The Maw of the Market

You can go here to read an excellent piece by Alastair Roberts: Social Justice: Seeking Integrity in a Society of Co-Opted Principle. Roberts examines the socially-enforced duty of expressive patriotism that we see especially in reaction to players kneeling during the national anthem at NFL football games. He then looks at Colin Kaepernick who began the kneeling protest for principle but has recently (Labor Day 2018) lent his expression of that principle to the profit-making behemoth of Nike Apparel: "Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything."

Is there nothing of a principled nature--political (or religious, for that matter)--that cannot be reduced to a quantifiable value?

I've previously alluded to the irresistible pull of the market here and here but Roberts elaborates. With respect to co-option of the principled by the commercial he writes:

While they are seldom as inept in execution as Pepsi was with its protest ad of a year or so ago, big businesses have proved remarkably eager to associate themselves with the culturally ascendant values of various social justice movements. However, what the Pepsi ad does reveal is how essentially unprincipled such associations can be, as the attractive and youthful aesthetics of protest and social justice movements—with their foregrounding of the individual consumer and celebration of their unfettered self-expression—are often more appealing than the specific things for which they stand. In some this co-option of social justice by corporations will produce cynicism; in many others, however, it will merely reinforce the cult of consumerism and the debilitated selfhood that it sells its subjects. (Emphasis added.)

If the reworking of principle for profit isn't bad enough, with respect to several contemporary varieties of Christianity Roberts observes that:

Much of evangelicalism, for instance, is built around the reality of the self-expressive, individualistic, and autonomous religious consumer. [Moral. Therapeutic. Deism, anyone?] And this is hardly exclusive to evangelicalism: a great many people who are in high church traditions are no less committed to a sort of self-expressive religious consumerism, albeit driven by a different set of aesthetic values and cultural and social affiliations.

So, what's the solution? Whatever it may be, it won't be simple. For the Christian, it may require a greater awareness that the "now" of the world of market-driven late-consumer capitalism is not the "not-yet" of the consummate Kingdom of God (here). Christians should be more content with a less-than-"professional" style of worship. (Some earlier comments here.) But it's not that easy to get out of our consumer skins even when we know it's leading us astray so I'll let Roberts have the final word:

We would be foolish to think that we can straightforwardly extricate ourselves from this religious consumerism. It is the water that we swim in, much as virtue-signalling is something that we are all inescapably involved in online.

Worldliness has always plagued the Church so in one sense there's nothing new in what we see today. Yet, the pervasive failure to see that a problem exists suggests that contemporary Evangelicalism's capitulation to the maw of the market will be with us for some time.