Yet, of course, this gift exchange has become the basis for the consumer culture in which we live. As Eric over at ericisrad.com quoted to me, persons like Bill O'Reilly invert the whole structure of gift giving at the Nativity by saying something to the effect that all business owners should thank Jesus for being born. In other words, God did them a favor for providing the spur to increased consumer spending that pays off in higher dividends for the owners.

How do we then celebrate?

David Jones at ressourcement.blogspot.com linked to an article in the online journal, The Other Journal," by Daniel Bell on "What's Wrong with Capitalism? The Problem with the Problem with Capitalism". Bell argues that "Christian critiques of capitalism are hindered because the problem of capitalism is typically posed empirically instead of confessionally, and it is posed empirically in a flawed manner". By making the argument over capitalism as it's effects on the poor or the worker, we miss the point. The issue becomes what is the alterative? Shifting power to the worker? State-socialism? Yet these operate according to the same atheism as capitalism.

Bell responds with an alternative:

What is the alternative to capitalism? Surely the alternative is obvious. It is the Kingdom of God, where those who build, inhabit, where those who plant, harvest, and where all are filled and the agony that currently besets us ceases. This is to say, the question of alternatives is finally the eschatological one of the appearance of the Kingdom. Which implies that the question of alternatives is rightly answered only confessionally. Why? Because the Kingdom is not something we build; it is something we receive. It is finally not a product of our labor, but is, instead, given to us as a gift. All of which is to say that the alternative to capitalism is not something that we construct; rather, it is something we confess. And, it is worth noting, because the Kingdom is something we confess, the rejoinder about “the best we can do” loses its punch entirely as it is revealed to be thoroughly beside the point. The interesting question never was, “what can we do?” but the eschatological one of “what is God doing?”

Here the confessional does not escape but recovers the empirical. The confession advanced against capitalism and its Christian courtiers is that the alternative to capitalism has already appeared, even if it is not yet present in its fullness. The ages are not juxtaposed; they overlap (1 Cor. 10:11). God has given and continues to give here and now more than capitalism’s Christian proponents can see.

What is it that they fail to see? For one thing, the way that God has and continues to gather persons together into a body called the church where, by means of the divine things in our midst – Word and sacrament, catechesis, orders, and discipline, human desire is being healed of its capitalist distortions and set free to partake of a different economic ordering, one ruled not by scarcity and struggle, debt and death, but by a charitable logic of donation, gift, and perpetual generosity. They fail to discern the divine economy that is already taking form in our midst as persons enter into new economic relations, giving and receiving, exchanging, not according to the rhythm of capital’s axiomatic of production for the market but animated by the Spirit of faith, hope, and love. In more recognizably political and economic terms, this divine economy takes the form of what the Christian tradition identifies as the Works of Mercy. The corporal and spiritual Works constitute the beginning of God's reordering of human polity and economy in accord with the Kingdom. In other words, the Works of Mercy are the ecclesial instantiation of the divine economy and this economy is already taking shape in our midst in countless ways and communities – in various alternative markets and co-op’s, houses of hospitality, sanctuary and jubilee movements, and gleaning projects, all of which engage in and encourage economic production and exchange according to a logic other than capitalist.

It is interesting to see the familial exchange of gifts as a sign of the Kingdom come in Christ, a sign open to perversion and parody, but a sign of participating in the Works of Mercy that God has shown to us in the gift of the Son by the power of the Spirit.

How do we keep the sign of the Kingdom rather than a parody through unfettered materialism? First, we have to be personnally involved in the works of mercy for the Spirit's sanctifying power to form us in love of God and neighbor, and to renew us in the image of Christ. Honestly, I cannot separate my family's gathering around a tree from my love and concern for Shadow, who shared his depression this time of year because he has no family with whom to gather. I am praying for guidance here. Frivolous spending has no place, though, when my friend is excluded from such an exchange of goods, and therefore, family.

Second, we have to get to the real problem of capitalism: the subtle but powerful way that it malforms our desires away from God to things. To wax Augustinian, a capitalist familial gift exchange uses God to enjoy things (see Bill O'Reilly!) in order to bond a family together in sentimentality provided by things, rather than using things given to each other in love to enjoy God, and thus, to have the family itself witness to the peaceable city of God that God began in the Incarnation.

Bell again speaks wisely:

Because capitalism is wrong not only on account of its failure to aid the poor and needy, but also because of what it does succeed in doing, namely, deforming human desire. As Augustine noted long ago, humans are created to desire God and the things of God. Capitalism corrupts desire. Even if capitalism succeeds in reducing poverty, it is still wrong on account of its distortion of human desiring and human relations. As Alasdair MacIntyre has noted, “although Christian indictments of capitalism have justly focused attention upon the wrongs done to the poor and the exploited, Christianity has to view any social and economic order that treats being or becoming rich as highly desirable as doing wrong to those who must not only accept its goals, but succeed in achieving them. . . .Capitalism is bad for those who succeed by its standards as well as for those who fail by them, something that many preachers and theologians have failed to recognize.” Capitalism is wrong not simply because it fails to succor the impoverished, but also because where it succeeds it deforms and corrupts human desire into an insatiable drive for more. Capitalism makes a virtue of what an earlier era denounced as a vice, pleonexia or greed – a restless, possessive, acquisitive drive, but which today is celebrated as the aggressive, creative, entrepreneurial energy that distinguishes homo economicus. Diagnoses and critiques of this cancerous desire and its effects abound and need not be repeated here.

If gift exchange becomes part of the malformation of our desires for aquisitiveness outside what is Good, True, and Beautiful, it will ultimately rip a family apart. Christmas familial gift exchanges that tie families together because of the momentary fulfillment of unchecked material desires set the stage ultimately for sibling dissolution over arguments of the distribution of goods following the parents' demise.

Relationships do not exist for the distribution of goods; goods exist for the good of human relationships. May all of our practices increase the desire for God and God's kingdom, celebrated in the gather of the congregation and even in the exchange of gifts in the context of a family on this coming feast of the Nativity.