A Mall is just a Mall, and (Sometimes) That’s All We Want

In their recent essay in The Other Journal, Cory Willson and Robert Covolo position themselves between James K. A. Smith’s approach to culture and cultural practices, as depicted in Desiring the Kingdom, and my own, as they see it depicted in Poetic Theology.¹ I basically agree with both their analysis and their creative response to these two approaches. As far as our cultural critiques are concerned, Jamie Smith and I begin at different starting points but end up in fundamental agreement. I think, however, there might be one important difference.

In Poetic Theology, I attempt to highlight two primal elements about the poetic spaces of people’s lives: the attraction of desire and the goods that we desire. First, learning from Augustine, I am trying to retrieve a positive theology of desire. That is, I want to affirm those attractions that move us to pursue certain goods—whether at Nordstrom or (speaking as a Cubs fan) Wrigley Field—as something fundamental to who we are as creatures made in the image of God. For many people, and for all of us some of the time, these poetic spaces stand close to the center of our identity. Of course, all such attractions—or as Augustine would put it, all the things we love—are to be secondary to our love for God. They are, as he put it, “to be loved in God.”² I think this affirms that the attractions which move us are approved by God and that they are to find their highest meaning in our enjoyment of them in and for God as divine gifts. But the point I want to emphasize here is that this sense that those attractions which move us are most perfectly realized as God’s divine gifts does not invalidate that they are indeed approved by God.

Once I made this point in a lecture and a Korean pastor asked me: “But according to the New Testament, aren’t our desires inherently wrong?” Now, it is true that nine of the twelve times that the word for desire (epithumia) appears in the New Testament, it is used negatively—these are the “desires of the flesh,” which work against the spirit and so on. But we cannot disregard the fact that the word desire also appears three times in a positive sense (mostly in the Gospels), and it is particularly important that we understand why the word had the negative connotations it had in New Testament times. The answer is in the attitudes toward desire that were fostered in the Stoic tradition, where reason was to carefully harness the bodily impulses. Because of the dominance of this tradition, ordinary desires of the body had come to have the negative connotation they largely carry in the New Testament. The problem with this tradition, of course, was that it conveyed a very negative attitude toward the body and created goods, something that Paul goes out of his way to counter in a number of places—including the discussion of food offered to idols which Willson and Covolo address. Perhaps the most prominent example of Paul’s resistance to the Stoic tradition is his advice to young Timothy. Rather than warning Timothy about the danger of desires, he explicitly refers to the Stoic tradition, wherein people forbid marriage and demand abstinence from certain foods, as wrong, for these things “God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected provided it is received with thanksgiving” (1 Tim. 4:3–4). Of course, our desires, like all our human impulses, are disordered, and that is the reason Paul speaks of the need to sanctify or as we might say in modern parlance, discipline them by the Word of God and prayer.

The second element that I wanted to emphasize in Poetic Theology was that goods are reflective of the gifts of creation that God has given us. To argue that the mall necessarily forms us in idolatrous ways is impugning the goodness of those gifts that Paul describes—for example, marriage and food. After all, from one point of view the mall—and indeed all economic arrangements—is simply a vehicle for distributing the fruits of the earth and of people’s labor. Now, it is perfectly true that this distribution is frequently skewed in all kinds of ways—there are those who want to corner the market or advertisers who want us to buy what we don’t need. But these are problems with the structure of things broken by sin, not problems that are inherent to malls, and I think Jamie Smith would agree with me here.

But what I emphatically deny is the claim (to paraphrase G. K. Chesterton) that when someone goes to the mall what they are really looking for is God.³ I find this incoherent. When people go to the mall, what they are looking for is a nice shirt or a dress for the party next month, and indeed, this is what they (usually) find there. And they come home feeling a little bit better about themselves, and they may enjoy the party a bit more. Nothing is inherently wrong with this and, indeed, it can even be seen as a healthy part of life.

Sooner or later, however, looking better at a party calls for a larger story. This calls for more attention than I give it here, but we cannot simply go through life attending parties. At the end of the day, what we want most deeply is a celebration of thanksgiving that is only to be found in the experience of worship. But what we need to help people see is not how misinformed they are by all the shopping they do, but that these acts are better loved and celebrated when they are seen as God’s gifts, when we see that “every good and perfect gift is from above” (James 1:17 NIV). Seen in this light even trips to the mall can be sanctified by the word of God and prayer. In this sense, a mall is often just a mall, and that’s fine with me.