Whatever the world might say, Christian moral teaching is about more than sex. Andrew Petiprin joins us for a conversation about the Christian perspective on money, particularly in a consumerist culture. How is a Christian to live when “happiness” is on sale everywhere?
Cy Kellett:
Hello, and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers Podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host, and today we talk about something that may seem slightly tangential to the whole apologetics endeavor, and that is consumerism. But I don’t think it’s maybe as tangential as it seems right from the beginning. One of the great appeals of Christianity, and an appeal we often fail to make is its radical nature.
That is, it gets to the very root of what it is to be a human being, and it’s medicine for whatever ails that very, very root. And so this is our opportunity, consumerism, modern consumerism, talking about it, pointing out its failure to make happiness where it claims it will make happiness. These are real opportunities for sharing the faith. We have a wonderful guest for you, someone I’ve been really looking forward to speaking with, and now I get a chance to speak with him.
Andrew Petiprin is our guest. He served as the fellow of popular culture, which must be the greatest job in the world, a fellow of popular culture at the Word On Fire Institute. He’s an author, he’s a former Anglican cleric. He came into full communion with the Catholic Church in 2019. He has his master’s in Divinity from Yale University and his master’s in Philosophy from Oxford University. You probably heard about those too. And he’s the author of Truth Matters: Knowing God and Yourself. Andrew Petiprin, thank you very much for being here with us.
Andrew Petiprin:
Cy, great to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Cy Kellett:
Well, you were doing a kind of episodic television for Word On Fire. You were doing a series of episodes called, Watch With Me, where you watched films. And the idea for this episode of Focus came from episode 10 of that, and I highly recommend people watch those. If you like Star Wars or 8 and a half, or any of the movies that fall between those two, you’ll really enjoy, Watch With Me, over at the Word on Fire, a webpage. But episode 10 was cult classics and consumerism, and you picked three scary sci-fi movies to talk about consumerism. Why did you do that?
Andrew Petiprin:
Well, Cy, I really appreciate what you said in your introduction about how on the surface consumerism is one of those things where somebody might say, “Well, what does that have to do with the heart of the gospel?” Well, I think it has everything to do with the heart of the gospel. I mean, I think in a way it’s kind of the one form of idolatry that every one of every ideology suffers from. We all consume, we all do. And it really gets in the way of an authentic relationship with Christ and an authentic life in the church.
I mean, Jesus talks about this so clearly in Matthew chapter 6. But what I like to do, Cy, is not just point to passages of scripture. I love to do that, but I also like to look for places where you can see represented in a way that really sparks the imagination, the problem that Christianity is speaking to, the problem that our faith says, “Hey, look, we have an answer for that.”
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Andrew Petiprin:
And movies are a great avenue a lot of the time. Now, obviously, we know that there are a lot of movies that are bad for us and get in the way of our faith. There are a lot that are very edifying and uplifting. The ones that I chose for this video about consumerism are maybe somewhere in between. The horror genre is not for everybody, for sure. The three films that I picked though for the consumerism episode, they certainly aren’t pornographic. They don’t have anything super-duper scandalous, but they have their scary moments and their sort of troubling moments.
Cy Kellett:
Some gore.
Andrew Petiprin:
Some gore here and there, yeah. And some of its kind of cartoonish, like in the first movie that I picked is called, Dawn of the Dead. It’s a great film by George Romero. He had made a film earlier called, Night of the Living Dead, which was kind of a cult classic from the ’60s. And about 10 years later, he made another one called, Dawn of the Dead. And in, Dawn of the Dead, you literally see these characters moving around with basically their brains dead, they’re zombies and where are they? But moving around inside a shopping mall. And so it’s a real metaphor for civilization’s demise in the form of consumerism.
Cy Kellett:
I become a zombie the minute I enter a shopping mall. I identify entirely with that.
Andrew Petiprin:
Totally. Isn’t it just one of those places where you go there for the mindlessness of it in a way?
