Of Roses and Rifles, Crescents and Crosses

As was pointed out in the last thread, there is a stubborn insistence on the part of many American Christians that our nation's immunity to cultural Babylonianism inevitably results in our being the number one exporter of happiness to the rest of the planet. God uses this country, we are told, to be a providential source of blessing to the entire globe.

I cannot help but wonder if what we export is received in the same spirit in which it is allegedly given (I mean come on, those roses with which the Iraqis were supposed to greet our soldiers sure ended up looking a lot like rifles). Is it possible that others may not be particularly fond of the blessings we keep trying to give them?

Just because we say, really loudly and with lots of force, that we are just trying to help, doesn't always make it so. There is greater reason to believe that intense persecution by Muslim fundamentalists would be a blessing to the American church than there is for the idea that an American-style government and culture would be a blessing to the people of the third world. I mean, concerning the first scenario Jesus himself told us as much (Matt. 5:11-12), but that still doesn't make us actually desire it.

So maybe a healthy dose of national humility is called for, especially on the part of us Christians whose Bibles tell us that unchecked power, untold wealth, and greed euphemized as ambition, though as American as apple pie, are called in Scripture "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life" (I John 2:16).

If we don't want Islamo-fascist oppression here, and if they don't want our "free markets" over there, so what? Whether it comes dressed in camo and army boots, or in turbans and sandals, it's still Babylon.

And stamping it with a crescent or a cross won't change that....

On Babylon, Beasts, and White Picket Fences

I just preached from Revelation 13, where we are introduced to the beast from the sea and the beast from the earth (sometimes called "the antichrist" and the "false prophet" respectively). When we discover these beasts' project, we see that their aim is to combine military might and lofty religious rhetoric in order to bring about conformity to their sinister agenda of destroying the church by means of lies and deceit.

I can't help but wonder if, in our little parcel of earth, we haven't to some degree bought in to the lie that there's a protective force field around our nation that precludes our complicity in an agenda that is anything but godly and divinely-favored.

I recently heard a well-known Christian talk-show host (yes, he is Reformed) attempting to explain the difference between providence and redemption. He said, "You see, just because America has been the source of tremendous good in the world doesn't mean we hold a 'Most Favored Nation' status in God's redemptive plan. God uses us to providentially bless the world, but not to redeem it."

Indeed, for we wouldn't want to think too highly of ourselves, now would we?

As I heard that, I couldn't help but wonder if we see our heavenly citizenship as profound enough to help us handle the fact that our little corner of the kingdom of man is itself a suburb of Babylon, and no imagined myth of nobility or manifest destiny can change the earthly, fallen, and selfish motives that drive us "further up, and further in" to this Dream which we have been told we are blessed to enjoy.

Last time I checked, a dragon-empowered beast with ten horns, seven heads, and the authority to make war upon and conquer God's people is not likely to be stopped by stars, stripes, and white picket fences.

Who Tramples Whom Underfoot?

I recently preached from Revelation 11, and as is the case all over that prophecy, this chapter offered a powerfully vivid metaphor to describe the church:

Then I was given a measuring rod like a staff, and I was told, "Rise and measure the temple of God and the altar and those who worship there, but do not measure the court outside the temple; leave that out, for it is given over to the nations, and they will trample the holy city for forty-two months" (vv. 1-2).

Some points of note: (1) The command to "measure the temple" involves measuring people, meaning the temple is not a literal structure; (2) The outer court is to be left unmeasured, and therefore unprotected; (3) The unprotected outer court is called "the holy city," a designation that elsewhere in Revelation refers to the Lamb's wife, the New Jerusalem (21:2; 22:19).

So according to this picture, the church is portrayed as partly measured and invincible, and partly unmeasured and vulnerable. As with the two witnesses in this chapter, who are hated by all and yet protected by God until their mission is complete, at which time their martyred bodies are raised and ascend to heaven, so the church is illustrated in an ironic and paradoxical fashion in order to demonstrate the bittersweetness of her earthly existence.

