The Religion & Culture Web Forum
Commentary Footnotes
May 2007
The Desire to Acquire: Or, Why Shopping Malls Are Sites of Religious Violence
By Jon Pahl
Professor of the History of Christianity in North America
The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia
1 A brief description of the origin and significance of the sculpture can be found in Thomas J. Schlereth, “The City as Artifact,” in The Encyclopedia of Chicago History, available at: http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/288.html (accessed 8 January 2007).
2 The language of the “religion of the market” is drawn from David R. Loy, “The Religion of the Market,” in Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65 (Summer, 1997): 275-290, and is available online courtesy of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, at: http://www.bpf.org/tsangha/loy-market.html (accessed 8 January 2007).
3 See here my forthcoming essay, “Founding an Empire of Sacrifice: The Quaker Martyrs of Puritan Boston, 1659-1661,” in Belief and Bloodshed: Religion and Violence across Time and Tradition, ed. James K. Wellmann, Jr. (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 97-116. For an analysis of political culture that accords well with my argument here, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). Within the next year, you should be able to check out “It’s a Mall World,” a full-length documentary film on the global spread of shopping malls. The film is being directed by Helene Klodawsky and produced by Ina Fichman and Luc Martin-Gousset for Instinct Films and the CBC, among others. For a brief promo, go to http://www.instinctfilms.ca/home.html, click on “Productions,” then “Present,” then “It’s a Mall World.”
4 See, for this line of inquiry, John Fiske, “Shopping for Pleasure: Malls, Power, and Resistance,” where shopping at the mall becomes an act of political resistance by women against the constraints of both patriarchy and wage-labor. There are, to be sure, pleasures aplenty to be experienced at the mall in shopping’s manifold choices, but every choice is presented TO a consumer, not produced by her, thereby rendering her passive and contained within the confines of the place and its system of production and exchange. So, for instance, when Fiske suggests that for working class women, “riding the escalators…becomes a concrete metaphor for social mobility,” cultural analysis has descended to the level of sheer fantasy. I have no desire to replicate Christian anti-pleasure polemics that perpetuate patriarchy and abuse by denying the subjectivity of women, but I suspect that an affirmation of feminist agency is hardly enough to subvert the profit motive that drives mall presentation and construction. Practices may offer limited freedom within hegemonic structures, but the structures endure and reap their alienating effects on consciousness in any event [in The Consumer Society Reader, ed. Juliet B. Schor and Douglas B. Holt (New York: New Press, 2000): 306-228. The excerpt is from Fiske’s fuller work, Reading the Popular (London: Routledge, 1989)].
5 Stein’s comment, made in an interview upon her return to the Oakland of her childhood, was meant to indicate that the places of her childhood no longer existed. But the statement has taken on a life of its own to point to the vacuity-in-the-midst-of-plenty of some sub/urban spaces in American culture. See Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1937), 289.
6 The language of orient draws on Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, tr. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1958), as modified by Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), and David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal, American Sacred Space (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). I discuss the difficulties in defining a “sacred place,” and offer my own conclusion, in Chapter Two of Shopping Malls and Other Sacred Spaces.
7 In a speech in Atlanta on November 8, 2001, Bush took pride in the fact that in America “people are going about their daily lives, working and shopping and playing, worshipping at churches and synagogues and mosques, going to movies and baseball games.” This is, to be sure, a selective list—and Bush also contrasted the America “he knew” with an image of Americans as “shallow, materialist consumers.” But the gist of his message—repeated in many variations, was that “getting on with daily lives” included “working and shopping and playing,” with a smattering of traditional religion thrown in to justify the rest. See the helpful website, “September 11 News,” for similar pronouncements. The specific quote comes from http://www.september11news.com/PresidentBushAtlanta.htm (accessed 4 January 2007).
8 The language of the “sacred” does not, of course, refer to a reified essence, but a product of the human imagination. See for the classic statement, Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Enquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine…, tr. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1926).
9 For this claim see Ira G. Zepp, The New Religious Image of Urban America: The Shopping Mall as Ceremonial Center (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1986), 15.
10 I argue that sacred places function on at least three levels: poetic, political, and personal. The three correspond, roughly, to Aristotle’s categories of poetics, politics, and rhetoric. For a theological examination of some key water symbolism, see Catherine Keller, “No More Sea: The Lost Chaos of the Eschaton,” and Barbara R. Rossing, “River of Life in God’s New Jerusalem: An Eschatological Vision for Earth’s Future,” in Christianity and Ecology: Seeking the Well-Being of Earth and Humans, ed. Dieter T. Hessel and Rosemary Radford Ruether (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 183-198, 205-224.
