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Overheard in Detroit May 31, 2008

Posted by Zack in Michigan | 2 comments

Overheard in the Detroit Airport. A couple who lives outside of Columbus (but with Southern accents) talking with a guy from Lawrence Kansas. The couple is in their 60’s. The guy is in his late 40’s. The guy from Lawrence (4 kids—all girls) is in the Guard and serving off and on in Iraq.

The couple says, “So…what are you thinking about the election?”

The guy doesn’t want to talk about it.

The couple says, “Well…we don’t like Democrats. But we’re voting Democrat this time to get out of the war. We just have to get out of there. We just have to get you guys home.”

The guy says, “I’m disappointed too. But…”

The couple: “But there’re no Colin Powells out there, huh? We need a Colin Powell.”

The guy: “Yup. Or a Petreus.”

The guy from the couple: “I served in Vietnam. I always liked the Generals.”

And now they’re exchanging picts of kids, wife, grandkids. The guy is pretty bummed out. I think he’s heading back to Iraq. Now they’re talking about wrestling.

UPDATE: The group talked for a long time. It turned out that the guy is just back for two week emergency leave because his sister died of cancer. Back for the funeral. Also, the couple is not married: They are brother and sister. They’ve both got some kinds of cancer. They’re going off to a cruise. I think they’re fraternal twins. When the guard guy had to go, the woman gave him a big, long hug and told him he was a beautiful person. She told him to expect that his wife was going to cry for a long time when she saw him. Her brother said, “He knows that, he’s a military man.” The brother added: “Kick ass! …and try not to kill anybody.” The guy walked away with a really big smile on his face.

Just another American Christianarchohippyconservativatarian in the making May 27, 2008

Posted by Zack in Kansas | 7 comments

Over the past five or so years, a really huge number of Christians (in the millions according to some researchers) have had a severe case of ideological whip flash. They haven’t changed course from bring pawns of the GOP to simply being pawns of the Democratic Party (thank God). They are swimming toward much deeper waters than that.

And thanks to the revealing magic of the Blogosphere, we get to watch many of them as they work out the twists and turns of these transformations. I don’t mean that to sound patronizing. The truth is that my own transformation over the past few years has been a whole lot more messy and chaotic than what we see Timothy going through below. (He is essentially stuck somewhere in between Christian anarchism and some kind of Compassionate Libertarianism of his own invention — and Brecht figures in somehow!) But I didn’t want to freak out anyone I work with, so I kept it to myself.

Check out Timothy’s list (I get a shout out at the end). Note the strong influence of Jesus for President. I’ve met a whole lot of people with similarly heterodox lists over the past couple of years. These are just pieces of the full list:

  • I have identified as Republican for as long as I can remember. This has recently changed.
  • I voted Dubya twice, and I don’t regret it.
  • I would not vote for Dubya again
  • Partially, this is because I no longer believe in war. In any circumstance.
  • I don’t even think I believe in force anymore.
  • If I believed in the use of force to stop bad people, I think I would vote for Dubya again, if given the chance.
  • He believes that power should be used to protect people.
  • I do not.

    • …

  • I think non-violent solutions are right whether they work or not.
  • I think anything right is right whether it works or not.
  • This is my definition of an extreme rightist.
  • A extreme leftist believes that only things that work are right.

    • …

  • I am not planning on voting for any of the major three candidates for president in November. (Nor October via absentee ballot. Nor December via being a Supreme Court Justice. Ha ha. Perhaps in January as part of the Supreme Court Justice League’s time travel division. Ok, that would technically be November, so that’s a possibility, I guess.)
  • I am excited about this election.

    • …

  • I am excited about this election for the same reasons the Democratics and Republicanites are scared of it: the possibility of chaos at the conventions: The HILLARY vs. OBAMA quagmire. MCCAIN vs. all the RON PAUL people who went to the trouble of going to the state conventions. That seems like a real political process where people was similar things, but disagree on the how of the thing. But as for after the conventions? I am barely interested.

    • …

  • I am not planning on voting for anyone. Primarily because I do not believe that power is the method by which change happens. I wish this wasn’t a joke.
  • Change happens when people change.
  • Most people do not want change.
  • Most people, even revolutionaries want the status quo. But only if they get to run it.

