One of our family mottos is “It’s an adventure!” It started on a family vacation to Ireland and now we use it quite often in the face of life changes and experiences both big and small. As I write this, I’m on the train from Edinburgh to Aberdeen—just one small leg of the adventure I’m on with God. It’s pretty crazy how life’s twists and turns take us places we could never have imagined.
I’m now in what feels like a second lifetime after starting out with a Masters in Economics and spending nearly 10 years working as a corporate market research consultant. During that time I spent several years living in London, and the rest in Cincinnati. I began to gravitate toward social justice and opened a social enterprise called Stop Traffick Fashion, an online boutique selling apparel and accessories made by survivors of human trafficking. While working on that I was still working full time as a consultant and became increasingly disillusioned with corporate life. I never thought I would go back to school, but eventually heard of a Master’s in Social Justice and after reading a few of the course descriptions and talking to people at Kilns College, the decision to do it became more clear than anything that I can remember to that point. So I quit my career and moved to Bend, Oregon to go back to school and work at Antioch Church.
Sometimes it felt like a wild, fun, adventure and other times were quite painful and filled with feelings of loss that I could never have anticipated. Writing down the physical changes and moves in a short paragraph feels a bit flat because it doesn’t begin to capture what I experienced, how I’ve changed and how I’ve experienced God in new ways.
Throughout my time studying theology and social justice, it began to become clear just how much my Christianity, though genuine, had been domesticated and Americanized. One way in which I experienced this was how I related my past education in economics to my faith–or rather, how I didn’t. In America, our economic life is much more determined by being American than by being Christians. For my final thesis, I set out to examine how we could redeem capitalism, make it more just and ethical. But as I started it became more clear to me that we can’t settle for that. The current phase of neoliberal capitalism is totalizing and what I learned and wrote about was that even for those of us for whom the system “works”, it actually doesn’t. It distorts how we relate to God, to ourselves, and to each other.
When I finished that research I felt like I’d really only scratched the surface. I wanted to learn more—for myself, and in hopes of helping the church experience more freedom. So here I am in Scotland, living in the UK for the second time, and pursuing a PhD in Theological Ethics.
I’ve spent the last 5 months reading and researching to narrow down exactly what my project will be. Much of that time has been anchored by a conversation I remember overhearing in my first week as a market research consultant. I was sitting in a cubicle and overhead a woman having a conversation on the phone about a focus group they were organizing for their brand. I don’t remember all of it, but I specifically remember her instructing the moderator to “Make sure you find out what makes her feel secure.”
In many ways, I’ve been haunted by that comment ever since. So as I’ve been narrowing in my topic I have been focusing on consumerism and marketing. I’ve learned that to ask how I can be more Christ-like in this age of global consumerism is not first to ask how I can consume more ethically, budget better, or be more generous. Rather, it is to ask “What exactly is going on?” Only then can I discern how the reality of Christ in me confronts consumerism.
And so I now set out to write 100,000 words (which, if you’re wondering, is a little longer than The Hobbit and a little shorter than The Prisoner of Azkaban) to try to articulate the ways in which consumerism and marketing form us and our identities, and to engage theology to understand how our truest, fullest identity contrasts and confronts such an identity. Through this I hope to learn and communicate how being set free to be fully human makes a difference in our lives, our churches, and a world captive to consumerism.
It’s an adventure! Prayers appreciated.
Emily Beth Hill 