The Kingdom of God

Cross Currents, Spring, 1999 by William T. Cavanaugh

Michael Budde, Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997. viii 177pp. $35.00

Finally someone has written a realistic appraisal of what we are up against. The thesis of political scientist Michael Budde's book might seem obvious: the global culture industries present a huge obstacle to religious formation. Part of Budde's argument, however, is that the very obviousness, the all-pervasive normality, of the culture industries has made the formation they offer seem inevitable and has sapped our ability to resist. Budde's book is a wake-up call to the Christian Church, to help it recognize the extent to which the culture industries subvert the following of Jesus of Nazareth, and to recover the subversive praxis of Jesus as an alternative.

By "culture industries" Budde means not only mass communications media, but also telecommunications firms, computer interests, and marketing firms, many of which are bound together in the same conglomerates. "Not long ago, if you wanted to understand the 'real' ways of power worldwide, your field of study was fairly clear: pay attention to states, armies, and weapons; measure wealth, production capabilities, and prosperity" (16). As Budde shows, however, political scientists and others in the last two decades have been turning their attention increasingly to the production of culture as a major locus of power. Budde provides a wonderfully condensed account of why this is so (22-27): the transition to a globalized, post-Fordist economy has sped up production to an extent which is dangerous for capitalism without correspondingly increased levels of consumption. Of course, the construction of consumption is the job of the culture industries. It is Disney, and not Exxon or the State Department, which typifies power in the post-Fordist economy. Beware of Mickey Mouse.

Budde's analysis of the power of global culture industries gathers together in summary form the findings of many of the latest studies in the social sciences. The facts are sobering: culture industries have an enormous influence over what we desire, what we value, what we buy, and how we behave as citizens. Budde is not the Unabomber. He admirably resists the dark conspiratorial tones that infect popularized forms of this analysis. Budde recognizes the truth of Foucault's insight that no one individual or group is directing this power complex. We all participate to different extents in the construction of the culture of consumption. We remain free actors making conscious choices, but our choices are increasingly channelled by the superior access to information which the culture industries command. We are not stupid or easily fooled, but we are playing poker against an opponent who has already seen our hand (42).

Television, of course, comes in for its usual share of justifiable abuse in Budde's book. No matter how many times we have seen the statistics, they still cause a jolt: the average person will spend thirteen years of his or her life watching television, three years of which - twenty-four hours a day - will have been commercials. Budde pauses briefly to consider the content of the squalor that we contemplate with such rapt attention, but he pays much more attention to studies of television's form, the way it seduces and immobilizes people through its manipulation of space and time. Add to television the constant exposure to the Web, junk mail, telemarketing, billboards, logos, radio and the like, and you have a fairly convincing argument that, yes, it really is that bad. In Budde's words, we are in the midst of a flood, not one that lasts forty days and forty nights, but a constant flood with no end in sight (82).

All of this is available elsewhere; what makes Budde's book important is his detailed analysis of the effects of the culture industries on the formation of Christians, specifically Catholics. Budde shows how culture industries present obstacles to the construction of desire in prayer, colonize any separate Church space, and poach religious symbols and narratives for use in selling products. Above all, the global culture industries rob the Church of time. "One would be hard-pressed to learn any demanding set of skills or competencies with the amount of time most Catholics in advanced industrial countries devote to their faith tradition. On the other hand, there are few competencies that cannot be acquired with three to four hours per day of time invested - and people in the West use that much time to develop 'competence' in television-watching" (82).

Perhaps the most impressive feature of Budde's book is the extent to which a political scientist is prepared to engage with theology on its own terms. Budde presents an ecclesiology which emphasizes formation: Christians are either made by the Church, or unmade by other forces. Budde spends an entire chapter arguing Yale school versus Chicago school on the nature of religious belief. For Chicago, religion is a universal human impulse that is expressed in different external forms. Budde adopts Lindbeck's analysis of the nature of doctrine to argue, on the contrary, that religions are like languages that must be learned through a careful formation in skills and practices. If the radical message of the Gospel is not to be buried in the flood, the Church must learn from the catechetical practices of the early Christians, for whom following Christ was a skill learned through a demanding, and ultimately liberating, process of formation.