    • …

  • I don’t plan on voting for OBAMA. I do trust him. Call me a biased ex-Republican if you want. This is nitpicking, but he recently said that America is the world’s last best hope. I do not believe this. I see people hoping in OBAMA as president more than the others. I don’t know if hoping in a guy is good. I think hope is good. Maybe that’ll be good. Doesn’t mean I’m voting for him, though.
  • I don’t plan on voting for MCCAIN. I don’t trust him. Seems more interested in power than policy. I would want to vote for someone who believed more than politicked. Two years ago, he almost defected to the Democratics. I could care less if he did. His voting record seems a little more AMERICAN LEFT than AMERICAN RIGHT. But to do so, or not do so as a political manoeuvre? Meh, says I.
  • The AMERICAN LEFT and AMERICAN RIGHT do not believe they believe the same things. I agree and believe they do not believe the same things. But I do believe they practice the same things to the point that, to an outsider, there is no discernible difference.
  • The way things are going, I am planning on writing in JESUS for President. I don’t think he’s going to win. He doesn’t test well in the young urban professional demographic (not sure they even think he’s real), and his PR people have really dropped the ball over the last 6800 quarters or so. Crosses on shields, indeed.

    • …

  • For some reason I am still hopeful.
  • Some days, I don’t believe anything has ever worked, that everything is a failure.
  • This is probably true.
  • Most days I think everything I do is a failure.
  • I don’t know how that works with the concept of imago dei [the idea that God created us in his image], which I also believe.
  • Ah-ah.
  • I believe in small government. I’m close to libertarian if you have to define me.
  • Quit defining me.
  • I don’t think I’m an anarchist. I don’t know why. It seems almost closer to what I think than libertarianism. Maybe I think people should organize for safety. I would like this to be true.
  • Maybe it’s that I still want decent roads, dangit, and don’t want to pay some company for it.
  • I don’t trust companies any more than I trust governments.
  • I don’t trust any groups of people.
  • I don’t trust people.

    • …

  • Also, clean water would be nice.
  • And laws against slavery and such.
  • How to enforce without force, though . . .
  • A good law is sometimes all an oppressed person needs.
  • A good swift kick in the pants is sometimes all a snotty person needs.
  • My Facebook political views say I am not interested in power.
  • I am interested in power.
  • I do not want to be.

    • …

  • In a series of articles beginning here, that is not yet finished, Zack Exley says that Christians need to go beyond love on the small scale, and can organize to love on the big scale. That large organization does not necessarily mean failure. I don’t know if I believe him yet.
  • In light of that, I would like to define my politics as loving the people I see better than I love myself, and trying to see as many people as possible.
  • I do not live what I believe about politics.
  • Does anyone live what they believe?
  • Is everyone a failure?
  • Likely.
  • I believe that anything that can go wrong, will.
  • I also believe that anything that can go right, can, sometimes.
  • So yeah, I still have hope.
  • I believe in hope.
  • Um, JESUS for President!

Post at Jim Wallis’ blog, God’s Politics May 27, 2008

Posted by Zack in | 2 comments

Over the last few years, I’ve gotten acquainted with a movement of Christians that is vibrant, enormous, and yet refuses to let itself be named or to take credit for any of its accomplishments. Some have named subsets or aspects of the movement — for example, "The New Monastics," "The Emergent Church," "Ordinary Radicals," and even "Revolutionaries." But there are millions of people swept up into this movement who have never even heard those phrases.

I grew up an atheist and a left-wing activist/organizer. I got a view into this movement only when I married a Christian and started going to church (the only way it was ever going to happen) a few years ago. When I first saw thousands of upper-middle-class, white, Southern suburbanites respond passionately to a sermon titled "Two Fists in the Face of Empire," I knew that something incredible must be going on. Afterward, a minute of Googling revealed that the U.S. was already full of churches preaching that same "anti-empire" gospel — both mega- and mini-churches, suburban, rural, and urban. The movement is invisible to people outside the church (and to liberal mainline Christians) because it is strongest among "born-again" Christians — the kind who believe Jesus is really coming back, raise their hands in the air, weep in worship, and study the Bible every day because they believe it’s true. These folks have learned that most of their coworkers and classmates think all that stuff is bizarre, and so they keep it to themselves. In some ways, born-again Christians are as different from mainstream America as the Amish, but there are 100 million of them and they’re almost totally invisible.

