Commodified Communion

Resist! Antonio Alonso’s Commodified Communion: Eucharist, Consumer Culture, and the Practice of Everyday Life opens with this single word that highlights both the subject of his scholarly inquiry and his orientation. The anxiety provoked by the collision of liturgical practice and western consumerism is not new to either scholars or practitioners, but this conversation has largely been confined to the realm of theological ethics and shares a set of common refrains: that a meaningful contrast can be drawn between consumer culture and Christianity, that the preferred response to consumer culture is one of resistance, that the site of this resistance is Eucharistic, and that the Eucharist should be celebrated towards this end (43-44). Commodified Communion offers a provocative alternative to this approach.

Alonso begins by taking up a claim that is often argued and rarely contested these days: “that American consumerism runs against the grain of the deepest impulses of Christianity and is in need of reform” (18). His exploration of the distinctive work of Geoffrey Wainwight (liturgical theology), William T. Cavanaugh (political theology), and Vincent Miller (systematic theology) reveals a shared logic, which he characterizes as a “theology of resistance.” In mining the Christian tradition for theological responses to consumer culture, these theologies of resistance frequently turn to the Eucharist as the practice or site of resistance par excellence. This too is shown to be a theological claim with considerable limitations. While Alonso does not dispute the distortions of consumer culture that these theologies of resistance bring to light, he ultimately argues that these narratives of resistance “leave little room for the activity of God amid commodified beliefs, goods, and practices of everyday life” (44). This book is a search for God and ultimately for Christian hope amid the limitations and brokenness of our commodified world.

Far from being distinctive from consumer culture, Alonso argues that the very materiality of the Christian life makes its embeddedness in western consumerism (or indeed any human culture) unavoidable. While theologies of resistance seek to counter the effects of consumer culture on Christianity, Alonso instead goes in search of Christian hope amidst the messiness and ambiguity of everyday practice. Alonso’s careful constructive theology is located in two longer chapters in the middle of the book. In chapter 2, Alonso challenges the common interpretation of Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 1984) as an account of resistance, where strategic practices that enact and maintain their totalizing systems are contrasted with tactical practices that reject and oppose these systems. Situating this text within Certeau’s larger project, Alonso argues that tactics are not about resistance per se but are instead “signs of living realities that pulse within and against systems of strategies that can never quite contain them” (57). These living realities are the remainder left over by totalizing systems. They erupt as illegible cries that exceed the boundaries and imaginaries of the systems in which they are found and point, tantalizingly, to something more. By helpfully layering a discussion of Walter Benjamin’s wish images onto this substantive re-reading of de Certeau, Alonso effectively shifts the utility of de Certeau for the theological project from a foundation for theological ethics (a program of resistance) to a foundation for Christian hope. 

In chapter 3, Alonso explores the limits of the claim that the Eucharist is a privileged site of or formation for Christian resistance. The incongruence between the worshipping ideal and the actual lives of practitioners has long been a source of frustration for liturgical theologians and ritual scholars, not to mention generations of believers stretching back to Amos and Isaiah! Here again, Alonso proves to be a careful reader of scholarship that has become almost canonical in liturgical and ritual studies. Alonso finds in contemporary authors from Mary Douglas to Mark Searle to Aidan Kavanagh (and more!) a subtle but consistent resurfacing of the medieval dictum ex opere operato (from the work performed) under the pretense of ethics: “If liturgy is done right . . . it will magically shape better and more ethical consumers” (105). Despite great efforts to overcome this instrumentalizing theology, Alonso contends that theologies of resistance that turn to the Eucharist for resolution continue to place grace at the mercy of humanity and distort our understanding of the materiality of the Eucharist.  

This book proceeds in a way that demands the reader return again and again to the sometimes beautiful and almost always uncomfortable reality of the church’s incarnation in our commodified world.  Alonso’s scholarly reflection is punctuated with short vignettes that do work akin to a theological ethnography: descriptions of his abuela’s home altar, church hymnals, an Apple ad campaign, mass produced communion bread. Far from simple illustrations, these short chapters are performative. They are testimonies to the living remainders left over in the totalizing commodification of our world and thus cries of hope that puncture even Alonso’s careful systematic theologizing. They provoke in the reader the very tension that Alonso works to keep at the heart of this book: the urge to resist and the wonder that the living God might be found even here.  They also evoke the many other cries of hope that Alonso is convinced are present in our worship, even if he and we cannot always perceive them.

In his concluding chapter, Alonso returns to the question of Eucharistic hope. This hope, he insists, is found not in the extent to which the Eucharist is capable of resisting the world in which we live nor in its ability to escape its joyful or lamentable tethers, but rather in the ways that we come to recognize God’s activity in the Eucharist in and in spite of the brokenness of our liturgies and the worlds in which they are embedded.

Commodified Communion is both critical and constructive. It challenges long-standing assumptions about the Eucharist’s relationship to the world and engages productively with a wide range of theological voices across liturgical and political theologies. For those steeped in theologies of resistance, Alonso’s thesis is uncomfortable, whether one is a believer in the pew or a theological scholar: that in a commodified world, “all churches . . . exist as a commodity on the shelves of the marketplace, whether we like it or not” (5). To the extent that this thesis stands in judgment of the concrete instantiations of a commodified church in the world today, Alonso’s book deepens and extends the work of his theological interlocutors whom he treats with critical admiration throughout this book.

Although this text reveals the limits of Eucharistic resistance to our broken world, it does not release the reader from their responsibility to seek justice both inside and outside of their liturgical celebrations. Resistance is not futile! But Alonso’s work is ultimately more aligned with the work of Latin American liberation theologians who not only call for the transformation of the world, but also seek and discover God in the places we least expect—in the midst of brokenness and sinfulness and suffering. In this theology, hope emerges not from some imagined future constructed by preachers and theologians who have finally managed to build a better liturgy, but from the recognition of God’s activity in and in spite of our commodified world.

Layla A. Karst is an assistant professor of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University.

Layla Karst

Date Of Review:

December 24, 2022