11 Mall of America; A Guide to Fashion, Food, and Fun. Mall Newspaper/Advertising Hand-out, August 2-August 15, 2001, 8.
12 This claim appeared on the “Mall of America—History,” segment of the web page, at http://www.mallofamerica.com/about_the_mall/moa_history.aspx (accessed 10 June 2005). The link has since been changed or aborted.
13 For the kind of values I envision, see Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
14 Jon Goss, “Once-upon-a-Time in the Commodity World: An Unofficial Guide to the Mall of America,” The Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89 (March 1999): 3, cites this phrase from the Mall of America web-page, at www.mallofamerica.com.
15 See, for instance, the careful analysis of the spreading gap between rich and poor by Kevin Philips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (NY: Broadway Books, 2002).
16 Steven L. Shepherd, “Mall Culture,” in The Humanist 58 (Nov/Dec 1998): 41.
17 See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (NY: Oxford, 1985), and also the trenchant analysis of Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). I explore the salience and contours of these “sacred places,” namely “living waters,” “the light of the world,” “one body,” and other biblical metaphors for divine presence, in the second half of Shopping Malls and Other Sacred Spaces.
18 I have a profound appreciation for Girard, but also a strong critique that I develop in my current research. See especially, among his many works, Violence and the Sacred, tr. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). The best introduction to Girard’s work, which also includes a good bibliography, is The Girard Reader, ed. James M. Williams (NY: Crossroad, 1996). On the one hand, I admire greatly Girard’s analytical insights, as I admire Girard himself as a gentle and intelligent Christian. On the other hand, I disagree with some of the implications drawn from Girard’s work, especially his reductive emphasis on sacrifice, and his assertion of Christian uniqueness and superiority to other traditions on the matter of violence. Sacrifice is undoubtedly crucial to religions, but dependent upon broader processes of compression and displacement, and the conclusion of Christian exceptionalism is empirically unwarranted and theoretically unnecessary. Such a conclusion actually scapegoats other religious traditions, which ironically contradicts Girard’s theory itself. Christian distinctiveness does not equate to superiority.
19 Here, Jonathan Z. Smith’s critique of Eliade is crucial. Sacred places are typically contested places: they “take” place, as Smith puts it, under the sway of discernible interests. See note 6.
20 See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).
21 The City of God, Book III, Chapter 1, tr. Henry Bettenson (NY: Pilgrim, 1972), 89.
22 See Stephen L. Carter, Integrity (NY: Basic Books, 1996).
23 On the distinction between force and consensual power, see Hannah Arendt, On Violence (NY: Harvest Books, 1969), 56. See also, the helpful outline of these ideals as they might be put into practice as articulated by Stout, Democracy and Tradition.
24 See Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, 3rd ed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 124. That malls and markets are increasingly backed by U.S. military might for reasons that are apparently unconscious, or at least inarticulate or incoherent, among recent Administrations goes without saying.
25 See most notably R. Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (Lanham, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).
26 See here my article, “Nationalist Religious Broadcasting: The Case of the 2004 U.S. Presidential Nominating Conventions,” in Political Theology, 8 (January 2007): 33-61.
27 See here the recent work of Harry S. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2006), who helpfully directs historians’ attention to the “civil religion” as a source of “sacrifice.” If the nation (or empire) is the macro-institution that benefits from hybrid religious constructions, the family (and sexuality more generally) is the micro-institution where these new forms of religion tend to get applied. See, for instance, the recent and largely successful efforts to regulate human sexuality by defining “marriage” in heterosexual terms. Such efforts originate, as Ann Pellegrini and Janet Jakobsen have shown, in constructions with discernibly religious roots, but have mutated into distinctive hybrids that cut across institutions, denominations, and cultures. See Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (New York: New York University Press, 2003).
28 I explore these prospects in An Empire of Sacrifice. In the Introduction, I rethink conventional definitions of “violence,” “religion,” and their relation in American history in a critique and reconstruction of leading theorists, including Girard, Appleby, Regina Schwartz, and Lincoln, among others. In the Epilogue, I trace the history of religions in the twentieth-century not primarily as the history of either secularism or fundamentalism, but rather the emergence of normative religious nonviolence, in what I call “a coming religious peace.”
29 This is the salient point (unfortunately overgeneralized and largely misapplied) of Russell McCutcheon’s various critiques of the “discipline” of religious studies. See most notably Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
30 The original was released in 1978; a remake in 2004 reiterated the point that consumption can consume consumers. See the trailers and release information for both films via the Internet Movie Database, at http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0077402/ and http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0363547/, respectively (accessed 7 January 2007).
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