Contemporary religious practice has become indistinguishable from consumer behavior. We "shop" for churches, "invest" in spiritual growth, "purchase" salvation through transactional prayer and donation. This project doesn't satirize this phenomenon—it presents it honestly, using the visual and structural language of e-commerce to make explicit what is already implicit.
The discomfort users feel when encountering divine attributes presented as purchasable products is the point. The work asks: if we're already treating faith as a commodity, what changes when we're honest about it? Does making the transaction explicit reveal its absurdity, or simply acknowledge a reality we've been unwilling to name?
This project is not anti-religious—it's anti-transactional. It critiques a system that has reduced the infinite to the purchasable, the transcendent to the deliverable, the sacred to the searchable by product ID.
Dear Santa: A Uniform Cross is a critical examination of the transactional nature of contemporary religious practice, where faith has been systematically commodified into purchasable units. This project constructs an e-commerce interface that sells spirituality as discrete products—FAITH, GRACE, SALVATION—each with its own SKU, inventory status, and product description written in the sterile language of consumer goods.
The work operates as both critique and mirror: by literalizing the marketplace metaphor that already permeates religious discourse ("buying into" beliefs, "investing" in faith, spiritual "transactions"), it exposes the uncomfortable reality that modern religion often functions more like retail than revelation. Users can add divine attributes to their wishlist, compare product specifications, and browse collections of theological concepts as if shopping for home goods.
