Bono and Greg Boyd

In a recent comment Matt pointed me to a blog post by theologian and pastor Greg Boyd in which he endorses Bono’s Product (RED) campaign. In his post Boyd asserts, “It seems to me that the One Campaign, which includes Product (RED), is one of the most beautiful and powerful Kingdom movements being carried out right now.” Boyd suggests that God is using Bono to show the church what it ought to be doing. According to Boyd, “Our job is to manifest God’s love by using our God-given time, talent and resources to serve the world. See a need and meet it with your gifts.” I’m sure most everyone is familiar with the Product (RED) campaign, but if you’re not familiar with it you can watch Bono and Bill Gates talk about it here and you can watch one of their awful commercials aired during the Super Bowl here. I’ve also written on this particular issue before and have argued that Bono actually hurts poor children here. And, if you’re looking for laugh about this particular topic watch this.

In a nut shell, Product (RED) is a campaign put on by Bono and sponsored by major transnational corporations to help people in Africa who are living in poverty and dying of HIV/AIDS. The idea is that if you buy specific products that are (RED) products from major corporations like Reebok, GAP, Apple, and more recently Dell Computers, then a portion of the money from your purchase will go to Africa to help dying people. So, it is what the corporate cats call creative capitalism. Essentially, it is a way to get Americans to help some poor people by exploiting what Americans already do best: buy and consume. It is a method of helping others that does not demand any sacrifice. It is a way to make everyone “happy.” Americans get what they want: more stuff; corporations get what they want: more consumers; and the poor people dying of AIDS in Africa get what they want: health and wealth. Everyone gets what they want, right? Of course, it would be naïve to think that these major transnational corporations are actually concerned about the poor. But you see that is the whole point of the thing, it is a way to “do justice” while maintaining our own self-interest. In some ways it is just another way for Americans to shut out the reality of poverty (which reveals to us the reality of our own inevitable death) from our lives. We don’t want to see poor people, so we do what both liberals and conservatives in America have always done: try to find some way out of actually loving and caring for the poor.

What Boyd loves about Bono’s campaign is that he “didn’t rely on government to address these issues. He just did it.” In the context of Boyd’s anarchist-leaning theology this is seen as something good, for Bono didn’t capitulate to the secular “sword,” that is government. However, as Slavoj Zizek correctly points out, “Today it is the great capitalists – Bill Gates, corporate polluters, fox hunters – who ‘resist’ the state.” And, indeed, global capitalism wields one hell of a bloody sword. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for Christian resistance to the state, but not if this means grabbing a hold of the market to change the world. Boyd’s insistence that the church must detach itself from secular politics ought to apply to the global capitalist market as well, for similar reasons related to his concern about Christian allegiance. I’m sorry but I fail to see how the theological and moral issues raised in supporting global capitalist techniques of “ending poverty” fundamentally differ from supporting nation-state techniques.