Does Affluence Fuel Spirituality?

Designer clothes, cell phones, SUVs, mutual funds--modern materialism seems the enemy of all that is spiritual. Advertising screams out insatiable consumption. Movies and television blast us with images of runaway wealth, instilling the notion that too much is never enough. New books such as Luxury Fever and The Overspent American lament that the cycle of work and spend is sapping away all that matters in life. And prosperity continues to increase: we have more stuff each passing year. If materialism and spirituality are inversely proportional, it would seem that the soul is doomed. Where Nietzsche, Darwin, and Freud failed to destroy spiritual belief, perhaps Nike, Disney, and American Express will succeed. As Jonathan Twitchell argues in the provocative new book Lead Us into Temptation, losing themselves in fashion, cars, electronics, and other forms of consumption "is how most of Western young people cope in a world that science has pretty much bled of traditional religious meanings."

That's the conventional wisdom, anyway. Yet a nationwide increase in religious and spiritual interest is happening at the very time America enjoys unprecedented physical prosperity. Perhaps the upsurge in concern for the sacred is not happening in spite of materialism, but because of it.

Consider that Rev. Jim Henry, pastor of First Baptist Church of Orlando, Florida, a mega-church that is among the country's largest evangelical houses of worship, notes, "People today find that the things they're buying and turning to are not fulfilling. Interest in spiritual subjects is the highest it's been in the 35 years that I've been preaching, and I think disenchantment with consumerism has a lot to do with that." Henry's church, being in Orlando--home of Disney World and its satellite parks and hotels and malls and stores--sits at the epicenter of runaway consumption. This fact seems to be driving people toward the church, not away from it; First Baptist draws almost 10,000 worshippers per week.

Scholars see the same trends nationally. Robert Fogel, an economist at the University of Chicago and a leading free-market conservative, is already projecting that the 21st century will see another "Great Awakening" of spiritual concerns in American life, as people turn toward faith and questions of higher purpose to escape the emptiness of commuting, the career ladder, and shopping.

Thoughts of the sacred surely do seem to be on the increase in contemporary life, leading barometers being the popular "spirituality" movement; the rise of evangelical Christianity; the growing membership of Roman Catholic, Orthodox Jewish, and traditional Islam denominations; and the end of the decline in membership in the mainstream Protestant churches; the growth of retreats and hermitages; the width of the religion and spirituality aisles at any bookstore.

When such trends are noted, a common explanation is that "baby boomers are coming back to God" after discovering they have children to raise and realizing that no matter how many vitamins they take and how long they pump the Stair Master, mortality will come knocking.

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