Just after Christmas the Church went to war with the politicians over our souls. The Bishop of Manchester lamented the Government's message that we should spend our way out of recession. The Rt Rev Nigel McCulloch described the issue as a moral one. “It's about what we value,” he said. “The Government believes that money can answer all of the problems and has encouraged greed and a love of money. It's morally corrupt because it encourages people to get into a lifestyle of believing they can always get what they want.”

Earlier the Archbishop of Canterbury had told John Humphrys that it “seems a little bit like an addict returning to the drug”. The drug being, presumably, our craving for material things. There wasn't any discernible suggestion of a better way to avoid recession; instead there was a hint that recession might itself be the better way. As one columnist summarised it: “Perhaps we are coming to see that greed should not be worshipped; that actually it is something to be ashamed of.”

After pondering who the “we” was here (did the writer believe that he personally had worshipped greed, or just that he had noticed a lot of others doing it?), let's allow that the words resonate. Love and worship are the supposed emotional responses; greed and consumerism are the imagined objects. The result has been corruption.

In November the man who might be the next Catholic Archbishop of Westminster threw his censer, still smoking, at Disney. Christopher Jamison, the Abbot of Worth, accused the corporation of replacing God. Disney would snake its way into the affections of children and parents, hissing a

moral message, and then - once inside - inject the venom of material lust for DVDs and visits to Disneyland. “This is the new pilgrimage that children desire,” pronounced the abbot, “a rite of passage into the meaning of life according to Disney. Where once morality and meaning were available as part of our free cultural inheritance, now corporations sell them to us as products.”

Actually we had, not so long ago, to pay a tithe for them. To the Church. And while it is true that my children would rather go to Disneyland Paris than Lourdes (the rides are faster), is it right to conflate that with their morality? Again, who are the corrup-ted? Does the Abbot of Worth crave worthless DVDs? Or do his children? A low blow.

It would be entirely wrong to locate the desire for the end of materialism only in the computer-rich offices of senior clerics. Lily Allen's new song, The Fear, describes a feeling of moral alienation caused by lust for things: “And I am a weapon of massive consumption/ and it's not my fault it's how I'm programmed to function/ I'll look at the sun and I'll look in the mirror/ I'm on the right track, yeah we're on to a winner.”

Chorus: “I don't know what's right and what's real anymore/ I don't know how I'm meant to feel anymore/ When do you think it will all become clear?/ 'Cuz I'm being taken over by the Fear.”

Maybe there was a time, she implies, when she would have known what to feel. That's certainly the repeated assertion of the axis of nostalgia, that odd union of beached socialists and washed-up reactionaries, who both long for the world as it was before the fall. The same world. “The leisured poor were Blair's gift to Britain, people who craved not values but designer labels and satellite dishes,” the writer Andrew O'Hagan condescended recently.

Such a timeline has the support of dubious science, with the psychotherapist Oliver James linking a supposed rise in mental illness to the type of capitalism practised in Anglophone countries, and stating that materialism and competition explain why Americans are six times as likely to report depression as Shanghai Chinese.

The banker isn't the target. In commentary after commentary the assumption is made that the consumer suffers some kind of disease, that the obese, for example, display moral as well as oral turpitude. It is only when you add the word “mass” to consumer society that it becomes threatening, in a way that it wasn't before the masses consumed.

Some older working-class people feel it too, that they are unentitled. Last autumn in Harlow in Essex I met Pam, who had an uneasy sense of the present. “In the Fifties,” she told me, “we had an easy kind of life, no credit cards. Life was at a pace that was really comfortable. Now everybody's in debt, everybody is struggling. I'm 66, I'm still working. Why should I work so hard? Back then, if you didn't have the money, you didn't buy the goods. Now ...” But the truth is that they did struggle in the Fifties.

Such worries rarely afflict the wealthy - always the moral panic about consumption is about the lower orders. The first Elizabeth enacted Sumptuary Laws, her Statute of Apparel of 1574 laying down with a feminine precision exactly who might wear what, clothes being the chief pleasure of those with any money. “None shall wear any cloth of gold, tissue, nor fur of sables: except duchesses, marquises, and countes-ses in their gowns, kirtles, partlets, and sleeves” and so on, down the social and material scale.

Part of this was about restricting imports, part was about social control, but all of it was couched in the language of a concern about the corrupting effects of luxury.

In this month's History Today magazine the historian Keith Thomas, in an adaptation from his forthcoming book, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England describes historic assaults on consumerism. In the 16th and 17th centuries a pleasure in owning things was associated with effeminacy, or else in the demands of women for social status.

I don't know what Professor Thomas would make of the revolt of the socialist William Morris, and, later, the Catholic G.K. Chesterton, against the horrors of mass production, and their advocacy of a return to medieval craftsmanship - a state that was characterised by desirable things being restricted to high-born people.

Indeed one definition of modern consumerism is precisely that it consists of participation in the process of consumption by “lower” social groups. When just the rich consumed, no one worried about materialism. So each stage of the democratisation of consumption has been associated with moral failure: before the “madness of malls” there was the threat of the department store, the corrupting effect of hire purchase, the lazy atomisation of mail order, the seductive decadence of credit cards. In Britain American hamburgers were cool as long as they were consumed by the metropolitan elite in the Hard Rock Café. When McDonald's sold to the masses a Big Mac wrapper became the mark of the beast.

Each panic too has had its “downsizing”, its fashionably masochistic moment of “thrift” in which the professional classes lecture about restraint and in so doing make more of the working lose their jobs. Don't you know that the best things in life are free? Did you not realise that family was more important than possessions? We did, and that's why we're growing salad from seed, replacing minimalist furniture with sagging old sofas and colourful throws (which we knitted ourselves!), and look how much we've saved! And don't look at who was made redundant as a result! Let us, as the woman from the National Trust advised the other week, “regress to comfy”. Let us go and work in the soup kitchens, or else get our soup there. But like salad seeds or velvet partlets, these panics are essen-tially fashionable. The desire of the masses is no longer suppressible by the priestly classes. And this too shall pass.

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