Today is the day – the day of great sacrifice, the day of great salvation. Today, a great multitude of people will go out and celebrate their materialistic salvation, going forth to the altar of consumer sacrifice and giving generous donations to the gods of big business. Today is the day salvation, in which those struggling gods, weakened by the lack of faith shown to them throughout the year, find their flocks return, bringing with them a bounty of treasure, enough to provide their high priests a livelihood for another year. Today is the day, the inverse of Good Friday. Today is Black Friday. Welcome to the darkness which imitates the light.
Look what happens on this annual pilgrimage to the malls: consumers go out, have an all-night vigil in front of the altar of choice, giving up of food and drink, sleep and shelter, hoping that the gods will be pleased and give them, in return, monetary salvation. It is the social religion of choice; today one is not a fool to give up of oneself, because today one’s sacrifice goes for the salvation of businesses, and if the businesses are saved, then these gods will in return bless the nation with security for another year.
Even though Black Friday is a perverse inversion of Good Friday, Christians find themselves involved with this dark mystery religion. Indeed, this new religion invokes the Christian faith, encouraging Christians to believe one can indeed serve two masters, God and mammon alike. Mammon does not require its follower to renounce Christ: indeed, it calls upon Christ, and uses Christ the best it can, because it knows that the work of Christ can be perverted and used for its own ill ends. Indeed, it even follows the examples of Christians of old: Christians took over and used old pagan temples and practices in order to convert pagans to their new faith; mammon, having learned this lesson, follows suit and takes over Christians celebrations and uses them to convince Christians to become one of its fold.
But if today is the day of personal sacrifice, a day of great fast for the saving of the buck, then we must ponder if this is not somehow connected to the secular celebration of Thanksgiving, the day of gluttonous rejoicing. While I will admit there is a layer of the celebration of Thanksgiving which a Christian can celebrate (giving thanks to God), we must look to the bigger picture, and see how the consumer world has connected the two days, Thanksgiving and Black Friday, together. One is the celebration of excess, the celebration of the bounty of the previous year; the other is the fast, the vigil, the sacrifice aimed to appease the gods of plenty, so that one can attain another joyful Thanksgiving the next year. Thanksgiving is at once Mardi Gras and Easter for the consumer religion. It adapts older, good traditions in order to seduce the public into its religious rites; it even uses those who do not fall for the Black Friday religious rites, who try to keep to their own Christian purity, by having them join in with its paschal feast: heretics are shown to receive the gracious gifts by the gods of plenty, showing how strong and charitable those gods must be.
Do not believe it.
While I do think a Christian can celebrate Thanksgiving without sin, and that there are many good aspects to the memorial which takes place on the day, they must be aware of how their celebration is being used in the larger, social religion which is at the heart of our state. It is for this reason that Christians should also remember the whole story, the kind of which Michael Iafrate reminded us of this week. The social religion is dangerous, and it covers up a multitude of crimes it created by its perversion of a good.
Welcome to Black Friday. Mammon wants to know: will you celebrate its rites today? Can you help it save the world?
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