Black Friday: A Chance to Explore Consumerism
Two years ago, while living in Spain, my spouse and I decided to host a small Thanksgiving dinner. The whole thing turned into a headache. Thanksgiving, after all, isn’t celebrated there, and finding ingredients like canned pumpkin or stuffing was nearly impossible. What was easy to find, however, were Black Friday deals. Somewhat disconcertingly, bright English-language signs advertising “Black Friday Deals” were plastered across storefronts, promising deep discounts on electronics and clothing. I remember thinking how strange and tragic it was that a holiday centered on gratitude had not crossed the Atlantic, but its consumerist counterpart had.
Yet we must also honestly name how relentless consumption dulls the meaning of Advent and Christmas, is destroying our planet, and makes us more transactional than gracious.
The history of Black Friday in the United States reveals just how deeply American culture is shaped by consumerism. In 1939, at the urging of retailers seeking a longer Christmas shopping season, President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving from the last Thursday of November to the second-to-last. By the mid-twentieth century, the day after Thanksgiving had become the unofficial start of the Christmas shopping season. The term “Black Friday” first appeared in the 1950s among Philadelphia police officers, who used it to describe the noise, traffic, and general chaos that followed Thanksgiving as shoppers and tourists flooded the city. In later decades, the originally negative term was rebranded by retailers to symbolize profitability, marking the supposed day when stores moved from operating “in the red” to “in the black.” Today, Black Friday remains the high holy day of American consumerism and is increasingly a global phenomenon.
As clergy and congregations move toward Advent and Christmas, Black Friday offers an opportunity for self-reflection on a reality so omnipresent that it can be hard for people living in the United States to perceive. Like the air we breathe, consumerism saturates our imaginations. It shapes our identities, our desires, and the way we celebrate the holiday season. This makes it a worthy topic of exploration, whether from the pulpit, in parish newsletters, and in adult formation settings. But timing matters: when is the right moment to name and examine these forces? And in what tone or context?
Black Friday may offer an opening. Unlike a critique of Santa Claus or Miracle on 34th Street, focusing on Black Friday alone provides enough critical distance for genuine self-reflection and fruitful conversation. The pastoral challenge is to hold these conversations without shaming people. After all, the desire to give gifts – especially to children – springs from a place of love. Yet we must also honestly name how relentless consumption dulls the meaning of Advent and Christmas, is destroying our planet, and makes us more transactional than gracious.
For a solid academic overview, I found Kenneth R. Himes’s Consumerism and Christian Ethics especially helpful. Yet when it comes to pastoral insight, Himes himself points readers to a short 2001 essay by Timothy Vavarek. Vavarek does not write as an academic but as a parish priest reflecting on fifteen years of ministry in San Antonio, having watched firsthand how consumerism shapes, strains, and often harms the families under his care.
The essay is worth reading in full – and perhaps even discussing in congregations – but what struck me most was Vavarek’s down-to-earth way of defining the problem. He describes consumerism as “a social and economic order based on the systemic creation and fostering of the desire to possess material goods and personal success in ever greater amounts.” It trains people, he writes, to “blindly fight against contentment in the status quo.” In other words, consumerism does not simply encourage people to buy things. It forms desire itself, teaching us that “good enough is by definition never enough.” What follows, he observes, is instability. The disposable income meant for a family’s future or for charity gets diverted toward inflating one’s lifestyle, worth, and status. “The consumerist imperative to acquire,” Vavarek warns, helps explain “decreased savings and increased debt,” a pattern he saw most clearly every year “in the aftermath of Christmas.”
Jesus calls us to live with simplicity, with just enough, sharing generously what we have with those in need, and in doing so, storing up riches in the life of God.
Vavarek proposes a return to a penitential Christian way of life, proposing that practices such as fasting, prayer, and tithing help believers loosen the grip of consumerism and reorient their desires toward God. Himes, meanwhile, endorses a virtue-ethical framework that highlights temperance and positive, healthy frugality as countercultural habits capable of shaping a Christian life within a society so saturated by consumption. I have wondered if inviting a community to explore and learn more about the root of the problem – our rampant consumeristic culture – might help people arrive at their own experiments and solutions. Those steps in the right direction, emerging from relevant community and experiences, might carry more buy-in and contextual wisdom.
The starting point that has been most fruitful for me is a conversation around sufficientia, a spiritual antidote to consumerism’s insistence that we never have enough. Sufficientia is not exactly a virtue but an ancient Christian posture rooted in scriptural and monastic tradition. It draws especially from Proverbs 30:8: “Give me neither poverty nor riches; give me enough.” Early Christian ascetics took sufficientia as an organizing principle for communal life. For them, it affirmed that poverty, hunger, and homelessness are catastrophes, and no one should live in such conditions. But at the same time, we do not need unnecessary luxuries or an extravagant life. Jesus calls us to live with simplicity, with just enough, sharing generously what we have with those in need, and in doing so, storing up riches in the life of God.
I’ve found that this notion resonates quickly and naturally with a wide range of communities, both within my own parish and in other settings where I’ve preached or taught.1 People are exhausted by perpetual messaging about their own inadequacies; they feel the pressure of constantly trying to keep up. Naming sufficientia offers a shared language to challenge the cycle of upward comparisons consumerism has trapped us in.
Taken together, these reflections suggest that Black Friday may offer clergy and congregations a unique entry point into a deeper spiritual conversation. By tracing the history of this secular “holy day,” examining theological insights from thinkers like Himes and Vavarek, and exploring a posture such as sufficientia, we can explore with congregations a pathway forward beyond consumerism. We can also help one another imagine more grounded ways of entering Advent and Christmas, ways rooted not in accumulating more, but in offering one another the countercultural gift of recognizing that we have enough.