I started weeping in worship services myself when I started to see what this movement was actually doing in people’s lives. It was taking very isolated, individualistic middle-class suburban people like me and breaking them open in all kinds of ways. Even though I had spent a lot of time working as a community and union organizer, I had always been careful to keep my life totally unentangled by the immediate needs and troubles of the people I was organizing — that’s what I was most comfortable with, and it’s also what I was taught to do by all my mentors.

I was organizing for "big" solutions and staying away from all the "little" stuff that to me just seemed too messy and complicated to ever solve anyway. But these young Christians I was meeting were "falling in love with each other across class and racial lines," and wrestling with demons of poverty, addiction, community violence, family violence, sexual abuse, depression, hopeless schools, and all the other troubles that plague American life. They were "making redemptive history" by healing wounds and repairing families and communities one at a time. It’s really the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve had the opportunity to witness it up close in a dozen states and scores of giant mega-churches and tiny house groups.

And so it is with great hesitation that I have been trying to make a suggestion for an amendment to this movement.

As this movement has radically embraced "relational" one-on-one or neighborhood-level social change, it has just as radically shunned any kind of big-picture national and global collective social change. I’ve been arguing in a series of posts at my blog Revolution in Jesusland that the movement should not limit its imagination to only small and local modes of change, but should allow God to work through them at a national and global level too.

A few days ago, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove answered me very graciously here, but, in effect, said, "No, I think we’ll stay local for now":

For many of us young evangelicals, the Moral Majority and its demise unveiled for us the deceptions of power. We walked away from politics as we knew it because we didn’t like who it made us. But we believe there is a better way, and we’ve tried to learn that Way from Jesus.

As I understand it, new monasticism is trying to learn what it means to live by the power of the Spirit in a world of competing powers. This means, first of all, that we give ourselves to prayer, trusting that there’s time to listen in a world of urgent needs. The most radical thing we can do in a world wrecked by injustice is to open our imaginations to prayer. If we want to transform the world, we have to begin with our own conversions. As Gandhi said, "We must be the change we seek."

… New monasticism is not against political organizing, or, as Dr. King said in 1968, "taking the nonviolent movement international." … But our witness there will only be credible if we’ve taken the time to be converted ourselves and to build communities of justice and peace where it is easier to be good. We won’t end global poverty until we learn to care for the poor in our communities. Our cries for world peace will fall on deaf ears until we learn to live peaceably as Christians.

But when I read the story of the Way of Jesus in the Bible, I don’t see him or his disciples limiting themselves only to prayer. I don’t see them waiting to perfect themselves before engaging their national community politically. The Jesus movement as presented in the Bible did live differently, but it didn’t set itself aside separately and neatly to live only as an example. Jesus didn’t lead his followers to form an intentional community set apart; he sent waves of disciples strategically all around the country to deliberately ignite a national movement — of highly imperfect people — that shook the foundation of empire. He didn’t only walk around saying profound things and hoping that people would get the point; he created intolerable confrontations with authority.

After Jesus, the Bible records the disciples organizing a networked movement of insurgent communities spanning the empire. In some ways, that movement was the inverse of the empire that it was trying to subvert: e.g., practicing enemy love in the face of state terror. But it also was a mirror image of the global reach of empire: e.g., it organized itself at lightning speed and on a global scale using the communication and transportation networks of the empire. (The New Testament itself is mostly made up of the equivalent of interoffice organizational e-mails written by first-century jet-set Christian organizers, constantly pushing, pulling, and teaching far-flung communities.)

On those points, the movement answers: "Okay, maybe, but Jesus never taught us to ‘take power.’ And so we must limit ourselves to witnessing from the ‘bottom’ and never try to put ourselves on ‘top’ in positions of power."

In college, I had friends who went off to join a weird little secretive Maoist party that was active on campus. It was a crazy thing to watch as they transported themselves back in time to the China of the 1940s. All their calculations about making social change here in America were messed up because their paradigm was based on the regime that Mao Zedong’s communists lived under as young persecuted revolutionaries. I think there’s a bit of that going on with this movement of Christian revolutionaries today. Too often, they’re applying the Way of Jesus to our modern-day world as though nothing has changed since the first-century Roman Empire.