Cy Kellett:
Exactly. Right. And Wetzel’s Pretzels, those two things.
Andrew Petiprin:
Absolutely.
Cy Kellett:
That’s one other reason to go. Yeah. Okay. All right.
Andrew Petiprin:
Well, and in some ways in that film, there are some actual humans who haven’t been zombified yet, who are trying to take refuge in the mall. But the funny thing that happens in that movie, not to give it away, but the funny thing that happens eventually is sort of like with the TV show, The Walking Dead, you come to realize like, “Wait a minute, who are the actual zombies in this story?” And you come to realize it’s the human beings who are moving around in this mall trying to kind of hide out from the zombies. So it’s a really rich film in a lot of ways that sheds light on this problem of consumerism that we all face.
Cy Kellett:
Right. And then you did the second one. Go ahead. The second film.
Andrew Petiprin:
Yeah. So the second one is called, They Live, which is by John Carpenter. And John Carpenter made a lot of high intensity action movies. Movies like Big Trouble in Little China and Escape From New York, and movies like that, that have this real cult following, they’re kind of wild action movies and stuff like that. And, They Live, is sort of like that, but it also has this rich layer of sci-fi on top of it that plays actually into some of what we might call conspiracy theory thinking nowadays.
Where there are people in the world who have uncovered a plot whereby there’s this sort of alien race that’s living among humanity in plain sight, but they’re beaming this kind of stuff all over us so that we can’t see that they’re really bad guys from another planet, and what are they there to do, but actually to just get us to consume things and to live mindlessly so that they can control us and they can use us for some kind of energy, or something like that.
Well, a hero comes along in the form of the former WWE wrestler, named Rowdy Roddy Piper, who wasn’t in a lot of movies, but he’s in this movie. And if you’re an old wrestling fan, as I am, then you might enjoy checking this one out. But he comes into the possession of a pair of sunglasses, which if you put them on, you can see all the subliminal messages buried everywhere, like on billboards and on TV and all those sorts of things. And you can see the real face of these aliens who are seeking to control the human race.
Cy Kellett:
Wow.
Andrew Petiprin:
Yeah. So it’s campy, it’s silly. It’s got some really hilarious, like campy fight scenes and stuff like that in it. But again, very illustrative about the problem that we face, that we want to think that we’re all moving around in the world, making informed decisions, that we’re trying to make the best of our lives, but we are all falling prey too often to these forces that are pressing in against us of just calling out to us almost in this sort of quasi demonic way, to spend and to consume, and to find our fulfillment in physical things and material possessions. So yeah, They Live, is another really good one.
The third one that I talked about is one called, Only Lovers Left Alive, and this is a movie that is probably less well known than those other two. It’s more recent as well. It was made in 2013, and it’s directed by a director named, Jim Jarmusch. And it stars big stars, Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton, but not in roles that they’re particularly famous for, but they play two vampires. So this is another kind of sub-genre in the horror field. Now, the interesting thing about them, we all know the mythology of vampires is they are these creatures that are basically not human anymore.
Demons have taken them over, but in order to live in the world, they have to feed on human blood or animal blood. They have to basically suck into themselves life from living creatures so that it can kind of fuel their deadly existence. Well, these two vampires have, how shall we put it? Even though they don’t go deep into the mythology about whether they’re real demons or something like that. But somewhere along the line, they’ve kind of come to their senses and they’ve decided that they don’t want to be bad anymore. So even though they need blood to live, they don’t want to feed on human beings anymore.
So they get their blood from morgues or from all the, whatever weird places they can find blood, they go and get it there. And meanwhile they try to live, like we might consider sort of ethically responsibly. They try to live kind of off the grid. The one guy is this genius and he’s created this power system so that he doesn’t have to… He’s sort of living on completely renewable energy and all this sort of thing.
