(Ir)religiosity

I was reading parts of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire this morning and I ran across a really interesting section in which they are quoting Marx and Engels (Don’t run away!  I’m not trying to make Communists out of anyone!).

“The bourgeoisie,” Marx and Engels write, “compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates the world after its own image.”

This is interesting because I place a great amount of importance upon the Imago dei in my theology.  Moreover, I interpret the concept as a broad sort of foundational etiological myth from which our common humanity is derived and by which we pursue justice, reconciliation, and all those other warm fuzzy words.

So that being said, I wonder what it means to radically assert the veracity of the Imago dei presently in the midst of our failing economic system.  Clearly we have misplaced our trust and relied upon a system of exploitation and greed.  To assert that we are indeed created in the image of God is to say that we derive are meaning from God as we participate in the divine life.  It seems to me that we have betrayed that trust opting instead to derive our meaning from the unrestrained free market, participating in the life of consumption.

We have thus traded the Imago dei (the image of God) for the much more destructive Imago comburo (the image of consumption) that is indicative of our current economic crisis.

Perhaps a radical reordering of priorities should be in order.