Ok, so I don’t do Black Friday anyway. I hate malls, shopping traffic, and spending money on stuff I don’t really need. But this year, I’m burying Black Friday for more principled reasons. As I shared earlier this week, I’m allowing God to liberate me from my cultural addiction to consumerism this Advent Season. That’s what I want for Christmas – freedom from stuff and money and a more intimate relationship with God and my family, friends, neighbors, and enemies. I’m inspired by the words of the forebearers of my Faith like Cyprian who said: “Their property held them in chains . . . chains which shackled their courage and choked their faith and hampered their judgment and throttled their souls. They think of themselves as owners, whereas it is they rather who are owned: enslaved as they are to their own property, they are not the masters of their money but its slaves.”
I feel the chains on my soul rattling and the prison door is shaking. I don’t know what freedom from stuff feels like, but I just know I’m going to love it. Simple living is calling my name.
That’s why I’m burying Black Friday because I hear the words of my Sensei saying, “No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.”
And as an expression of my new birth, not only am I burying Black Friday, but I’m replacing it with a new holiday called Buy Nothing Day. It’s a worldwide movement to buy nothing for 24 hours. The organizers describe it as a Ramadan-like fast that calls for people to buy nothing, turn off non-essential appliances, park their cars, turn off cell phones, and log off of the computer for 1 day. People observing Buy Nothing Day have done things to celebrate like volunteering to stand in malls with scissors offering the simple service of cutting up people’s credit cards, gathering 9 or 10 friends to silently drive shopping carts through Walmart in an explicable conga-line without ever buying anything, and holding signs up at mall entrances saying stuff like, “Stop buying. Start living.”
I’ve not decided how I will publicly celebrate Buy Nothing Day quite yet, but I am looking for others in the Baltimore Metro area who might be down to partake in some creative, non-violent, mischief with me.
Let’s strike a blow to Black Friday this year and thereby plant seeds in others to reconsider their devotion to American consumerism.
Who’s down?
Hi Heber,
A friend of mine posted this article on Facebook and I thought I'd share, I'd be really interested in your response: "Black Friday and Consumerism, White Privilege and Buy Nothing Day"
http://blog.sojo.net/2008/11/20/black-friday-and-…
It relates both to your 'Buy Nothing Day' involvement (which I heartily applaud!) and to your post about freeing the emerging church from white captivity.
I find the author's analysis to be a good reminder for me, personally, as a white Anglo Protestant straight male in this country, that my privilege affects everything I do, even when it seems to be the "right" thing, but I'm not sure if I agree with his conclusions about "Buy Nothing Day." Is letting rampant consumerism off the hook really a good response? I don't think so….but would be interested in hearing your thoughts.
David, I agree with you. In my opinion, Eugene's friend was right to raise a question that sparked an examination of privilege. However, letting low income folks in front of you in the Black Friday line is no solution to systemic economic injustice. If that's what makes some well-intentioned people feel better about institutional injustice then that's a sad commentary on the depth of their concern for "those poor people."
I share your concern about the article having no substantive critique on consumerism and our current economic system that feeds off of and encourages it. This really underscores for me what is a glaring deficiency in mainstream Western Christianity: there is very little conversation about capitalism and consumerism in light of their incompatibility with the Kingdom of God preached and lived by Jesus. While there are books, talks, and speakers "underground" who through a "Jesus lens" critique the economic system (I'm thinking of folks like Ched Myers, Jacques Ellul among others) and the unsustainable American way of life; by and large these conversations are just not happening at the scale necessary to provoke a John The Baptist-styled repentance and rebirth.
Despite this, I am hopeful that eventually the tide will turn particularly among our generation of Jesus Followers who are more and more questioning the state of our world and wondering aloud about different ways to "be" within it. This is an amazing time to be found within the fold of the Jesus Movement!
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