{The following is an except from my Fall 2010 term paper. Lemme know if you want a copy when its done.}
At the root of all that follows is automobility, defined here as “the configuration of people, machines, landscape, urban geography, and culture that attends the increasing dependence upon the gas engine for transport in industrial and post industrial societies.” It is the expansive social, spatial, and institutional tapestry which both undergirds and flows out of a widely democratized mode of petroleum-fueled individual mobility. It isn’t just the stuff of driving — cars, oil supplies, onramps, and the like. It’s more than the culture of cars — Nascar, Sunday driving, andThe Fast and the Furious. It’s more than the geography of easy-motoring — parking lots, java shacks, and exurbs. Automobility is all of that combined (and more) in a comprehensive society-wide positive feedback loop where increased mobility rewards new building and commerce modes, which in turn makes automobility a requisite for functional cultural membership. It is the interplay of affordable driving with an individualistic culture and underregulated urban design which produce a car-scaled landscape that in turn rewards and reinforces affordable driving and individualism. And on the vicious cycle of automobility continues. For example: malls are created as the automobilized bastard children of town centers, which steadily replace actual town centers and public spaces, which in turn produces a culture dependent on cars to get to its public (albeit civic-turned-commercial) spaces, Q.E.D..
Suburbia is here defined as any urban geography which is patterned to the scale of the automobile. While other forms of urban geography (new urbanism, city center, etc.) incorporate and accommodate the automobile, it is suburbia which is built wholesale around the car as a primary form of personal locomotion, accommodating non-motorized mobility modes only where is minimally necessary. Suburbia, suburban, and suburbanized will also be used in a slightly looser manner throughout this paper to conjure their wider colloquial cloud of cultural values, artifacts, rhythms, and architecture associated with a car-scaled urban geography. Suburban Christianity, for example, is not just the faith of Christians who happen to live in the suburbs, but more expansively is a Christianity robustly adapted to and shaped by those automobilized cultures which inhabit suburbia.
Consumerism is an industry-choreographed cultural matrix designed to sell products by crafting personal and group identity through an engineered narrative rooted in individual choice. “Consumption,” said Jean Baudrillard, “is a system of meaning.” For example, the consumerism behind Apple products (exemplified in their “I’m a Mac” TV spots) is a narrative of “other computers are hard to use, unpredictable, and for status-quo brown-shirt peons. We think different. Ours just work, and are for savvy innovators like you.” At once they’ve conjured up an identity-forging story of both marginalized/roguish independence and acceptance into an “in crowd” who have seen the light. Mac users are painted as both the cool kids and the witty nerds who have emerged from the Gatesian nightmare triumphant. That is consumerism at it’s most potent. Apple’s market savvy is also consistent with the marketing proverb that you’re rarely selling the product as much as the brand, the sizzle more than the steak. Consumerism rewards consistent, dependable, predictable expectations based on a name; “there’s the REI, I know what to expect there.” The predictability of brand recognition thus apes the dependability of a relationship with less risk of surprises. This predictability in turn empowers the consumer’s choice laying at the heart of the matter. Consumers are, according to the narrative of the ads, keen discerners of product who are always on the lookout for the best deal. To buy is, like voting, the ultimate expression of our public self. “I shop; therefore I am.” One’s power to choose in a consumerism-saturated culture becomes a mythologized potency unto itself.
Appropriately, choice lies at the center of suburban Christianity. You can choose to go here, to this congregation, over so many other churches. One’s arrival or departure at their chosen church is of little import to the rewards of this choice; what matters in a consumerized, suburbanized church is that you chose it and can choose to leave it for another church. Within the the suburban church par excellence, the megachurch, that identity-forging power of choice is again rewarded: I can choose which felt need or affinity group I want to find belonging in. Stay-at-home moms, empty-nesters, golfers, porn addicts, justice advocates, new parents, skateboarders, and dancers all get to choose their own Jesus-ified social niche to belong to. Rather than being an alternative community, suburban Christianity offers their version of already existing ways people organize themselves (affinity, therapy, life-stage, etc.). Thus after the consumerism-act of choosing a church, one further reinforces their consumerism-identity by choosing a ministry to/not to belong to. Suburban Christianity, then, is defined in this paper as the forms of Christian faith specially adapted to suburbia by scaling to an automobilized geography and culture, and by catering to consumerism’s identity-forming narratives and techniques. Hence Figure 1’s rooting suburban Christianity in both suburbia and consumerism. Both of which, we must return in reflection on again and again, are rooted in an affordable, sustained, widespread automobility.