Now in continuing our Babylonian theme of late, I find it interesting that the divine description of the church, in the thinking of many sincere believers today, fits better when applied to the good ol' U.S. of A.

Our God-fearing nation, we are assured, is hated by infidels, A-rabs, the French, and other unsavory types because our light on the hill is shining brightly upon their culturally backward societies, exposing their lack of megachurches and WalMarts (which are one and the same, really).

Well, I would humbly suggest that "the Gentiles" who "trample the holy city" are not Muslims who fly planes into our skyscrapers, but the very aspects of our society (yes, ours) that turn our churches into strip malls, our worshipers into consumers, and our God into a commodity beholden to the ebb and flow of the Market.

Babylon By Mirror

I remember listening a sermon by Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones in which he referred to the hymn "The Kingdom Come, O God" which contained this line:

O’er heathen lands afar
Thick darkness broodeth yet:
Arise, O Morning Star,
Arise, and never set!

He basically laughed, and lamented, at the idea that Great Britain was still thought of in his day as a place that needed to look "afar" to find "heathen lands." Look no farther than in the collective mirror, the Doctor argued, for there you'll find all the heathensim you'll ever want to see.

I wonder if transformationism in the spiritual kingdom is the mirror-image of its counterpart in the civil one?

Just as postmillennial transformationists feel compelled to "redeem the city," so many Americans (believing or not) feel the responsibility to "make the world safe for democracy." The latter has been called "the white man's burden," and perhaps the former should be considered the Christian version of Manifest Destiny.

If what is good for the pious goose is good for the pagan gander, then the secular version of judgment begining at the house of God may be the willingness to admit that we Americans don't need to get to "Babylon By Bus," we can just walk out our front door.

Who, us Babylon? I dunno, but Revelation 18 hits eerily close to home.

On Obstinate Optimism

I find it interesting, when I consider genres like the printed page or the screen (big or small), how rare a thing it is to come across a true tragedy. You know, the kind where Sauron takes the Ring, where Voldemort kills all the Muggles, and where the villain escapes at the end, leaving behind a trail of suffering and darkness with no evidence of "lux post tenebras" (as the fella said).

The reason for this is pretty obvious, I think: Deep down we need to believe that nice guys finish first, that only the good die old, that cheaters never prosper, that crime doesn't pay, and that honesty, at the end of the day, really is the best policy.

Problem is, none of this is true. Not in the here and now, anyway.

What if the story of man, in his earthly kingdom under the sun, is the consummate and archetypical tragedy? Now I know what you're thinking: "Well duh, Sherlock! Of course it is, look at all the suffering and misery out there." Yes, but perhaps we're not seeing the tragic nature of the human story with sufficient clarity and depth.

Let me put it another way: What if our collective earthly story, yours and mine, is actually swept up in and even contributing to the tragic nature of this present age? What if it's not merely the case that, despite America's most valliant efforts to rid the world of evildoers, suffering still exists out there among the swarthy and less civilized. But what if we Americans are ourselves culprits, contributing collectively to what we claim, on paper at least, to desire to eradicate?

I'll not elaborate just yet (or perhaps ever). I'm just wondering out loud if we American Christians are willing to accept the fact that our heavenly citizenship may be the only redeeming thing about our earthly lives.

I mean, we Reformed folk can resign ourselves to being outsiders looking into a broader church culture with which we feel little affinity, and we often do it with no small amount of moustache-twisting and sinister glee. But why can we so readily "tsk, tsk" those misguided evangelicals, while insisting that our secular corner of the earthly kingdom is on the right side of every battle, destined to don the white hat and ride off into the providential, common grace sunset?

Homo Faber, Meet Homo Ludens

Playing off of the Latin title for man, Homo Sapiens, which means "man the wise," various authors have sought to describe man by different characteristics. Among these are Homo Faber ("man the worker") and Homo Ludens ("man the player").