But, Cy, the story unfolds, and little by little we realize ultimately not consuming is just a little bit too hard. It’s like no matter how hard we try in our lives to do the responsible thing, and that there’s just always one more temptation, we’re always going to find ourself in some kind of tough spot where it’s like, “Well, I guess I’m just going to have to do it.” So three great movies that really point to this problem and maybe wake us up a little bit to try and do a little bit better.
Cy Kellett:
So none of them explicitly Christian movies, of course. So what you’re saying is they’re pointing us to a problem or a predicament that we’re in. And the predicament is, we live among all this plenty. And I mean, if you’re thinking of Dawn of the Dead, then this has a tendency to dehumanize us. If you’re thinking of, They Live, then we’re actually, it’s a manipulative kind of life. We’re being manipulated. And then the, Only Lovers Left Alive, which I have never seen, I didn’t know about that movie. The suggestion would be, and you’re kind of powerless against all of this.
Andrew Petiprin:
Well, yeah.
Cy Kellett:
So give me a Christian answer to this life that’s not really a human life. The life of a consumer is somehow less than human. It’s easily manipulated, and it’s very, very hard to divorce ourselves from.
Andrew Petiprin:
Yeah. Well, let’s go through them. So if we start with, Dawn of the Dead, I think what you said is exactly right, Cy, that it’s meant to point out the dehumanizing nature of consumerism. And this is something that the church knows about. This is something that if you look for example, at a document like Centesimus Annus, which is the 100th anniversary of Rerum novarum, it was written by Pope St. John Paul II.
So he’s reflecting on a hundred years of Catholic social teaching basically, and he’s writing it in 1991, right at the end of the Cold War. And it’s a really great document for a lot of different reasons. But one of the things he talks about in the document that John Paul II talks about is the danger of consumerism, precisely at the moment when it appears that the west has defeated the east, that basically the capitalist west has defeated the communist east.
We’ve come to this place in history where it appears that we’ve kind of triumphed over this evil and this danger, which is this socialism, communism experiment that had been happening for the better part of a hundred years. But even while celebrating that victory, John Paul II wants to point out, “Watch out, because you don’t want to just out materialize the materialists.” You don’t want to just say, “Hey, look, we beat those guys because we’re just like, we just have better stuff.”
Cy Kellett:
Right. Right.
Andrew Petiprin:
And he specifically points to the possibility that the misuse of our economic freedom can lead to our dehumanization. So it’s just a really great place to turn where you’re not going to be getting human ideology there, but you’re getting real wisdom from the church as we think about how to interact with stuff. And that plays out in, Dawn of the Dead.
Cy Kellett:
I got to be honest with you, Andrew, it seems un-American what you’re saying and what the Pope is saying. I don’t know how else to say it. I think there’s a certain kind of pride in, we have released the energies of capitalism, and those energies are so unambiguously good, that kind of popes, they might say they’re little complaints over there in Rome, but the truth is, this is good, this release of these capitalistic energies.
Andrew Petiprin:
Yeah, I mean, I think you have a point there. When I think about this though, I would think about a thinker like C.S. Lewis who talked about how, “Look, we’re not talking about, we’re not condemning material things per se, but what we are saying is that if we’re aiming for material things first, then we’re going to lose heaven. We’re going to lose our ultimate goal.” But he says, “If we aim for heaven, then we get the world thrown in too.”
And I think that that in a sense is even though John Paul II is not an American, and so he has a slightly different perspective on some of these things than we do, but I think that that’s more or less what he’s getting at too. Obviously there are material goods that are improvements to life on earth, compared to the squalor that some people live in, but we definitely don’t want to prioritize those things above the things of the spirit.
Cy Kellett:
And so this would correspond with Christ’s own teaching that what does it profit a man to gain the whole world? And I’m paraphrasing because I don’t remember the exact words, but to gain the world and lose his soul, that if our society is entirely directed to this improvement in our material circumstances, it’s a soulless society then.
