[Note: This is Part 1 of “The Borrowed Life”, a 4-part series about consumer culture, financial anxiety, and the sufficiency of Christ.]

The music starts before you reach the entrance. By the time you cross the threshold, the temperature has shifted, the lighting has softened, and the architecture is drawing your eye upward toward vaulted ceilings and curated displays. Scented air drifts from a nearby anchor store. A familiar song — one you associate with something good, something wanted — plays at just the right volume. You have not been shown a product, yet you are already being formed.

This is the liturgy of the shopping mall.

What consumer culture and worship share runs deeper than analogy. Both are systems of formation — not merely systems of persuasion. Both operate by shaping desire, not just appealing to it. They do not simply tell us what to want. Through repeated practice and immersive experience, they train us to become a certain kind of person who wants certain kinds of things. The question this article wants to examine is what that formation is doing to us — and whether the gospel offers a counter-liturgy capable of reshaping desire around something more lasting than the promise of the next purchase.

Consumer Culture and Worship: The Liturgy You Did Not Know You Were Practicing

The word “liturgy” carries ecclesiastical weight most people associate with high-church tradition — the Book of Common Prayer, the ordered movements of a Mass, the call and response of Sunday morning. But liturgy in its broader sense is any structured practice that forms a person’s loves and loyalties through repetition.

By that definition, the shopping mall is one of the most liturgically effective institutions in American life.

The philosopher James K.A. Smith has articulated this with unusual clarity. “The mall is actually an intensely religious site,” he has observed, “the cathedral of consumerism that is really trying to capture their love and longings and desires.”^[1] The mall does not operate on our reasoning faculties first. It operates on our imaginations and affections. It presents a vision of the good life, arranges that vision in aspirational and beautiful form, and invites participation through the act of purchasing.

The shape of the liturgy follows a recognizable pattern: advertisement creates longing; display arranges the longing into something concrete and attainable; acquisition provides momentary satisfaction; dissatisfaction follows when the product fails to deliver its promise; new advertisement creates new longing. The cycle is not accidental. It is the system’s design. “The way we become consumers,” Smith notes, “is not because somebody argues us to that conclusion, it’s because our hearts are captured by these cultural liturgies that pull us into a rival story of the world.”^[2]

This is why James asks: “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions” (James 4:1-3). James is not merely describing interpersonal conflict. He is describing the condition of a heart formed by a liturgy of desire — a heart trained to want, to want more, to believe that getting what it wants will finally bring peace.

Consumer culture did not invent this condition. It exploits it. It finds the restlessness that Augustine described — “our heart is restless until it rests in Thee” — and hands it a catalog. The question is not whether we will worship. The question is what we are being formed to worship, and whether we are paying close enough attention to notice.

What the Debt Numbers Actually Tell Us

This is not a theoretical problem. The shape of American consumer debt entering 2026 tells a diagnostic story.

The average American credit card balance now stands at $6,523 — up 2.2 percent year over year.^[3] Buy Now Pay Later services reached $18.2 billion in 2025 holiday season spending alone.^[4] For middle-income consumers, real credit card debt has grown rapidly from pandemic-era lows and is now above the 2019 level.^[5] For lower-income consumers, debt is tracking toward pre-pandemic trends in real terms, even as wages and purchasing power have not fully recovered.

The data reveals not a uniform picture but a stratified one. A “K-shaped” consumer story persists: higher-income households’ card spending grew 2.4 percent year over year in 2025, while lower-income households’ spending grew just 0.4 percent.^[6] Some people are spending freely because they have more. Others are spending on credit to maintain a standard of living their income no longer supports.

Ted Rossman, a senior industry analyst at Bankrate, put it plainly: “Low-income Americans especially are carrying bigger balances heading into the holiday season just to cover essentials.”^[7] Hillary Lanier, a 32-year-old in Charlotte carrying a five-figure credit card balance, described the experience simply: “It’s definitely higher prices. It’s a very vicious cycle.”^[8]

A pastoral note belongs here. Not all debt is the same, and this article is not a meditation on personal irresponsibility. Some people carry credit card debt because the rent is due and the paycheck has not arrived. That is not a spiritual failure; it is the painful arithmetic of an economy where costs have outrun wages for a significant portion of the population. The debt that this series is examining is what consumer culture produces as a system — the collective weight of a society shaped to purchase identity and security on installment. Both the person surviving on credit and the person spending freely deserve a clear account of what that system is actually doing to them.