I pointed out in a previous post that work is a pre-fall activity, and that Adam was commissioned to guard and care for the garden as part of his image-bearing activity in the covenant of works. The fall and subsequent curse did not introduce or obliterate work, therefore, but altered it and transformed it into something which would be characterized by toil, sweat, and an uncooperative earth.

Although work is not to be avoided (as if laziness were a virtue), neither is it to be seen as an unmixed blessing either (the CEO of Microsoft apparently never got the memo).

In the same way that many Ugandans would scratch their heads at Jesus' statement that no one would start a building project without making sure he had the money to complete it, or many Hungarians wouldn't grasp Peter's point that the disciples at the feast of Pentecost couldn't have been drunk since it was only 9am, many Americans today have a difficult time with the concept of "serving Mammon." As with Rockefeller's answer of "A little more" to the question "How much money is enough?", "serving Mammon" is something that rich(er) people do, but not us.

If it is true that market-driven societies value hard work more than they do leisure, then perhaps it is also true that we Americans are more aptly labeled Homo Faber than Homo Ludens.

But if life postlapsum is more than toiling for daily bread, and if divine image-bearing consists of more than being an efficient tool of production (such as enjoying friends and family, engaging in a hobby, or simply lingering over a well-brewed beverage and a book), then perhaps training (or even forcing) ourselves to slow down a bit is the most "world-affirming" thing we can do.

Darwinism in the Workplace

I mentioned in an earlier post that the phenomenon of "job dissatisfaction" is not simply a symptom of a spoiled culture with nothing to do but complain that the AC in our corner office is too loud and interferes with our Blue Tooth, but in fact, it goes back to the fall of man when God cursed his labors and told him that work would continue in the post-fall world, but it will be a total pain.

We're supposed to feel frustrated, and if you think about it, so was Adam, even before the fall. If Vos was right, and eschatology precedes soteriology, then there was a measure of longing during Adam's pre-fall state (and this means, by extension, that you don't need a crisis to see the need for God, nor will getting that big promotion make you cease "looking for to fill that God-shaped hole").

Still, we live in a market-driven society, which teaches us to think of ourselves as consumers and forces us to compete for that which sustains us. This is ironic for conservative Christians, since in a very specific cultural battle we claim to believe in a "right to life," while on the big, broad question we deny that claim, insisting instead that a person only has a "right" to that which he can gain for himself in the open market. So if you don't have any skills that the rest of us deem valuable, then don't come crying to us for a handout.

I guess pro-choice Darwinism is alive and well in our circles after all.

When we are atomized and forced not to cooperate but to compete for wages, promotions, and power, it is to be expected that the built-in frustration we feel will only grow over time.

Are there ways in which the Christian can be countercultural and buck the traditon in the workplace, or should the two kingdoms provide us with the ability to play by one set of rules of rules Monday through Saturday, and another on Sunday?

Some Thoughts on Christians in the Workplace

It has been suggested to me by a woman in my church that a series of lectures on the issue of Christians in the workplace would be helpful, for the issue of job dissatisfaction is being experienced rather accutely by many. In the light of this, I'd like to put the issue on the table, offer some thoughts (which I may unpack in detail in subsequent posts), and get some feedback from you, the faithful reader.

First, I take it as pretty much incontrovertible that all (legitimate) vocations, though common and not holy, are potentially God-honoring. Further, this involves no transformation or redemption of anything. Since adjectives are not adverbs, a non-holy job (accounting) can be done holily, thus glorifying the Lord while retaining the common and secular nature of the work itself.

Secondly, there is a built-in ache that accompanies all earthly toil. As Vos taught us, eschatology precedes soteriology, which means, among other things, that the frustration we feel is supposed to be there.

Thirdly, the nature of our market-driven society, in which we are forced to compete with one another for wages, for position, and for power necessarily compounds the frustration people feel. Work, for many Americans, is not just some thing we have to do for eight hours a day in order to have enough money to enjoy our extra-curricular lives, but it has become our lives.