Andrew Petiprin:
Exactly. And Jesus talks about this a lot. I mean, I think, for example, Matthew 6 is such a great place to go, but in Matthew 6, that’s where he says, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.” Right?
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Andrew Petiprin:
But then he also says, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rusts consume and where thieves break in and steal.” He’s just making the very obvious point that this stuff won’t last. It won’t last. So we need a certain amount of stuff. And why shouldn’t we have well-made stuff? Why should we eat garbage? We should eat nutritious food, and that might cost more. We should wear clothes that are going to last more than four or five times through the washing machine. So there’s no need to be cheap about things necessarily, but we do need to remember that even the best quality things are not destined for eternity. And so we need to keep that perspective in mind and not just want things for the wanting of the things themselves. So, Dawn of the Dead, speaks to that.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. Did you want to move on to, They Live? Because I have one more kind of just point I want to ask you about on that one, and then I’ll let you move on. And that is that, like when I see these young people who, like they follow the Instagram of the Kardashians, who are very much into the material things, or of the wealthy celebrities, Drake or whatever, whoever’s got the… And the Kardashians are very nice, Drake’s very… I’m not trying to insult them, I’m just saying that that preoccupation is simultaneous with, and so I want to ask you about, is it related to a kind of desperation, almost suicidal desperation among the young?
Andrew Petiprin:
Yes, I do think that’s true. And I think that these are all the things we’re talking about here are characteristic of a society that is forgetting God. And we see this with our young people particularly, and social media isn’t helping, that when we forget what our real purpose is in being alive at all, then all we can do is just kind of spin the wheels that are available to us and try and find temporary happiness. And the way social media is structured with the infinite scroll and with refreshes that are meant to hit us with dopamine over and over again, we can almost lull ourselves into a comfort with that reality.
But what we end up with is living like the characters at the end of the Pixar movie, Wally, where everybody has what they need sort of, but they’re not really living. They’re not really living. They’re just kind of floating around on these hovering chairs, drinking soda, and watching screens. And I don’t know about you, Cy, but I mean, that’s not the life that I want. I just think we’re made for so much more. And so sometimes these movies or novels or works of fiction can kind of point us in the direction to wake us up a little bit and remind us.
And I think that connects to, They Live, the second film, because, They Live, is sort of about the power of advertising, the power of the media, the way in which we can be to some degree brainwashed because we’re just inundated all the time with messages that say, “You need this, you need this, you need this.” And these messages are increasingly tailored to us as individuals. I mean, it’s almost scary sometimes how well our feeds anticipate things that we might be interested in. I mean, I know all the time I’m looking and I’ll think, “Oh, darn it, I am interested in that, but I wish you didn’t know that, computer. I wish my phone didn’t know that.”
Cy Kellett:
I’ve had the same feeling, kind of a resentment of, “Oh, they’re right, though. I am interested in that.” Yeah.
Andrew Petiprin:
Right. Yeah. And, They Live, John Carpenter’s movie, it’s this kind of preposterous premise that there are these aliens living among us who are wanting to use our mindlessness for their benefit somehow. And we don’t need to go down that rabbit hole to realize that there are forces in this world that benefit from our complacency, that benefit from us just kind of enjoying our screens and consuming the messages that are fed to us, and kind of keeping quiet and hoping for the best in our lives.
And again, it’s not to say that we all need to be superheroes or that we all need to be geniuses and know the ins and outs of everything that happens in reality, but we certainly don’t have to just settle for the mainstream message. We don’t need to settle for what’s just coming at us as the first take. Right? There’s more.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, we have to in some way resist. But it’s hard to find the… And it’s certainly hard to give to your children this spirit of resistance, because as a parent, that’s what you want more than anything is, you don’t want them to get sucked into this death cult of things. But how do you convey that spirit of resistance to others?
