Abstract
Commodified Communion aims to offer a new approach to theological engagements with consumer culture in contrast to theologies focused on “resistance,” which Alonso argues leave “little room for the activity of God amid commodified beliefs, goods and practices” (44). He seeks an analysis that can “see God at work in the myriad ways that people live theology through commodities” (4).
Its constructive argument draws from Michel de Certeau and Walter Benjamin. A., like others before, contextualizes Certeau’s notion of “tactic” within his broader project on everyday life. Tactics are not an intentional counter-project, but an “absence” which escapes assimilation within strategic operations. A. helpfully connects this escape from strategic power structures with Certeau’s more theological writings that emphasize “absence” as “the mode of Christ’s presence” (67).
Benjamin’s notion of the “dialectical image” in the Arcades Project offers a way of reading commodities as both regressive fetishes and utopian wish-images. A. finds here “a way to awaken reflection on the activity of God in a commodified world—especially through promises it can never keep—activity often muted, relativized, or erased in theological narratives on consumer culture” (76). For Benjamin, these images were dialectical precisely because such wishes could only be expressed in distorted form. A.’s argument focuses on the affirmative half of this dialectic.
A. labels previous approaches to consumer culture “the resistance,” which he explores in a chapter devoted to the work of Geoffrey Wainwright, William Cavanaugh, and Vincent Miller. He seeks to attend to their distinctive approaches (which are very different), yet argues they all manifest a shared view that theology’s task “vis-à-vis consumer culture is to respond, resist, or reshape it” (40). A. is particularly concerned that in turning to the Eucharist as site of resistance these theologians presuppose that the “effectiveness of the Eucharist should be measured—at least in part—by its ability to support that work” (41). Such approaches are “caught in an immanent and instrumental frame” (44), and ultimately result in an onto-theological, if not Donatist, eucharistic theology that makes grace dependent on our proper performance (105). A. traces the roots of this approach to Virgil Michel and notes its resonances with the critiques and methods of Mary Douglas, Victor Turner and Mark Searle, as well as Enrique Dussel’s reflections upon the role of the Eucharist in Bartolomé de Las Casas’s ethical conversion.
Theologies of resistance, on A.’s reading, lead either to dreams of purity or to despair at our inability to resist. Drawing upon Louis-Marie Chauvet, A. offers a eucharistic theology that accepts that “in a fallen world, the Eucharist will always be enmeshed in that world” (120). Consumer culture is another form of brokenness that requires an embrace of the doctrine of ex opere operato. God’s grace is not obstructed by commodification, even by the Cavanaugh Company’s market-dominating factory-made communion breads.
This provides a theological lens with which A. can value the graced longings at work in his grandmother’s kitch-filled altarcito, commodified hymnals, and the Apple corporation’s “Think Different” campaign, which are explored in extended analytic vignettes.
When framed in terms of ex opere operato, the argument is hard to deny. None of the theologians of the resistance, however, argue anything like a limit on God’s grace in the Eucharist. A.’s portrayals of grace and salvation remain quite abstract. Another principle of sacramental theology: res tantum—the fruit or effect of the sacrament—addresses the particular character of sacramental grace. Might this provide a mediation between A.’s concerns and those of the theologians he critiques? A combination of these approaches would be more adequate to Benjamin’s dialectical critique.
A. simply accepts that religious objects such as liturgical music or his abuela’s altarcito are commodities and argues for their graceful potential as such. But does the fact that hymnals are marketed to music directors mean that congregants engage liturgical music as a commodity? A. is a rare figure: an accomplished composer of liturgical music and a gifted academic theologian. It would be enormously valuable to hear more from his unique experience about the dialectical interplay of commodification and theological commitments in the composition, marketing, and practice of liturgical music.
While the book is careful to address the specifics of others’ positions, much of its argument is advanced vis-à-vis a frustratingly generic description of a theology of resistance. At times, this becomes a straw figure, difficult to reconcile with the nuances of the theologians whom it is supposed to represent. More consequentially, this way of proceeding hinders A.’s creative and useful thesis from critiquing and refining the particulars of previous positions and thus from advancing the state of the argument. That said, the book offers a provocative and valuable new approach to theological analyses of consumer culture, and deserves careful reading.