But haven’t 2,000 years of redemptive history taken place since then? Yes, many places in our societies still look a lot like Rome and many people still suffer violence at the hands of the state on a regular basis — and we can’t forget that. But thousands of years of resistance and subversion has borne fruit. There is something new. Most Christians today live in societies where we can remove, replace, and even become our own political leaders in peaceful elections. Is that an accident? Is it to be ignored? How tragic would it be if the body of Christ opened up new ways for humanity to work together, but Christians were too discouraged to try them? Yes, our democracies are flawed. But maybe the biggest problem with them is our lack of imagination in using them, and our lack of faith in ourselves as leaders. What if the disciples had approached Rome with a similar lack of imagination and faith in themselves? Reading the story of Jesus and the disciples, how often do you hear God telling us, "Hold back! Watch out! Be careful!" I don’t hear that at all. I hear instead, "Have faith in me, allow me to work through you, and go for it!"

Jesus lived under an empire that ruled primarily by the cross and the sword. Today we live under an empire that also tortures and kills — but that is not its primary mode. Our empire neutralizes its citizens with an idea — one so fundamental to our thinking that we often mistake it for a law of nature: that any attempt by humanity to determine its future intentionally and collectively will always result in failure. Of all people, Christians should not allow that modern ideology of empire to limit their imagination.

If you want more… May 18, 2008

Posted by Zack in | 2 comments

I can’t believe I went 16 days without posting. Part of it was that Elizabeth & I went on vacation. It was the first real vacation we took since our honeymoon three years ago. We get so many opportunities to take little trips for work, conferences, etc… that we didn’t feel justified in taking a vacation. But we eventually realized that some true downtime was needed. (Pictures!)

And so there we were driving around the West, hiking every day, seeing so much amazing stuff, thinking up all kinds of schemes and ideas…I wanted to write about it…but it wasn’t related to the Revolution in Jesusland theme.

So I’m going to start posting on an additional blog. It will have all of the Revolution in Jesusland posts PLUS writing on all the non-Jesusland stuff going on in my little life. Most posts will be about technology, politics, culture, random observations, and so on. I’m not asking you to read it! But if you’re curious, go for it.

I’m calling it Fly Over THIS because about half the times I tell someone from one of my former haunts on the coasts that I live in Kansas City, they look at me with horror and say Kansas…or Missouri, or wherever I live…is supposed to be one of those “fly over” states that you don’t visit, let alone live in.

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Is Bad Organizing Biblical? (continued) May 18, 2008

Posted by Zack in | 2 comments

[Continuing on here from my last post. Sorry about the meandering style, but it really helps to get feedback on these little unfinished fragments. I tried writing one giant argument on this topic, but it just got too long and crazy.]

Both mainstream and radical Christians seem equally as uncomfortable with the image of Jesus as the practical leader and organizer of a real, live, gritty movement. Movements always eventually make mistakes and turn ugly. And Jesus’ movement sure went on to make a lot of mistakes. Therefore we go back and try to cleanse Jesus of getting his hands dirty as a practical organizer. We like the image of him getting his hands dirty hanging out with sinners and serving the poor. But we don’t like the image of him ordering around a large insurgent organization, because we know from our own experience that that always has many unpleasant consequences for everyone in the end.

But Jesus was a down-and-dirty organizer. It’s true, we don’t get a detailed play by play of Jesus’ organizing model. But we do get some glimpses.

First, he methodically laid a foundation for his movement by creating a buzz by preaching and healing in many villages. All that happened before he kicked things up a notch in Nazareth, the event that I usually hear described as the beginning of his ministry. After strategically planting those seeds, he then had huge crowds traveling with him.

I think the most common image in most of our minds of those crowds following Jesus is something like Monty Python’s Life of Brian: massive, unthinking, unorganized throngs. But there were apparently many leaders in those crowds. Jesus deputizes 72 organizers from that crowd and sends them to go do advance work in the villages and towns that he wanted to visit next. He even sent them in pairs, as any good organizer would. Some of my learned Christian friends tell me that seventy-two (or 70 as it appears in some manuscripts) represented the elders of Israel—i.e. political/spiritual leaders. Whether the number is a real historical number or symbolic, the message is that Jesus was systematically engaging a political nation on a national scale. (Maybe today, in America, he would have sent a team to each congressional district.)

Regardless of the symbolism of the number 70 or 72, we get a glimpse there in Luke 10 that Jesus worked meticulously to build…yes build…a movement. Luke even shows us Jesus debriefing his organizing teams when they’ve finally regrouped (Luke 10:17-24). There are few places in the bible where Jesus is as happy as he is during that debrief:

At that time Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure….