Fourthly, many have reached a point where they have ceased even asking out loud whether they are working too much. If you are a manager, a partner, or an executive, you pretty much have to put in sixty-plus hours a week, right? The ladder only goes in one direction (up), so unless you want your personal stock to plummet, you'd better keep climbing.

Fifthly, the mantra that we must do all things "with excellence" is most often applied to those areas where excellence is rewarded in a visible and worthwhile way. In a meritocracy, a 10% pay increase is worth more than a "World's Greatest Dad" coffee mug.

Lastly, every culture has its blindspots, which make certain verses in the Bible seem non-sensical. In Uganda, it's the one about not starting to build a house without making sure you have the money to finish it. In Hungary, it's the one where Peter says that the disciples can't possibly be drunk since it's only 9am. Maybe for us capitalists it's the one that condemns the withholding of just wages from laborers for the purpose of living lives of earthly luxury and self-indulgence?

The Invisible Hand, the Invisible Foot

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), Max Weber drew a line connecting Calvinism and Capitalism, arguing that free-market ideology was much more likely to thrive in Protestant countries than in Roman Catholic ones.

I find it interesting that according to what has been called "The Protestant Work Ethic," the more financially successful a person is, the more we are supposed to believe that God has blessed him. "Look at how well-off Bill is! God must be blessing his business, for he sure seems to be doing something right."

Is it a mere coincidence that the two phenomena that share the metaphor of "The Invisible Hand" are Divine Providence and the Free Market?

Most Christians will acknowledge that God's Providence is outside the bounds of human control. Just as "the Spirit blows where he wishes," so "the Lord will have his way among the inhabitants of earth, and none can stay his hand or ask, 'What doest thou?'"

But is the Market equally "free"? Does it mysteriously bless whom it will, while passing by others with a sovereign aloofness and nonchalance?

I would question my Reformed Libertarian readers whether the giving of massive campaign contributions on the part of huge corporations in return for the ability to influence labor laws, thereby enabling companies to exploit workers, is an example of "free market principles," or whether it is the abuse of power for profit.

Further, I would question why a society that provides aid for the poor is labeled "a nanny state" while a culture that, through tax breaks and economic subsidies, allows its CEOs to make 400 times what their average workers earn is called a "democracy."

Could it be that the real question is not whether there should be welfare, but rather, who should get it?

Could it be that while the wealthy enjoy the invisible hand of the market, the poor feel nothing but its invisible foot?

The Unworthiness of Egypt

There was a line in a film that came out about a decade ago that has always stuck with me:

"I see all this potential, and I see squandering. . . . An entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy junk we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."

These sentiments are uttered by a protagonist who is desperately searching for something to restore a semblance of hope to a generation obsessed with materialistic consumerism.

What haunts me is that if someone like him can see it, or to reference another film from that era, if someone like Neo could ask, "What is the Matrix?", does it not stand to reason that the believer, of all people, should see through the charms and enticements of this age? If the wealth of Egypt was unworthy of Moses' pursuit and devotion, what does that say about the treasures that we insist on consuming?

I'm not saying the delights of this world are all necessarily sinful or evil. But that's the wrong question, anyway. The real question should be, are these pursuits worthy of us in the first place?

Invention is the Mother of Necessity

I do not doubt that the well-worn slogan "Necessity is the mother of invention" was at one time true. When the cavemen got cold, they had two options: invent fire or freeze to death.

But with the rapid growth and advancement of technology, supply no longer is the result of demand but often the cause of it. In other words, inventing stuff is easy; the challenge is to convince people of their need of it.

Consider the Internet: a technological phenomenon that I, back in the mid-nineties, dismissed as a passing fad that would be as quickly forgotten as the Slinky, has now become so intertwined with our lives that most people could not work, or even socialize, without it (no, the irony here is not lost on me).