Andrew Petiprin:
Yeah. Do you remember, Cy, in, I think it was in the 1980s, maybe in the 1990s, there was a commercial for against doing drugs that had a father who goes into his son’s room and catches him with marijuana or something like that. And he says to his son, “Where did you learn how to do this?” And the son says back, “From you, I learned by watching you.”
Cy Kellett:
Oh, I do remember that. Yeah.
Andrew Petiprin:
You remember that one?
Cy Kellett:
Right. Yeah.
Andrew Petiprin:
It was one of those classic like, “Just say no,” commercials. And I hate to say it, but I want so badly to set a good example for my children, like you do for yours. And to really let them see a better way where our lives don’t have to be dominated by just kind of the lowest common denominator stuff. But all too often, Cy, I find myself just standing there with nothing to do, looking at my phone, and sometimes setting a bad example for my kids.
And there are ways around it. There are ways to be more intentional, like we really try hard in our house not to just have TVs on, not to just have screens on, but to be very intentional about when they’re used and for what purpose. And I’m a huge movie guy, as you know. So we really try to sit down as a family and watch movies, not just flip channels or whatever.
But again, and maybe this connects a little bit to, Only Lovers Left Alive, that it’s really hard to resist. It is really hard. Now, we’re people of hope, we’re Christians, so we do not despair. We do not give up. We keep fighting. We keep our ideals in mind, and we try the best we can. Most importantly, when we fail, we get back up and try again. We ask forgiveness or we set a new plan in place or something like that. That’s our culture, that’s our nature. That’s what we’re called to do as Christians.
So the ending of, Only Lovers Left Alive, it’s not a huge spoil to give it away, but it’s a bit bleak. It is a bit kind of nihilistic in the sense that one wonders what one can do. But there’s a lot we can do, and we’ve all experienced moments, maybe they’re too rare, but we’ve all experienced moments where we know there’s something more.
We know it, because we feel it, whether that’s at a beautiful liturgy in church or whether that’s going on a pilgrimage or listening to a beautiful piece of classical music, or there are so many things where we can feel otherworldly. Where we can really understand that there’s something beyond this, and that that’s the reality, that’s really why we want to spend as much of our time and attention. But it’s tough. We live in a world where those aren’t the values.
Cy Kellett:
But when you say that, when you give that as the remedy, it suggests that the problem is an emptiness. And I think I do actually experience this in my own consumerist moments, that there’s an emptiness that I’m trying to fill. And I guess there’s two possibilities. One is there’s something else to fill that emptiness with, and two is maybe there’s nothing else in this world to fill that emptiness. And what you need to do is learn to accept it, live in it, because then you’re living for another world.
Andrew Petiprin:
Yeah. I think the problem that you put your finger on there is one that I think about a lot too, and I don’t know if there’s a clean answer. I think in my own experience, I have felt it to be a bit of both. I mean, I think that there are, again, I keep bringing up C.S. Lewis, but he has this great line about how if you experience something, basically saying if you experience something that feels otherworldly, that’s sort of proof that you are made for another world, that there is something beyond this. However, we also know that there are a lot of, there’s almost like a kind of deepfake with regard to all of that stuff in our lives. There’s a lot of synthetic transcendental experiences.
Cy Kellett:
Well put. Very well put. Yes.
Andrew Petiprin:
There’s a lot of stuff, it’s not the real deal. And this is why a lot of people get addicted to video games or drugs or pornography or whatever it may be, because they’re looking for that thing, and they’re settling for a substitute, not the real deal.
Cy Kellett:
Synthetic transcendence. That is a great phrase. I am so going to steal that and not give you credit for it.
Andrew Petiprin:
You can have it, Cy.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, synthetic… That’s what we fall for. And you can see why the intensity of the experiences that are on offer. Even travel, I suppose, like there’s a certain way in which you could say, “Well, travel expands the mind and it opens the soul.” And all of that’s true, but there’s a diminishing return on that, that there’s a point at which if you’re just traveling all the time, you’re not living a human life.
