Tribal brands

Depending on your Unique Buying State, you can join any number of tribes on any number of days and feel part of something bigger than yourself. You can belong to the Callaway tribe when you play golf, the VW tribe when you drive, and the Williams-Sonoma tribe when you cook a meal. Brands are the little gods of modern life, each ruling a different need, activity, mood, or situation. Yet you're in control. If your latest god falls from Olympus, you can switch to another one.

from The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier (AIGA, 2006)
Christianity Today

Patronising the poor

This could be a bit wrong, but I was wondering about attitudes toward charity.

I have often heard it said (by ordinary plebs like us, and concerned celebrities and politicians) that the two-thirds world must have access to clean water and sufficient food. We must wake up and respond to this charity bash, to this appeal, and be like them: crusading concerned people of conscience. And when we have done so, we will have helped them.

And yet, whilst stating righteously that these are the things they need, we also know we would never settle for these ourselves. Here in the West we would never vote for a government that promised only clean water and sufficient food. Those are invisible givens: we also want tax breaks, mortgage relief, private healthcare, motorways and multiple vehicles, spare cash for gadgets, fripperies and booze...and on and on. These are our needs.

So whilst we virtuously demand basics for the developing world, we retain our basics at a massively inflated level. Why? Presumably because we are more important than them, so our basic needs are much greater.

So even in charity, we can patronise the poor.

Bible reading for money

This acquisitive mode is so culturally expected and congregationally rewarding that it cannot fail to affect our approach to the Scriptures. When we sit down to read the Scriptures we already have an end product in view: we want to find something useful for people's lives, to meet their expectations of us as pastors who deliver goods. If someone says to me, "I don't get anything out of reading Scripture", my knee-jerk response is, "I will show you how to read it so that you can get something out of it". The operative word is "get". I will help you be a better consumer. By this time the process is so far advanced it is nearly irreversible. We have agreed, my parishioners and I, to treat the Bible as something useful for what they can get out of it. I, a pastor shaped by their expectations, help them to do it. At some point I cross over the line and am doing it myself - looking for an arresting text for a sermon, looking for the psychologically right reading in a hospital room, looking for evidence of the truth of the Trinity. The verb looking has taken over. I am no longer listening to a voice, not listening to the God to whom I will give a response in obedience and faith, becoming the person he is calling into existence. I am looking for something that I can use to do a better job, for which people will give me a raise if I do it conspicuously enough.

Peterson, Working the Angles, p98-99.