The numbers are not an indictment of individuals. They are a portrait of a liturgy at scale.

Advertising’s Real Product

Here is what advertising actually sells.

It does not sell products. A car advertisement does not sell transportation. It sells arrival — the version of you who pulls up to the gathering and belongs. A cologne advertisement does not sell fragrance. It sells desire — the capacity to attract and be desired. A luxury watch advertisement does not sell timekeeping. It sells permanence in a world of fleeting things.

Joerg Rieger, a theologian who has studied consumerism closely, has named what is really on offer: “The desire promoted by advertising is not the simple desire for the product; it is for something more transcendent to which the product points, like the hope for happiness and a better life.”^[9] The product is the vehicle. The destination it promises is transformation — a better, more significant, more secure version of yourself. “We don’t just buy things,” Smith has noted; “we buy significance and identities.”^[10]

This is precisely where the gospel has something substantive to say — not at the level of stewardship ethics or budget advice, but at the level of what we are actually worshipping. Jesus said: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:19-21). The word “treasure” here is not primarily financial instruction. It names the object of ultimate loyalty — the thing we believe will secure and define us.

Paul’s warning to Timothy cuts deeper still: “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evils” (1 Timothy 6:10). Paul does not say money is evil. He says the love of money — the disposition of the heart that has made financial security into a functional savior — is where the problem lives. Consumer culture does not merely tempt us to spend money. It trains us to love what money represents: security, identity, transformation, transcendence. That training — repeated, immersive, architecturally sophisticated — is the liturgy. And we are absorbing it whether we intend to or not.

The Gospel’s Competing Liturgy

The gospel’s answer to consumer culture is not primarily a counter-budget. It is a counter-liturgy.

Smith has leveled a warning the church would do well to hear: “So much evangelical worship is just the secular liturgy of the mall with a different ‘commodity’ for sale.”^[11] The danger is real. When Christian community becomes primarily a vendor of spiritual goods and pleasant experiences — when Sunday morning is designed on the same principles as a well-curated retail environment — the church has absorbed the liturgy it was called to contest. The result is not transformation but a religious version of the same consumerist formation.

The church at its best is something different: a community of practice oriented around goods that cannot be purchased and a story that runs entirely counter to consumerism’s logic. Word, sacrament, prayer, confession, service — these are not simply religious activities. They are formative practices that shape desire around a different purpose. They declare, week after week through embodied practice, that we are not primarily consumers but worshippers — not people whose significance is purchased but people who have been purchased by Christ.

Jesus said: “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst” (John 6:35). This is a direct confrontation with what consumer culture promises but cannot deliver. It promises satisfaction — the right product, the right lifestyle, the right version of yourself — but its liturgy of dissatisfaction ensures the hunger always returns. Jesus claims to be the reality the hunger is reaching for. Not the product that momentarily relieves it, but the Person who genuinely satisfies it.

Paul assures the Philippian church: “My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19). This is not a promise of financial abundance. It is a declaration about the sufficiency of Christ as provision for every actual human need. Consumer culture is built on the premise of scarcity — you do not yet have what you need; buy it. The gospel is built on the premise of abundance in Christ — in him, you have already been given what you most need; live from that.

The problem with consumer culture is not that it offers too much. It is that it offers too little. It cannot deliver what it advertises.

The Borrowed Life

The mall will not stop designing its liturgy. The advertisements will not stop selling transcendence. The buy-now-pay-later services will not stop making acquisition feel costless in the present. Consumer culture is sophisticated, pervasive, and — critically — designed to be experienced rather than argued against.

But so is the gospel.

The restlessness Augustine named eventually found its rest. Not by subduing desire but by redirecting it toward its proper object. The security that consumer culture borrows against, the identity it promises to deliver, the transformation it perpetually defers to the next purchase — the gospel declares that these have already been given in Christ. You do not need to buy your way into the person you want to be. In Christ, you have already been declared to be someone — someone known, loved, and provided for by the God who did not spare his own Son.

