I recently read White Noise Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel. It covers a year in the life of Jack Gladney, a small-town history professor who has made his mark by pioneering the field of Hitler Studies. Jack, who serves as the narrator, lives with his fifth wife, Babette, and four children. The book critiques many aspects of modern life–academic pretentiousness, blended families, parental folly, American consumerism, fear of death, and environmental catastrophe, to name a few. It is not about God or religion, at least not in any obvious way. No one prays for divine help or guidance, no one explains events as having supernatural origins, and no churches or religious rituals are mentioned. There are nuns at the hospital where Jack seeks treatment for himself and someone he’s shot near the end of the book, but these are anything but your conventional Catholics. Jack asks Sister Hermann Marie, who has just dressed his wound, about heaven, but she responds,

“Do you think we are stupid?”

Taken aback, Jack says that nuns must surely believe in heaven, angels, and saints. No to all of this, the sister says. Jack points to a picture on the wall of Kennedy and the Pope in heaven, asking why do they have such a picture on the wall, then? It’s for others, she explains, elaborating:

“As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe. Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak. We are left to believe. Fools, children. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes. There must always be believers. Fools idiots, those who hear voices, those who speak in tongues. We are your lunatics. We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible.” (Chapter 39)

Only fools believe, the sister is saying, and we’re not fools, but we pretend to believe to make unbelief comfortable for others. It seems that she believes in a version of the Secularization Thesis, the view that religious beliefs will fade and religious institutions lose their power as modernism progresses. As this podcast explains, secularization thesis is not nearly as widely accepted as in the ’80s, when White Noise was written. Maybe the sister should have stuck with religious belief rather than exchanging it for belief in sociological theory!

In actuality, everyone believes in something that to them gives meaning to life. In this sense, Sister Hermann Marie is right: if no one believed, it would be hell. Jack himself is not an unbeliever. He just doesn’t believe in anything as sublime or majestic as God. In this sense, he exemplifies what G.K. Chesterton said about belief:

“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

Jack and his family worship at the altar of consumerism. He experiences meaning and  a sense of transcendence when he goes to the mall or the grocery store. For example, during a trip to the mall with his family, he encounters a colleague who says something derogatory about him. Jack tells us that this potentially deflating comment “put me in the mood to shop.” Here’s what happens:

“My family glorified in the event. I was one of them, shopping, at last. They gave me advice, badgered clerks on my behalf. I kept seeing myself unexpectedly in some reflecting surface. We moved from store to store, rejecting not only items in certain departments, not only entire departments but whole stores, mammoth corporations that did not strike our fancy for one reason or another. There was always another store, three floors, eight floors, basement full of cheese graters and paring knives. I shopped with reckless abandon. I shopped for immediate needs and distant contingencies. I shopped for its own sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise. I had no intention of buying, then buying it. I sent clerks into their fabric books and pattern books to search for elusive designs. I began to grow in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I’d forgotten existed. Brightness settled around me.” (Chapter 17)

What better way to overcome self-doubt than blow a few hundred dollars! Philosopher James K.A. Smith describes the mall as a place that has rituals similar to those practiced by religious believers. According to him, “The mall is a religious site.” He points out how the various aspects of the shopping experience fits this characterization, explaining,

“This temple–like countless others now emerging around the world–offers a rich, embodied visual mode of evangelism that attracts us. This is a gospel whose power is beauty, which speaks to our deepest desires. It compels us to come, not through dire moralisms, but rather with a winsome invitation to share in this envisioned good life.” You Are What You Love, p. 43

The mall has been supplanted in part by online shopping, but the religion is the same–consumerism–and makes the same promise–to give meaning and identity through what we purchase and possess. No, sister Hermann Marie, it isn’t just wild-eyed men, nuns, and monks who believe. Religious adherents are just practicing a faith that, more than consumerism, nationalism, militarism, capitalism, socialism, and all the other -isms that seek our devotion, is likely to actually deliver on promises of meaning, identity, transcendence, and purpose.

DeLillo has a fine sense of the absurdities of American beliefs and behaviors. I definitely recommend this as a fun and enlightening read.