Add Religion to Your Shopping List (…and Happy Holidays until Jan. 6 when I’ll be back – see you then, thanks)

As I was growing up, this was always the time of year when my mother would insist that my sisters and I stop for a moment and appreciate the true meaning of the season, which, in our Episcopalian househod, meant the story of the birth of Jesus.  This was true for all of my friends whatever their religious tradition or denomination.  The holiday season was a time to bow our heads not just spend our dough.  Our mothers made sure.

But there came a year in my church when the women’s group decided to put up a Chrismon Tree.  It was a wonderful idea.  They put up a huge tree in the front of our church and covered it with white lights and Chrismon decorations.  These many years later, a Chrismon still goes up every year.  It has become a tradition.

Funny thing, though, about that tradition.  It was begun in 1957 at Ascension Lutheran Church in Danville, VA, which is part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, just one of many branches of Lutheranism worldwide.  And in our little Episcopal church in the Piedmont area of North Carolina, we added a bit of local spice to our Chrismon Tree with some original ornaments borrowed from the Moravians in nearby Winston-Salem.  As conservative as a church as it was, it was very cutting edge in its eclectic potpourri of religious influences.  I say cutting edge, but maybe not.  After all, this is precisely what religion in America looks like – nothing with too much of anything, just something with a little bit of everything.

A survey released this past April by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life confirmed and further fleshed out the findings from an earlier survey completed in 2007.  America has become a nation of ‘religious drifters.’  When we grow up, we leave our childhood traditions behind and try out other traditions.  We shop around, often embracing more than one at a time or combining several into one mélange.  We believe in something spiritual, but just what it is not exactly clear, at least from the perspective of what religious belief used to mean.

As many people say they attend multiple types of religious services (35%) as say they attend only one type of religious service (37%).  Noteworthy percentages of Christians also believe in spiritual energy in trees (23%), astrology (23%), reincarnation (22%), yoga as a spiritual practice (21%) or casting curses through the ‘evil eye’ (17%).  Well, this is all well and good, but there is no traditional branch of Christianity that includes these things in its tenets or beliefs.  The Pew Forum pictures ‘religion, American-style’ this way:

Boston University religion professor Stephen Prothero offers some assurance about these findings, noting that “religious promiscuity is nothing new. Many early Christians were also practicing Jews.  And in China the “Three Teachings” of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism have co-existed for centuries, with many believers turning to Confucianism for etiquette, Taoism for freedom and Buddhism for enlightenment.”

What’s good about this, writes Prothero, is that it is strong evidence of the “enduring power of the ideal of religious tolerance” in America.  But what’s troubling about this, in Prothero’s view, is that “what we are really doing looks more akin to commerce than to education.  The store managers in our spiritual marketplace seem a bit too eager to sell us whatever they imagine we want.”  If it sounds like Prothero is worrying that religion has adopted a marketing model of faith, this interpretation of religion in modern America isn’t anything new.  My favorite critic on this particular topic is University of Florida English professor James Twitchell, especially his books Lead Us Into Temptation and Shopping for God.

But my takeaway from this Pew research has nothing to do with the mix of marketing and the Messiah.  It’s about the glimpse these findings offer us into the manner in which Americans organize their lifestyles these days.  It is about diverse mixtures of strange brews.  Americans live in a constant state of “becoming,” something Ann Clurman and I wrote about in Generation Ageless in our discussion of professor Bruce Charlton’s concept of “psychological neoteny.”  This term is a mouthful, but it borrows a term from biology in order to characterize the ever-evolving, ever-adapting sense of identity and self that people must have nowadays in order to succeed.  Maturity is no longer about settling in; it is about retaining the adolescent skill of trying on identities to see what works.  That’s not just religion; that’s life.

What this means for marketers is pretty clear.  There is no such thing as “the” consumer anymore.  Consumers are always looking for and open to something new, even something paradoxical and contradictory.  This is the culture of suburbs, malls and ‘Trading Up’ that so puzzled David Brooks in his send-up of Baby Boomers, Bobos in Paradise.  It is a plasticity of self that, at its worst, is exhibited by people who, in Brooks’ words, act like “spiritual reactionaires,” longing for traditional comforts while rejecting the norms and strictures that are the underpinnings of tradition.  At its best, though, such plasticity facilitates the “potential” — again, Brooks’ words — that points toward an ever-greater future.

To boil it down, it simply means that consumers thrive by adapting not by retrenching.  They will spring forward out of this long recession when marketers offer them a new value equation that resonates more strongly with the new reality of economic risk.  American consumers don’t want to look backward.  They want to experiment.  They want to innovate.  They want to put something new together.  Consumers are not looking back.  My childhood church in North Carolina is not standing pat.  Religion in America is not being tied down by tradition.  Reconfiguration is the rule of the day.  And that’s what consumers want from marketers – a fresh configuration of value.  Just as we say in A Darwinian Gale.  [J. Walker Smith]

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