This series — “The Borrowed Life” — takes its name from what consumer culture asks of us: to borrow against a future we cannot guarantee, to purchase security we do not need to acquire, to carry debt for things that the gospel declares have already been freely given. In the articles ahead, we will enter the anxiety that this pattern creates (Article 2), examine what Scripture actually teaches about contentment (Article 3), and explore what a community shaped by the gospel’s economics looks like in practice (Article 4).

But the foundation is here: before we can speak honestly about living differently, we need to see clearly what we are already being formed to want. Consumer culture is a liturgy. The question is whether we are worshipping at its altar — and whether we have been paying close enough attention to know it.

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Questions for Reflection

• Where in your own life do you recognize the cycle the mall designs — longing, acquisition, momentary satisfaction, renewed longing? What does that pattern reveal about what your heart is reaching for?
• When you make a significant purchase, are you buying the product or buying a story about who you will become? How honestly can you answer that question?
• Smith suggests we absorb consumer culture’s liturgy not through argument but through repeated practice. What practices in your daily life are forming your desires — and toward what ends?
• How does your church community engage the liturgy of consumer culture? Does it offer a genuine counter-formation, or has it in some ways adopted the same logic?
• Where do you find the gospel’s declaration of sufficiency in Christ difficult to believe in concrete, financial terms? What would it mean to actually live from abundance rather than scarcity?

Prayer Points

• For Personal Discernment: Pray for the ability to see clearly what consumer culture has formed in your own heart — the desires you have absorbed without choosing them — and for grace to bring those desires before Christ rather than to the next purchase.
• For Financial Honesty: Pray for those carrying consumer debt who have not yet named the spiritual architecture underneath the spending, that God would give them eyes to see the liturgy they have been participating in and ears to hear the gospel’s alternative.
• For the Church: Pray that Christian communities would take seriously their calling to offer a genuine counter-liturgy — one that actually forms desire around Christ and not merely around a religious version of the same consumerist goods.
• For Cultural Witness: Pray that the church’s engagement with consumer culture would be marked not by moralism or financial advice but by the compelling announcement of a God who has already provided what the culture is borrowing to purchase.

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^[1]James K.A. Smith, quoted in Michael Horton, “An Interview with James K.A. Smith,” White Horse Inn, https://whitehorseinn.org/resource-library/interviews/an-interview-with-james-k-a-smith/.

^[2]James K.A. Smith, quoted in Michael Horton, “An Interview with James K.A. Smith,” White Horse Inn, https://whitehorseinn.org/resource-library/interviews/an-interview-with-james-k-a-smith/.

^[3]Greg Lacurci, “Consumers take on more credit card debt this holiday,” CNBC, December 23, 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/23/credit-card-debt-holiday-shopping.html.

^[4]Greg Lacurci, “Consumers take on more credit card debt this holiday,” CNBC, December 23, 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/23/credit-card-debt-holiday-shopping.html.

^[5]“Why Has Consumer Spending Remained So Resilient? Evidence from Credit Card Data,” Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, August 13, 2025, https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/current-policy-perspectives/2025/why-has-consumer-spending-remained-resilient.aspx.

^[6]“Consumer Checkpoint: Choppy start, solid finish,” Bank of America Institute, January 2026, https://institute.bankofamerica.com/economic-insights/consumer-checkpoint-january-2026.html.

^[7]Greg Lacurci, “Consumers take on more credit card debt this holiday,” CNBC, December 23, 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/23/credit-card-debt-holiday-shopping.html.

^[8]Greg Lacurci, “Consumers take on more credit card debt this holiday,” CNBC, December 23, 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/23/credit-card-debt-holiday-shopping.html.

^[9]Joerg Rieger, quoted in Pontus Lindqvist, “Consumerism as a moral attitude,” Studia Theologica, 2020, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0039338X.2020.1751278.

^[10]James K.A. Smith, quoted in “Christians engaging culture: Q&A with James K.A. Smith,” SPU Stories, https://stories.spu.edu/articles/christians-engaging-culture-q-a-with-james-k-a-smith.

^[11]James K.A. Smith, quoted in Trevin Wax, “Spiritual Formation through Desire: An Interview with James K.A. Smith,” The Gospel Coalition, June 25, 2020, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/spiritual-formation-through-desire-an-interview-with-james-k-a-smith/.