The biggest challenge to transmitting the faith in the 21st century, according to Paul Griffiths, is that we have been inculcated by the culture of “late capitalism” into thinking of our identities as essentially items of taste. The Church (and he means the Catholic Church, but it could just as well apply to Protestantism) cannot help but appear as just one more “community of taste” appealing to a certain market niche, rather than a truth-bearing community. The problem is especially acute among members of “Generation Y” (b. 1978-1991) who, perhaps more than any preceding generation, have been formed by this kind of culture:

So far, then, we have Generation Y floating in an aural and visual flood, catechized by the late-capitalist market into seeking and finding identity in increasingly segmented communities of taste. Such communities are Lockean churches, in the sense conveyed by John Locke, in his 1685 Letter Concerning Toleration. There Locke defined a church as “a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord, in order to the public worshipping of God, in such a manner as they judge acceptable to him, and effectual to the salvation of their souls.” This is a community of taste and choice, constructed by a particular catechesis of desire. In all important structural respects, it is like the communities of people who mourn the passing of the jam band Phish or who read qvMagazine (a ‘zine for gay Latinos) or who go to monster-truck demolition derbies.

The problem, Griffiths continues, is that:

If membership in a community requires a catechesis of desire; if, too, that catechesis is contingent (it could have been otherwise) and not coerced, then it follows that the community in question is just a community of taste, preference, and predilection. It makes no sense from a late-capitalist, Lockean perspective to identify a community so joined as a community of truth, to say of it that it is the community that preserves and transmits more fully than any other the truth about human beings and the world. The members of Generation Y find it difficult to understand that anyone can seriously make such claims.

Much of Protestantism (especially the “free-church” tradition) has held that joining a church must be a matter of individual choice and conscience (hence “believer’s baptism”). How do these kinds of churches differ from the “communities of taste” that Griffiths bemoans? Well, in classic Protestantism, you joined a church (ideally) because you became convinced that it was indeed a “community of truth” (however we might want to unpack that).

One danger, it seems to me, of the fascination with “postmodernism” (usually used to refer to a grab-bag of cultural, intellectual and political phenomena) among some Protestants is that, in many ways, postmodernism is the ideal complement to a late capitalist economy. The limitless play of differance can quite easily go hand-in-hand with a celebration of “choice” as the highest good, as well as the seemingly inexhaustible plenitude and diversity of the market. The market is our counterpart to the medieval great chain of being – every niche is filled.

Grant McCracken makes a similar point from a more libertarian perspective:

What’s really scary about this “choice against choice” inclination is that it dresses itself up in indignation. It becomes the way sophisticated people show their discernment in matters of food and film, and their disdain for the mainstream. Is this what the avant-garde has come to? It is no longer an experimentation in the very new, an exploration of the far edge of possibility, but a refusal of the full range of choice. Could this be a fit of pique practiced by the Left in protest against the fact that markets did what markets were supposed to stand against: the creation of more and more options and the effortless incorporation of the new. Can we say at least that the most important locus of creativity and innovation has moved away from the artist into the very thing the artist stood against: the marketplace?

The question, it seems to me, is not whether we are going to be “pro-market” or “anti-market;” obviously the market is an indispensable part of human existence. But we can sensibly ask whether the values of the market will be allowed sovereignty over all other aspects of life. Sometimes (and I suspect even libertarians would agree with this) we must indeed refuse the full range of choice. That’s what commitment (to a cause, a family, a church) entails. The question for churches that downplay the question of truth is whether they can resist the hegemony of the market (as many postmodern types bravely claim to be doing), or whether they will become just one more consumer choice.