Tom Breaker: Look, Bill, if this is about reliving the 60's, you can forget about it, buddy. The movement is dead.
William Strannix: Yes, of course! Hence the name: movement. It moves a certain distance, then it stops, you see? A revolution gets its name by always coming back around in your face. You tried to kill me ... so welcome to the revolution.
--Under Siege
So I've been reading some books lately, and they brought this video to mind:
Some of the issues I'm about to address seem more apparent living in an area where people see nothing wrong with "Boogity Boogity Boogity Amen".
The books I read include Francis Chan's Crazy Love and Shane Claiborne's The Irresistible Revolution. I'll analyze first what I thought was wrong with the books, then what I thought they got right, and in the end I'll explain why I got the Songify song stuck in your head for the day--okay?
The basic premise of both books is that the American Church is decadent and apathetic, and that a major indicator of that is that we allow so many needs of the poor to go unmet. Likewise, we don't tell American Christians about the specific commands of Christ to care for the poor and love our enemies. Thus we have a lot of people attending church who are probably not Christians.
So far, so good--it's the application that gets sticky.
Of the two, I liked Irresistible Revolution better--mostly because the writing was better and because Claiborne doesn't hesitate to state things that Chan dances around a bit. (If you've read Chan, you'll wonder how on earth I think he was dancing around anything--but the people he picks in his "good examples" chapter point to his thinking on a number of these things.) For instance: pacifism, redistribution of wealth, environmental stewardship, and racial reconciliation. (Dad, you wouldn't like Claiborne's book.)
The Bad:
"The Suburbs"
They are both dismissive and even scornful of "the suburbs" (wherever that is) to a troubling degree.
I think I might live in a suburb, by their definition--in that I don't live in an urban environment, and my neighbors' houses pretty much look like mine, and from the logical way the streets are laid out it seems to be a planned community. There are any number of black labs and golden retrievers, and kids seem to play on T-ball teams and such. Another Pleasant Valley Sunday.
But I question whether living in a suburb means I'm not following God's call for my life. For one thing I didn't pick out my house; for another people in suburbs are presumably just as lost as people on skid row. They might even need it pointed out to them more vigorously--when you're pretty comfy in your ranch-style tract house it might be difficult to realize that you're a sinner who needs a Savior.
So while I think that there are people who are called to live in "the abandoned places of the empire", there have got to be people whose job is to offer support, raise children, and be the oddball Christians on the block in the suburbs.
"The Poor"
They both don't have much imagination for what loving the poor might mean in a non-urban environment. Chan and Claibrone speak from a perspective of privilege -- although Claiborne at least recognizes that he does -- that enables, for instance, Chan to say things like "What if you pledged to live at the median US income of $46,000?" like that would be shocking and untenable.
I wouldn't have understood this bias until I moved to Texas, where it seems like poverty is concentrated in definite neighborhoods. By contrast, in the small western towns I grew up in, poverty was more of an endemic thing. If you got to know your neighbors, you were pretty likely to run across some poor people. Claiborne found it necessary to move to downtown Philly to find some poor folks to minister to (not judging him for that--I really believe he was called).
So I think that the call to go find the poor and minister to them must make more sense in an urban setting, where poverty and privilege are removed from each other by distance. It just seemed odd to me, both because 1) I spent a lot of time being "poor" and 2) a whole bunch of my friends and neighbors were "poor" too, so the necessity of relocation seems weird.
"Environmental Stewardship"
Chan doesn't mention this much, but Claiborne hits it a couple of times, mentioning community gardens, a "veggie bus" that runs on used vegetable oil from fast food restaurants, and "clean energy" (wind energy) as ways that their community in Philly are attempting to be good stewards of the earth.
At the risk of sounding like a hippie, I DO think we ought to think about being good stewards of the earth. The Genesis mandate to garden the world really never was rescinded; we are not to pillage nature. I don't think that green options necessarily lead to Gaia worship. I have cloth diapers, reusable shopping bags, "mama cloth" (TMI!) and I buy veggies from a CSA.
The problem is that I'm not sure that all green options really are the best way to take care of the earth.