But I would maintain that one's true happiness and fulfillment in life actually decreases as his or her level of dependence on technology increases. Whether we're talking about cell phones, laptops, or automobiles, we have allowed a myriad of components into our lives in order to "simplify" our existence, only to find that, soon afterward, we have become slaves to these harsh masters.

Sure, technology solves some problems, but they're often the very problems it helped create. Whether it's a cure for the cancer that we contracted due to the chemicals and radiation we are constantly exposed to or the Blackberry that helps us remember the various business meetings we must attend (to discuss how best to market Blackberrys), the fact is that technology's benefits are questionable at best.

Do we ever consider the adverse effects of our gadgets? For example, no one bothers to remember anyone's phone numbers anymore, since they're programmed into our cell phones (which doesn't help when your battery dies and you need to use someone else's). No one can make actual commitments to be anywhere at a specific time anymore since, after all, "I can just call you when I'm ten minutes out." College-aged kids can barely socialize face-to-face these days, since the bulk of their "personal interaction" is done via Facebook.com (and don't get me started on MySpace's redefinition of what a "friend" is).

We've spent so much energy asking, "Can we?" that we've forgotten to ask a more important question: "Should we?"

Fuel is for Machines

In the spirit of continuing to force my views on others by means of diatribe and rant, I would like to propose that we cease thinking about things like food and beverages purely for their utilitarian benefits, and get back to the idea that these things are to be savored and enjoyed.

It was the fascists, after all, who popularized the idea that food was merely fuel to replenish the workers' empty tanks so that they can continue to produce efficiently. For truly dedicated workaholics like Gordon Gekko, however, "Lunch is for wimps" (time, after all, is money, right?).

For my own part, I have never enjoyed (let alone even felt) the utilitarian effects of coffee, which probably explains my disdain for the drive-thru espresso stands so ubiquitous here in the Pacific Northwest. Coffee is to be drunk while sitting in a comfortable chair with a book in hand, not while fighting our way through rush hour traffic after a "power lunch" (and when a cigar is involved, one has no choice but to just take one's time).

"Modern coffeehouses," one author argues, "have as their mission purely useful goals: give you strong coffee and some bread to help you survive the day in a state of high anxiety and fear. They give off the unpleasant aroma of efficiency."

So as a form of protest against the hectic and rushed nature of our consumer-driven culture, I would call upon those who feel so moved to find some time to camp out in the corner of some café or coffeehouse to actually enjoy a meal and/or drink, and to crack open that book you've been wanting to read for years.

And no, you may not simply set your cell to vibrate. It must be left behind....

Close Laptop. Turn Off Cell. Go to Pub.

“Visiting the pub and drinking beer,” writes Tom Hodgkinson, “became a form of protest against the new emerging work ethic.... Pubs once acted as the focus of the community, providing a free front room where people... could discourse freely, drink deeply, and carouse. One gets a real sense that the Industrial Revolution was taking the fun out of life” (How To Be Idle, 166, 167).

When I was living in Europe, my fellow-missionaries and I used to spend much of our winters watching the Lonesome Dove miniseries on video. As we observed the life-long friendship of Augustus McRae and Woodrow F. Call (played by Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones), we all vowed that we would never allow ourselves to become like so many men in our day: working 60 hours a week with no friends with whom we could “quaff foaming pints of nut-brown ale in convivial company.”

The nature of our culture is to isolate us from one another. We sit at our computers or in front of our TVs, we drive alone in our cars from the garage at home to the one at work, we interact through MySpace and email, we converse through cell phones and blue tooths, and even the live events we attend, like weddings or birthday parties, are usually observed through the screen of our camcorders.

We need to get out more (and I’m not talking about those “power lunches” during which we wolf down burgers at a food court so we can get back to work faster). How much political, personal, social, or theological reflection is just waiting to transpire at the local pub, if we would only make the time for it?

Frodo and Sam had the Green Dragon… what about us?

