I recently graded final exams for a Christian ethics course. Regarding a question about premarital sex, I found that I generally gave higher marks to students who believed that sexual intimacy for Christians should only be achieved after marriage. Concerned about being able to evaluate according to my own ethical values, and not according to the classroom's standards of analysis, use of resources, and the like, I reread a series of documents. After reviewing the essays again, I was satisfied that most of the students who held the traditional position had, in fact, been more analytical and had wrestled more intelligently with the issue. Those who spoke out in favor of premarital sex – many of them Christians – tended to make assumptions about human relationships that allowed them to avoid analysis and struggle. Why? Because, I think, they simply accepted the basic assumption of our consumption-based society: all needs require instant gratification. My students are the product of a culture that does not question this constantly repeated theme. Neil Postman, a professor of "media ecology" at New York University, recently estimated that children in America see 750,000 television commercials during the formative period of their lives, from ages six to 18. Is it any wonder that instant gratification is built into our perceptions? It's an idea taught 15 times an hour, six hours a day, seven days a week. What we see in our country today is a perfectly valid economic process – the mechanisms for producing and consuming goods – transformed into a religion. Production is good: how could humans live without producing food, clothing, housing? Consumption is good: how could we live without consuming food, wearing clothes, living in homes? The means by which we produce such abundance are good: who could argue against making human labor easier by means of machines? But taken together, they constitute America's other religion. The struggle between consumerist religion and Christian faith is a battle at least as old as that of the prophets against Baalism or of the early Church against the deified Roman Empire. In fact, it is enough to observe the change that occurred in Rome starting from the year 58 or so, when Saint Paul wrote Romans, until around 85 when John wrote the Apocalypse, to see a good thing become bad, taking on an aura of divinity. In Romans 13 Paul calls the officials of the empire "ministers [deacons] of God to do his will.