FAITHFULLY SITTING IN THE PEW OF ALL-CONSUMPTION

Anarcho-environmental novelist/essayist Edward Abbey (in One Life at a Time, Please [1988]): "We can see that the religion of endless growth--like any religion based on blind faith--is a kind of mania, a form of lunacy, indeed a disease."

He continues, "The one disease to which the growth mania bears an exact analogical resemblance is cancer. Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."

So, neoclassical economics a metastasizing neoplasm (cancer)? Seems so.

But, easy for us to say some academic domain or other is "cancerous," and a "religion," because we can relegate it to the Ivory Tower and look the other way (toward mass-distraction entertainment, no doubt). But, if so, then we, living under this economic-political regime--let's be honest--are the cancer cells, consuming the planetary body, spreading the destruction, and, what's more, doing it with what could be labeled religious fervor.

From the pews in the Church of All-Consumption, this all seems righteous as instructed by our faith in this historical process. The True Faith in this process--the really "true" faith--is that we do it all for God and religion, that "God" has ordained this religio-economic regime.

This, this takes lots of "faith." Glad I don't have so much of the kind (though, I'm sitting in the pew with the rest of you). And, the "collection plate" as it is passed is really a consumption platter from which we partake: put in a few dollars, and take out the manna of planetary destruction.

IN THE CHURCH BUBBLE WITH BEN AND ABE

Growing up in a small town in western Kentucky in the 1950s and 1960s, I attended the worship services of the town's Southern Baptist church every time the door opened--Sunday mornings and nights and Wednesday nights. My mom, who grew up Presbyterian, had switched to Southern Baptist and was perhaps as devout as anybody I have ever known--not in a churchy or religiose way, but in self-absorbed quietism. She floated in a self-imposed monastic bubble.

Anyway, our church had a library that contained a long shelf of biographies--from Kit Carson to Dolly Madison to Abraham Lincoln--that I devoured during the worship services while the partially absorbed background homiletics were condemning some souls to Hell.

My determined plan was to read the entire bookshelf of famous Americans before I had to consider seriously whether I, also, was headed to eternal perdition. Here was my soteriological, if immature, thought-process: If the likes of Ben Franklin were American icons and presumably flourished, albeit at different times, with sufficient rectitude to fulfill God's Plan (as I thought) to help construct the Divine City on the Hill (America), then I felt that I, too, was safe from the spiritual abyss. The American heroes were my Apostles.

After all, those books--and in a felt sense the famous people immortalized in them--lived in The Church Library. That was sufficient ecclesiastical endorsement for me. I continued reading the lives of the heroic American pantheon, existentially secure in their ordained company.