Third Millennium Capitalism Book

Another excellent book diagnosing the Church's nearly total captivity to the beliefs and liturgies of corporations and neo-liberal thinking. Far better than Budde's other The (Magic) Kingdom of God, this book argues that what we have in the West is a form of what they call "Chaplin Christianity," a culturally captured form of the faith that has accepted the basic premises of our culture at large, leaving it unprotected and unable to counter the myths and beliefs of our time.

What strikes me most about such books, of which I have been reading a number, is that they reveal the simplistic nature of Evangelical claims of the "culture war." Claiming to be the heirs of Van Til, for all their talk of presuppositions and worldviews, those on the evangelical side of this discussion actually leave the core presuppositions of this world to one side, happy to ignore them. The more you real of theo-politics, theo-economics, and political theology, the more you realize the Church is ignoring. Setting their sights firmly on concepts like the "common good," "democracy," "consumer capitalism," and the like, Budde and Brimlow tackle the presuppositions on which such structures are dependent, revealing how they undercut the Church's own liturgical narrative and make her powerless to counter the deep narratives of the world.

This takes us into some pretty interesting places. The authors expose how the Church is happy to become chaplin to the behavior of corporations, happy to take corporate money to provide counselling and confession to business employees, all the while ignoring the way such businesses squeeze the life and soul out of its people. It takes us to the "death industry," exposing the inroads in which corporations have bought out the funeral and body-preperation services in the world, a task once solidly set in the hands of the church. What does corporate ownership of "death" services shape us? What does it assume? How does it change and counter the liturgies and narratives of Christian burial? What does it mean that the Church cooperates entirely with both corporate and government designs to produce good little citizens, ready to identify and serve business and state over against Church and God? What implications does the Church's support of neo-liberal and libertarian capitalism have? They detail the conquest of the foundations of modern capitalism in the Church; foundations that come from Locke, Hobbes, and utilitarianism rather than from Scripture.

To leave us there, appalled and stunned at the Church's near total surrender to these cultural industries would be the height of despair. Thankfully, the authors do not do so. Their final chapter explores some economic and cultural implications of the Sermon on the Mount and how these things might work to counter the power and liturgical rituals of industry and government. It remains, of course, merely a beginning, not an end. A fine book I would commend strongly.