Rise, Shine, and Produce

"Sleep is a powerful seducer," writes Tom Hodgkinson, "hence the terrifying machinery we have developed to fight it. I mean, the alarm clock. Heavens! What evil genius brought together those two enemies of the idle – clocks and alarms – into one unit? ... For all modern society's promises of leisure [and] liberty... most of us are still slaves to a schedule we did not choose" (How to be Idle, 4, 6).

The author's point here is not that everyone should sleep until noon every day (he himself has small children), but that one of the (ill-)effects of our post-industrial world is that we have become what we once called "wage slaves," renting our bodies to tyrannical bosses. "What is truly amazing," Hodgkinson continues, "is that we buy alarm clocks voluntarily. Is it not absurd to spend our own hard-earned cash on a device to make every day start as unpleasantly as possible, and which really just serves the employer to whom we sell our time?"

I trust my point is not quite as idealistic as Hodgkinson's: Do we ever stop to think about the fact that the world wasn't always as hectic and hurried as it is now? That there are countries even today where people are not enslaved to the almighty dollar (what Jesus called "Mammon")?

For my own part, I desire to work as hard at my job as I can, while at the same time refusing to add to the simplicity of my calling a lot of extraneous non-essentials that would have kept me from sitting outside at the local coffee house a couple hours ago and enjoying a book and the sunshine.

Call it "inefficiency" if you must, to which I will respond that I am not a machine. Productivity, after all, may actually increase when we slow down the pace a bit....

On Hobbits, the Shire, and the Kingdom of God's Left Hand

In continuing to consider the believer's dual-citizenship in the kingdoms of Christ and culture, I would like to broach a topic of which the Bible speaks at length and in detail, but which is often ignored from the contemporary American pulpit (either because it has become so ingrained into our psyches that we don't really have the necessary perspective to think critically about it, or simply because we're afraid to ask the kinds of questions we should be asking):

Work, Money, and the proper use of our Time.

To kick the discussion off, I'll quote from the Prologue of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring "Concerning Hobbits" (bet you didn't see that one coming):

"Hobbits are an unobtrusive people; they love peace and quiet and good tilled earth. They do not like machines more complicated than a water-mill or hand-loom. They do not hurry unnecessarily. At no time had Hobbits been warlike, and they had never fought among themselves. They imbibed or inhaled, through pipes of clay or wood, the smoke of the burning leaves of a herb which they call pipe-weed or leaf [and developed a keen interest in the brewing and drinking of ales]."

My reason for this allusion is Tolkien's clear intention to present the lives of Hobbits as an ideal one, and the Shire in which they dwelt as a metaphor for the idyllic kind of life free from the pressures and hectic pace introduced by the industrial revolution.

The overarching question, then, is whether our lives reflect, even in a small way, the enjoyment of the pleasures of the kingdom of God's left hand, or whether we are so bound to our (legitimate) secular vocations that we have become incapable of being the moms and dads, wives and husbands, and even the human beings, that we desire to be?

One Market, Under God – Part Three: Blessed are the Poor....

The third portion of Doster’s article in byFaith Magazine (“The Kingdom Work of the Corporate World”) is called “Business is How We Care For the Poor.” Yes, you read that correctly.

Business is, “in an ultimate sense, the only solution to poverty,” Doster writes, since “for-profit work in the secular world is how we care for those in need.” As Christians go into business, the theory goes, new wealth will be created which will create new jobs, thereby fulfilling the cultural mandate and loving our neighbors.

But as I pointed out in my last post, a corporation has only one mandate, and that is to make money for its shareholders. If people are benefited in the process, that is merely a by-product that will exist only as long as the company’s bottom line increases. So if your favorite clothing company can have its products manufactured in a Chinese sweatshop by eight-year-olds making 12 cents a day, that is good news for investors. Or if American businessmen can privatize Bolivia’s rainwater and prohibit the indigenous population from collecting it in buckets to wash themselves for free, a victory is claimed for the free market.

