When Politics are Sacralised: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism

became available in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. This marked a shift like that which Alonso discusses regarding the liturgy after the 2nd Vatican Council: from grace through the actions of the priest (ex opere operantis) to those that occur from the work performed (ex opere operato). Yet both changes also accompanied a marked increase in individualism, which Alonso attributes to the rise of free market capitalism. The second proof of marketing’s power offered by Alonso is Thomas Frank’s short chapter, ‘Why Johnny Can’t Dissent’ (Frank and Weiland 1997), expanded upon in Frank’s (1997) The Conquest of Cool and Heath and Potter’s (2004) Nation of Rebels. The thesis is that marketing turns our dissent into a commodity like the car for countercultural rebels or ‘indie’ music or hipster beer and sells it back to us. Such opportunistic commodification sounds the death knell for resistance in Alonso’s view. Americans have long said you can’t fight City Hall and Alonso concedes that today you can’t fight consumer culture. And so, Alonso concludes, we must get over it. His liturgic real politik involves an updating of liturgies without condoning excess. We can put a Christmas tree in the narthex, but Santa is perhaps a bridge too far. But there is more. A final parable offered by Alonso is arguably his most telling. It lies in the observations fromWalter Benjamin’s (1999) unfinished Arcades project. Writing in the 1930s, Benjamin wandered through the former flaneur’s paradise of the Paris arcades where strollers could once gaze at the shoppers who gazed at each other and the glittering attractions of French consumer culture in full swing just a decade or two earlier. But the shoppers and the goods had moved on to department stores and high-end boutiques.What was left were fragments and the debris of a commodity culture. Benjamin saw in these leftovers ‘traces of people’s deepest hopes and desires.’ In one of the chapters of the posthumously assembled translation of The Arcades Project, Benjamin muses on the dreams these fashions, advertising, and buildings must have evoked. He called it an awakening from sleep and compared it to Proust’s rich memories after the familiar taste of petite Madeleines and lime blossom tea. So, the awakening is also a reawakening and a remembering of dreams past. In these glimmers fromprior dreams of a consumer utopia, Alonso senses not only the refuse of a consumer culture; he also hears cries of hope. We are reminded of the cries to awake in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2021. The resulting cry for woke culture has reverberated round the world. If a single death can have this impact, just maybe there can be a similar reawakening in Christian culture.