What Minimalism Lacks

CERTAIN STRAINS of consumerism are easy to spot. Think Beverly Hills and walls stacked with brightly colored shoes and purses, like heaps of fresh produce. Closer to home, perhaps, is the caricature of suburban consumption—gas-guzzling SUVs, expensive outerwear.

And then there’s minimalism, an ideology defined by its emphasis on intentional efforts to spend less. At its best, minimalism provides a healthy alternative for people of faith seeking simplicity and thoughtful economic practices. At its worst, the minimalist aesthetic looks an awful lot like the system it was designed to critique—oblivious, privileged, and disconnected from reality.

“You need less stuff than you think!” minimalists cry, their authentic Peruvian bracelets clinking together in agreement. From a theological perspective, the minimalists are right. From a social perspective, they’re missing a critical caveat: A person can make do with less if they have more. Would the person whose closet consists of three shirts out of necessity be considered a minimalist? Probably not, because minimalism is marketed to and for the wealthy. Somehow, the exhortation to “buy less” has morphed into “buy less, but buy expensively—I mean, ethically!”

With corporations vying for both our wallets and our hearts, where and how a person spends her money matters. The choice to invest in an item, and its maker, rather than enter the breakneck cycle of throwaway consumerism, is shot through with good intent. It is also a choice threaded with privilege.

In a world that often links a person’s value to the amount she can consume, the desire to take one’s fiscal habits seriously is radical—and for people of faith, essential. But after we look at our daily practices, we need to ask why we have so many resources while others have so few. We need to look compassionately at broken systems that make poorer folks feel that their worth is directly proportional to the things they own. We must confront toxic materialism even within ourselves.

Buying handmade items, decluttering our lives, or shifting the palette of our wardrobes to grayscale are value-neutral choices that only accrue ethical value when other areas of our lives also shift. If our hearts do not grow larger in proportion to the spaces we clear in our homes, if we do not discipline our unruly consumerist impulses, minimalism is nothing more than a class signifier disguised as social consciousness.

Privilege shouldn’t pressure us into guilt-stricken immobility. After all, Christians are called to examine privilege when we have it and use it for the common good. Fortunately, in true biblical fashion, there are conditions for this. When Jesus told the rich young ruler to sell all he had, the next step wasn’t for him to turn around and buy fewer (but more elegant) items from Anthropologie. The next step was to give the money to the poor. Are we willing to give up what insulates us from our neighbors’ suffering because we trust that God will provide, because our resources are better spent in the service of others?

Though the quest for less stuff is a noble one, without self-awareness minimalism can quickly become a shallow fix for the more complicated work of economic justice and spiritual depth.