Andrew Petiprin:
Right. You’re always looking for the next hit, the next fix. You’re always looking for the next high. And now highs are okay as far as they go, as long as they don’t become real problems. But I mean, not all highs obviously, but the feeling of feeling a little bit a sense of transcendence or something, that’s okay. But as you said before, it is also very important to step back from these experiences and realize, “Lord, whatever my life is, this is your gift to me.” And even my suffering is something that I’m called to offer to you for sanctification.”
And so yeah, we don’t want to live lives thinking it’s always supposed to be better than what we have. And that brings us, in a sense, full circle back around to the consumerist problem, because in a sense, that really is connected to the very basic structure of sin, of pride, of desiring things that are beyond what we’re meant to have. I mean, in the sense like kind of the problem that Adam and Eve themselves face in the garden.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. And one of the things that I started was with the radical nature of Christianity, and I do think this is something that actually the young are attracted to, and we often fail to attract them by our lack of radical commitment to the person of Jesus, a lack of radical commitment to what he taught us. But a kind of not anti-consumerism just for the sake of anti-consumerism, but offering a radically different alternative life. Actually to me it seems, and I’m thinking of Dorothy Day, frankly, because she attracted so many young people, and changed their lives just because she said, “I’m not going to live that way. I’m not going to live for money or power or fame or any of that.”
Andrew Petiprin:
Yeah, we’re living in a strange age, Cy, where at least in the United States and in a lot of Western countries, there isn’t something obvious that is worthy of giving our lives for. I think about that with regard, like both of my grandfathers fought in World War II. And in a sense, what an incredible privilege it was that they lived at that time where they could serve sacrificially for something that was worthy of their lives.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Andrew Petiprin:
And nowadays, it’s hard to find that thing, and yet the radical call of the gospel is still there. And yeah, Dorothy Day is a great example, but there are lots of others. There are lots of other people who, if you look hard enough, are not just accepting the mainstream narrative, and they are out there living lives of holiness.
Cy Kellett:
It’s a wonderful point because they really are. I mean, even in your parish, wherever your parish is, somebody is living that. I mean, I can remember when I was a kid, there was a guy, and he owned the local tire repair shop, but he went to mass every morning, and everybody in the community knew if you were in desperate need, this guy was the guy that could help or he could find the person to help you. It’s just something about the way that he lived. I suppose that’s the way to say it, a radical commitment to Jesus.
Andrew Petiprin:
Absolutely. Don’t ever accept the narrative that everybody’s doing it. It’s just not true.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Andrew Petiprin:
There are people out there living differently, and we just have to find them.
Cy Kellett:
Andrew, I’m so delighted that we got to talk. Andrew Petiprin, is our guest. I don’t know why I’m having trouble saying it.
Andrew Petiprin:
It’s a tricky one.
Cy Kellett:
I’m committed to some other… And people should go and watch these. They’re wonderful videos that you’ve got over at, Word on Fire. But there’s some possibility that you’ll do this again, that you’ll produce more of these kind of movies and Christian faith videos.
Andrew Petiprin:
In one way or another, yes. I don’t work at, Word on Fire, anymore, so I probably won’t be producing them over there. But yeah, I have a lot of ideas about that. I write a lot about film for different outlets and that sort of thing. And I have found that these videos have really resonated with people. And so yeah, I’d love to produce a future series where I can comment on faith and philosophy and film, because really film is a great medium for exploring some of these important themes.
Cy Kellett:
Because we don’t have you to do one on Barbie. This is the big summer of Barbie, and you’re not there for us.
Andrew Petiprin:
I’m not there for you, but I could be.
Cy Kellett:
Andrew, come on. All right, Andrew Petiprin, thank you very much. I hope we’ll get to talk many more times.
Andrew Petiprin:
Great. Thanks, Cy.
Cy Kellett:
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