My point is simple: To insist that the second Table of the law can only be fulfilled in a free-market, capitalist society, and that the wealthier a CEO becomes the better off the rest of us will be, is about the most white, privileged, American interpretation of “kingdom work” that I have ever heard.

Or are we only to “contextualize” the kingdom message to those who think that "Rush is Right"?

One Market, Under God – Part Two: How Sociopaths Love Their Neighbors

The next section in Dick Doster’s “The Kingdom Work of the Corporate World” (byFaith Magazine, October 2006) is entitled “Business Is How We Love Our Neighbors.” The author writes:

“God has placed most of his people in business because it is there, working with others in a common purpose, that we [‘Love God and neighbor’].”

But as Joel Bakan has powerfully highlighted in his book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Big Business is anything but a Samaritan, let alone a “good” one.

Legally speaking, the corporation is a person entitled to all the rights that other individuals share. As a legal entity, a corporation has as its edict one, and only one, goal: To create profits for its shareholders, without legal or moral obligation to the welfare of workers, the environment, or the well-being of society as a whole. Competition and self-interest dominate, and other aspects of human nature, such as creativity, empathy, and the ability to live in harmony with the earth, are suppressed and even ridiculed (taken from the editorial review on amazon.com).

To put the matter bluntly, if the corporation’s identity were not just legally that of a person, but if it were an actual flesh-and-blood human being, we would lock him up and throw away the key. After all, we have a word for people who relentlessly pursue their own interests with contempt for the suffering or harm it inevitably causes others – they’re called “sociopaths.”

My point is not to demonize those who work in the business world, but simply that the desire to Christianize every aspect of society requires a pretty large list of assumptions about what a Christian society would look like.

And (lo and behold!) it usually looks a lot like a free market democracy with an eagle as its mascot.

Last Word About Slogans

OK, last one, I promise:

"Necessity is the Mother of Invention."

This once was the case back in the day, before the technological boom ("Man, it's cold! We should, like, invent fire or something.").

But once our tool-centered culture gave way to Technocracy, which then produced our current Technopoly, this all changed. Inventions became so easy; the real problem became creating supposed necessities in order to justify them.

For example, I have had the following conversation approximately 274 times:

Person: "What's you cell number?"
Me: "I don't have one."
Person: "WHAT?! You don't have a cell phone?"
Me: "No."
Person: "Why not?"
Me: "Because I don't need one."
Person: "Sure you do! What if you were driving through the dessert in the middle of the night and you got a flat tire? What would you do then?"
Me: "Has anything like that ever happened to you?"
Person: "No."
Me: (Insert smug look here).

It is the nature of our Market-driven culture to invent stuff, and then figure out what we should use it for. The slogan, therefore, ought to be:

"Invention is the Mother of Necessity."

My goal, of course, is not to force my hopelessly antiquated (read: late 90's) ways upon any of you. All I'm saying is that the last thing I need in my life is one more thing I can't live without.

An Oasis in the Desert

In order to thoroughly depress myself, I've been reading a lot of social critics lately (everything from the more humorous stuff by David Brooks to the more serious Juliet Schor and Paul Stiles).

In one such book I ran across the movement started by the good people over at Ad Busters called Buy Nothing Day. The goal is to convince people to set aside their materialism for one full day (the most popular shopping day of the year, incidently: the day after Thanksgiving). An intriguing proposition indeed....

But then it dawned on me that, as a Presbyterian, I don't just have one day a year to make such a statement to this consumer-driven culture, but I can do it every week.

The Lord's Day has been described as a chance for believers -- who are unashamed citizens of the kingdom of culture six days a week -- to plant a flag in Times Square each Sunday in order to protest the rank consumerism of this age by simply saying "No! Not today...."

After all, it's hard enough as it is for Christians to stand out and be different from the culture around them. But once we surrender the Lord's Day to "the tyranny of the clock and the gods who amuse us," it's almost impossible.