Welcome to the Church of Brand Jesus

"A person is not a Jew who is one only outwardly, nor is circumcision merely outward and physical. No, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code.Such a person’s praise is not from other people, but from God."

Romans 2:28-29

Commenting on these verses, Tyler Wigg Stevenson, author of Brand Jesus, asks, "...why are so many self-proclaimed Christians buying into the religious lifestyle, image, and identity, but not making the radical spiritual-ethical commitment to discipleship? How is it that there is so much Christian hypocrisy?"

The heart of these verses is that being part of God's family (Jew in the Old Testament, Christian in the New Testament) is not primarily an external matter, but is rather an internal matter with external fruit. In these verses, the Apostle Paul is critiquing the Jews of his day who claimed God, but did so only externally. They were good Jews because they were circumcised. Paul counters by saying that the external act of circumcision is ultimately meant to be an external mark of an inward reality, namely a life that has been transformed by the Spirit of God. 

Stevenson applies these verses to the contemporary Church by pointing out our tendency, much like the Jews in Paul's day, to rely on external marks as the evidence of our faith. For example, we might believe ourselves to be Christians merely because we belong to a church, or were baptized, or align with the religious right politically. We have external badges of honor, but our hearts are far from God. 

The problem, according to Stevenson, is that the Jesus we claim to believe in, is in fact, not Jesus as all:

"The startling question is, then, is Jesus Christ actually the one whom many self-proclaimed Christians have accepted? Or, as seems to be the case,  have consumer-minded Christians been led from the narrow road, drawn by the promises of an impotent spiritual commodity masquerading as the power of God? Welcome to the church of Brand Jesus." pg. 101

Stevenson's point: External badges of religion are insufficient. As Paul stated in Romans 2, the mark of a true believer is a circumcision of the heart, or, a transformed life. External badges (church membership, political affiliation, occasional acts of charity) are insufficient because they don't have any power. They give the mere appearance of Godliness, but are just as Stevenson describes 'impotent spiritual commodity masquerading as the power of God." These badges are not the result of a radical internal transformation. They are not the result of totally new, born again life in Christ. No, they are the rather feeble attempts to construct our self-justification. 

The only solution to this problem is the true gospel of Jesus Christ; namely, that our attempts to build our own kingdom, wherein we attempt to build our own identity, our justification, and our very sense of life before God is completely insufficient. But, in his great mercy and love, Christ came to give us life. Through his life, death and resurrection, Jesus has come to free us from this death sentence of self-sufficiency. 

But herein lies the problem. Stevenson's point is that if you look at the life of the American Christianity, it is clear that we are not living or preaching this true gospel, wherein lives are truly transformed. Rather, we are preaching and living a different faith; the faith of Brand Jesus. 

And this Brand Jesus fits in perfectly with our consumer mindsets in that it gives us exactly what our sinful selves want, all the while wearing a mask of true spirituality:

"Brand Jesus takes the promise of the Kingdom of God and offers another pseudo-Christian vision instead...Brand Jesus takes the tragedy of sinful life and without asking us to change our behavior in the plot, promises a happy ending. Brand Jesus takes everything our species' depraved imagination wants to believe is true about the world and feeds it back to us." pg. 104

"We are in fact, wholly conformed to the pattern of this world. So, while Christians should be radically different from everybody else, we find that Christians are no more different from practitioners of other lifestyles than those folk are from each other. We've made discipleship into one option among many, when it ought to stand separate, as different from other ways of living as Christ was from the world." pg. 103

In short, the American Church has submitted to a form of Christianity (Brand Jesus), wherein they are allowed to continue in their current desired lifestyle without any real transformation. Although they may have external badges, there is no power behind it. There is no real knowledge of the God. There is no real experience of God's grace. It is a pseudo-Christianity, giving the people enough religion to soothe their spiritual conscious, but denying the very nature of Jesus Christ. 

The only answer is to run to the gospel of God's grace. 

Tyler Wigg Stevenson, Brand Jesus: Christianity in a Consumerist Age (Seabury Books, New York, 2007). 

The Idols of the Nations

Over the next few days, I am hoping to share some quotes from a book I recently read, Brand Jesus. The author, Tyler Wigg Stevenson, poses the frightening reality of consumerism in America, especially the effect this principality has had on the Church in America. Without doubt, Stevenson's work is one of the most challenging and piercing books I have ever read. Stevenson describes what it means for us to live in a consumeristic society:

"Consumer goods ceased to be simply the things that we bought to eat, to cover our bodies from the elements, to shelter us, and to move us from place to place. And, while such goods had always served to delineate classes of people, in these decades, their ubiquity led to their becoming the very building blocks of our self-understanding as human beings" pg. 15

"To live in a consumeristic world means that who we understand ourselves to be is deeply and significantly related to what we buy/consume. And this is true to a much greater extent than we'd like to imagine. In the act of consumption, we purchase our very sense of selves...And with the digital age, the ideal of self creation through consumption has gained a new potency, given that technologically enabled, digital forms of identity are the most complete 'selves' that we can gain through purchases, without having anything given to us." pg. 27

Stevenson goes on to identify the problem with looking for our sense of meaning and self understanding from a certain consumer lifestyle or branding:

"Like prayers offers to idols, we offer the resource of our devotion to the consumer selves that are utterly of our own making. These consumer lifestyles are the never-finished goals of our own quest for meaningfulness, order, and location in the world, but they lack any integral ability to grant us what we ask from them. That we ourselves believe the meaning we ascribe to them is not surprising." pg. 44

Stevenson's words echo Psalm 135:

"The idols of the nations are merely things of silver and gold, shaped by human hands. 
They have mouths but cannot speak, and eyes but cannot see. 
They have ears but cannot hear, and noses but cannot smell. 
And those who make idols are just like them, as are all who trust in them."

Psalm 135: 15-18

Simply put, idols, or as Stevenson puts it, "consumer goods", don't deliver. They never have. They never will. I think Stevenson has a point when he talks about the motivation behind our consumption. No matter how immaterialistic you believe yourself to be, we are all trying to "brand" ourselves in a sense. We all try to build an identity off of something. In our culture, it tends to be consumer goods that brand you as part of a particular group or status.

As I will post in the coming days, Stevenson contends that this consumerism has entered American Christianity in a rather detrimental way; not merely in a rising tendency for American Christian's to "church hop," but primarily in the way Christianity has been deduced to a brand identity or accessory that we add to our self created identity. More in the days to come. 

Tyler Wigg Stevenson, Brand Jesus: Christianity in a Consumerist Age, (Seabury Books, New York, 2007).