God is Not . . . Religious, Nice, "One of Us," an American, a Capitalist

Anglican Theological Review, Spring 2006 by Walters, Kerry

God is Not . . . Religious, Nice, "One of Us," an American, a Capitalist. Edited by D. Brent Laytham. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2004. 152 pp. $15.99 (paper).

In some ways this collection of essays is reminiscent of J. B. Phillips's little classic Your God Is Too Small. Both books worry about idolatry: envisioning the divine in ways that suit us, but which in fact ultimately distance us from the living God and stunt our spiritual development. But whereas Phillips tended to focus on personal modes of idolatry-that is, how individuals distort God because of their private fears, egoism, or guilt-the authors in the present volume focus on cultural modes of idolatry-how society creates false gods in its own image. The result is a fascinating series of reflections, which encompass theology, popular culture, politics, economics, and psychology. The essays are learned and offer sophisticated arguments. References to heavyweights such as Aquinas, Barth, Bonhoeffer, Bultmann, Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair Maclntyre, and Rowan Williams abound. Thankfully, however, the authors adopt easy, graceful styles that make the book wonderfully suitable for a general audience.

The essayists take on six different golden calves whose baleful influences are especially felt in contemporary American culture. Rodney Clapp scrutinizes popular culture s tendency to worship a "shape-shifting" deity-du-jour: "like the celebrities that modern, mass-media popular culture endlessly generates, gobbles up, and discards, this god takes on an unending and indeterminate succession of disguises or appearances" (p. 24). Steven Long worries that our pop-therapeutic culture and Protestantisms tendency to privatize religion encourages worship of a "nice" god-which ultimately means a god who is harmless, domesticated, and unembarrassing. Michael Baxter invites readers to do some serious and sobering thinking about the "American" god-the red, white, and blue-draped idol whom over-zealous patriots and glib politicians insist sanctifies U.S. domestic and foreign policy.

In what for my money (pun intended) is the collection's best essay, Michael Budde smashes the golden feet of the "capitalist" god, a particularly worrisome Moloch faithfully worshiped by millions in our consumerist society. In one of its crudest manifestations, the capitalist god reveals itself as a "Jesus CEO" booster of big business. A more subtle but even more unholy avatar of the capitalist god is the church's growing adoption-a move born, one can only suspect, of panic-of capitalist standards of management and advertising. Thus, as Budde tells us (pp. 81-82), the Church of England's director of communications regularly refers to church members as "customers," and insists that the church "has to be more businesslike" if it hopes to be a viable player in the contemporary world. Former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey suggests that church services ought to be kept to an hour in length lest potential church-consumers find the eucharist-commodity undesirable. And the five major Christian denominations in the UK recently launched an Easter marketing campaign which deliberately omitted any "downer" symbols such as the cross.

William Cavanaugh takes on the "religious" god in an essay that warns against the compartmentalized trivialization of God. Our secular culture, obsessed as it is with power politics and market allegiances, feels the need to get out from under the God who privileges the poor and powerless. So the God of justice is relegated to the harmless realm of privatized piety-a kind of "two kingdoms" move, which conveniently removes God from the earthly kingdom of politics and commerce.

The beauty of these essays is that they are not simply iconoclastic. They also offer exciting and solid reflections on the real God-the God of Scriptures, the God spoken of by the prophets and revealed in Jesus Christ, the God who suffers and redeems-who too frequently gets buried beneath the cultural artificialities of fads, niceness, patriotism, dollar signs, and piety. Editor Brent Laytham's engaging concluding essay, "God is One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic," both summarizes and creatively builds on these reflections.

It would have been welcome had the book reflected on a few other contemporary idols-god-as-masculine, god-as-theologian, and god-as-bible are three that come immediately to mind-but no book can do everything. And what Laytham and his authors have done in this book is very, very good indeed.

KERRY WALTERS

Gettysburg College

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania