Editorials - New cults and civil resistance
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 11/28/2025
This year we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Pierpaolo Pasolini's death. Looking at the preparations for ‘Black Friday’, now transformed into ‘Black Week’ if not ‘Black Month’, I wondered what Pasolini would have said about what this consumerist capitalism has become, which the Friulian writer had grasped in its still hybrid and incipient stage. In fact, half a century before him, Walter Benjamin and Pavel Florensky had already prophetically announced that capitalism would soon become a true ‘religion’, replacing Christianity: ‘In the West, capitalism has developed parasitically on Christianity’ (W. Benjamin). These three great authors had therefore intuited the nature of capitalism and, above all, had grasped the great metamorphosis taking place: the early spirit of 19th-century capitalism, associated with work, factories, and entrepreneurs, was transforming into the spirit of total consumption, a new global cult that was generating a new global culture.
The consumerist nature of global capitalism is particularly relevant and decisive in so-called ‘shame cultures’ (as defined by sociologist Ruth Benedict, 1946), as distinct from ‘guilt cultures’, which are typical of Nordic countries and Protestant societies. In ‘shame culture’ countries, poverty and wealth are measured and evaluated through the eyes of others. In the 21st century, with the spread of meritocracy promoted by North American business, poverty as shame has been joined by poverty as fault (demerit). Symmetrically, wealth is also valuable and produces satisfaction only if it is seen by others. In Catholic countries, being rich without anyone seeing it, knowing it, or envying it is worth little. Wealth is only wealth if it is flaunted and admired by others.
It is thus understandable that consumption-centered capitalism exerts an invincible seduction in cultures of shame: even if we are poor in income and work, we can appear rich in consumption—the same cars, the same sofas, the same vacations. Consumption fueled and doped by easy loans and the illusion of gambling and TV game shows.
It is in this religious context that the phenomenon of Black Friday, one of the new holidays of the capitalist religion, must also be understood and evaluated. Every year, the holiday becomes more impressive, the discounts more extensive, the queues for purchases longer. Until Christianity was the prevailing religion in the West, it was religious holidays that dictated the timing of discounts (Christmas). Now the new consumerist religion creates its own holidays, and therefore decides when sellers must offer discounts and consumers must buy—every new religion must create new holidays.
The invasion of this new global religion should therefore be of great concern to those who believe that spirituality and faith are serious matters and who perhaps seek to preserve what remains alive in Christianity and other religions. But this is not the case, neither in the Church nor, even less so, in the world of the left, which in the 20th century sought to oppose factory capitalism and the bosses. Pope Francis had invited the whole Church to give life to a concrete critique of capitalism. He had devoted a large part of his writings and words to the economy. Instead, today we are witnessing a growing enthusiasm in the Catholic world for Black Friday, both on the consumption side and on the production side. Let us ask ourselves: how many Catholics today have made a ‘conscientious objection’ to this new cult? And how many shops, bookstores, banks? Very few, I believe. Instead, we are seeing great enthusiasm for these new pagan liturgies, which adds to the exultation for the new religious theories of the winning paradigm, from leadership courses to the invasion of business consultants in parishes, dioceses, synods, religious communities, and movements. A religion that aims to satisfy its faithful, who feel fulfilled because they do business by buying at lower prices on the days and in the ways decided by the empire. The discount must be real, because sacrifice is an essential element in every pagan religion—which tells us that the idol is the consumer, not the object.
And as has happened in all global religious empires, individual freedom of choice is reduced and becomes very ‘expensive’. You can't not give discounts on Black Friday, you can't not buy. Satisfied consumers thus end up legitimizing and reinforcing the system; and the consumer who bought the same product the day before the discounts started will feel guilty and stupid. ‘Guilt’ is in fact an essential mechanism of this religion: ‘This cult is guilt-inducing. Capitalism is presumably the first case of a cult that does not allow atonement, but rather produces guilt’ (W. Benjamin). Not to mention the more macroscopic and immediate aspects, including, as denounced by WWF Italy, ‘Black Friday’ for the environment, the exponential growth of the online celebration of Black Friday, which unloads discounts (CO2, traffic, closure of small local shops, etc.) on the community and the planet.
Just today, by a providential coincidence, the international conference of The Economy of Francesco is beginning in Castelgandolfo, bringing together young economists and entrepreneurs who aim to resist the new nihilistic empire of consumption in order to create an economy of relationships, sobriety, and peace, in the name of the two Francescos (of Assisi and Pope Bergoglio). Christianity may have some chance of overcoming its current deep global crisis if it soon understands that there is no promised land to reach, no gospel to proclaim to citizens reduced to consumers, their souls emptied by increasingly sophisticated and metaphysical goods.
Without this awareness and the resulting moral resistance, we will continue to complain about empty churches and fail to see that other churches are filling up with new ‘faithful’ followers. Spiritual communities today find themselves in a position to be places of resistance to the empire that entrusts salvation to goods.
Only a prophecy that is also an economic prophecy can be the salt of the earth today: “No fascist centralism has succeeded in doing what the centralism of consumer civilization has done... The ‘tolerance’ of the hedonistic ideology desired by the new power is the worst repression in human history” (P. Pasolini, December 9, 1973).