For instance, Claiborne's veggie bus may or may not burn cleaner than the equivalent diesel bus, and that vegetable oil has to come from somewhere, most likely an industrial soybean farm where the tractors and combines run on (you guessed it) diesel. I don't know enough about it to do the math and discover whether the veggie bus is really a good stewardship option--but someone ought to, without assuming it's good because it doesn't burn petroleum. And even if it is the better stewardship option for Claiborne--which it may be, I don't know--it may not be the better option for everyone, especially if they live where there are not a lot of fast food restaurants wanting to get rid of their used oil.
Wind power, another thing that's presented as a way for Christians to demonstrate their concern for stewardship, is a whole other debate. My engineer husband points out that someone has to make the turbines and that the turbines are constantly breaking down--he wants to see calculations on wind's efficiency vs. coal or nuclear energy before he will say that wind is "green" compared to the other two options.
The Good:
Ready for the ways I thought they nailed it? Okay, here we go.
"Pop Evangelicalism"
I'm not sure I'm crazy about the dismissive name, but it's nice to see someone else noticing the phenomenon that my siblings and I noticed when we used to talk about Christian rock bands and their "alter-secular-ego"--i.e., that selling "Christian" commodities is just as big a business as selling secular rock albums and that sometimes the products seemed indistinguishable from each other.
It probably is not good to create a "Christian" version of everything--from birthday cards to fiction to rock to t-shirts--and then insist that good Christians should buy it. In particular this seems foolish when the "Christian" version is actually inferior to the secular version. At best Christian commodities are often silly; at worst they can be a distraction and a snare--you begin to think that the measure of Christianity is not whether Jesus is your Boss (as Miss Boo puts it) but how much Christian Stuff you own.
I'm An American, So That Means I'm A Christian
When I married the Husband I met some of his interesting high school friends, including one dude that quite casually informed me that of course he was a Christian, he was an American and white, so...?
(He believed none of the doctrines of Christianity, he just thought it was something you joined, like the Democratic Party.)
This is where I respectfully disagree with Peter Marshall: I don't think America is a "Christian nation", mostly because I don't think nations can be Christian. Only people can be Christians.
{Were the Founding Fathers religious men? Some of them. (I wouldn't want Franklin or Jefferson or Adams teaching a Sunday School class, would you?) Did Biblical principles of justice and freedom play into the founding of our country? Yes. But the argument that America is chosen in the same way that Israel was is shaky at best. Sure America is big and rich, but so was Rome. The parallels there are much more evident. And the argument that Christians ought to somehow be big into politics because "America is a Christian nation" is even shakier.}
At any rate, I hope I don't have to demonstrate why the idea that you are a Christian because of where you were born or what color your skin is is stupid. Do I?
Conversely, I shouldn't have to point out that patriotism is separate from Christianity, should I?
I don't think patriotism is a bad thing, nor do I think praying for the military is evil. But we can fall into a way of talking that is just as stupid as "Boogity Boogity Boogity Amen" - where we assume that our minor allegiances (like to our country, sport, or political party) are as important as our Great Allegiance (to Christ).
(No, I don't think that means all Americans are arrogant asses that should apologize for existing and having stuff. The attitude that Americans are automatically wrong and oppressive is another Boogity Boogity--just as dumb as assuming that all Americans are automatically right.)
*Edit: I wrote this earlier today with three children hanging off me simultaneously. I realized I never actually said that both Chan and Claiborne make the point that conflating Christianity with American citizenship is wrong, and that I agree with them on that--I just ranted for a few paragraphs. Sorry about that.*
Loving Christ Will Make Us Weird
It's supposed to. Both Claiborne and Chan point out that God will probably ask you to do some stuff that you otherwise would not have done, and that some of it might be very weird. Both Chan and Claiborne cry out against a homogeneous Church, but I guess I haven't seen it. All the churches I've been in--except the one I attend right now, ironically--have been little and full of weirdos and poor people. Welcome to the revolution.
This is an eerily similar predicament to the one I found myself in reading Radical Homemakers, where I discovered that I am apparently a radical. Now I'm a revolutionary. And I don't even have a Che t-shirt.
There you have it, folks! Go read the books for yourselves, why don't you? Even if you disagree with huge sweeping portions of them, at least they will make you think about what it DOES mean to love Christ.
Oh, and if you're related to me, just email and you can borrow them from me.
Cheers,
Breanna
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