Then he turned to his disciples and said privately, “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see. For I tell you that many prophets and kings wanted to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it.” (Luke 10:21, 23-24)

In Jesus for President Shane and Chris (who I’ve been using as my example text in this series) talk a lot about how Jesus’ ministry was all about the “small people”—the least being the greatest and the last being first in the Kingdom of Heaven. But that rarely happens by accident. It almost always happens because of meticulous work and planning by those “small people”—just the kind that is modeled all through the Bible by Jesus, the disciples and so many characters in the Hebrew Scriptures. Every organizer knows that joy that Jesus felt when he saw those “little children” accomplish and comprehend what the “wise and learned” sitting in their ivory towers could never hope to. (But don’t call the people you’re organizing “children” unless you’re God.)

Another really interesting tidbit in this part of the story is this: In Matthew, it is Jesus’ national organizing program that tips off John the Baptist that Jesus is the Messiah:

When John heard in prison what Christ was doing, he sent his disciples to ask him, “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?” Matt 11

After Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, the organizing only got bigger. Disciples and new converts crisscrossed the empire, methodically starting new Christian communities everywhere. We only get glimpses of a few of these efforts in the Bible. We know there were so many more that we never recorded.

Did the disciples haphazardly plant these communities as seeds and then walk away to let God make them grow? No, in fact most of the New Testament is made up of communications by them—sort of like inter-office emails—constantly worrying, pushing, pulling….doing anything they could to help the communities grow and strengthen the best they could.

Why would Jesus start up this kind of movement if he didn’t mean for us to continue on the same tradition? He knew where it was going. He knew all the infighting that was coming. He knew Rome would soon co-opt the movement. He knew all the violence that would eventually be carried out in the name of the movement. So, shouldn’t we conclude that Jesus believes its worth it? That those bad consequences are like the weeds among the wheat—that there will be no harvest at all if we stop organizing on a large scale because we’re too afraid of the unintended consequences? Isn’t Jesus calling us to keep building movements, warts and all?

Is Bad Organizing Biblical?
(Or: What Would Jesus Do With Democracy?
 Or: Next Step for Christian Big Thinkers, Part 3.
 Or: Review of Jesus for President, Part 4.) May 16, 2008

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 14 comments

I’ve been watching this rising movement of Christian radicals for a few years with nothing but complete awe and admiration. But I’ve finally worked up the nerve to ask a few questions—to pose a challenge even.

I think the movement is making an idol out of smallness and slowness. Small and slow can be beautiful, but making an idol of them is wrong because big and fast can be just as beautiful and just as central to living as a follower of Jesus. By ruling out big, unified, global political organizing, the movement is tragically limiting the Christian imagination at a time of great opportunity. Jesus didn’t limit himself to the small or slow, and I can’t find anything in the Bible to make me think he’s calling us to limit ourselves now.

But maybe I’m missing something. So I’m going to ask you guys in the movement a bunch of questions here. I’ll treat Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw as the movement’s spokespeople on this small+slow+local dogma through their new book Jesus for President.

I’ll tell you where I’m going with this up front: I think what’s happened to the rising Christian radical movement is that we’ve applied deep-down, empire-bred instincts to our politics…and to the gospel. It’s the same kind of thing that happened so often to Roman citizens who converted to Christianity. It wasn’t long before they were ruling by the sword in Jesus’ name, because ruling by the sward was all they knew. Our empire doesn’t rule over (white, middle-class, Christian) people with violence. It rules over us with a different kind of idea. This idea shapes our every thought, but we are barely aware of it. It was the same for the Romans: if you asked them, “Does Rome rule by the sword?” they wouldn’t know what you were talking about.

Our empire enforces hopelessness by raising us to believe that humanity is unfit to work collectively, on a large scale, to redeem creation. It says the only way to change the world is through decentralized efforts by individuals and private groups. And then it does everything in its power to make sure those efforts never add up to anything that can threaten empire. That idea is vital for the survival of empire today because modern empire has been forced by centuries of resistance and subversion (mostly by Christians) to put down the sword in governing most citizens. We citizens of empire are now free to dismantle empire non-violently (I realize that’s a big case to make; I’ll try to make it below). That’s why so many young Christians who want to be martyrs have to go across the world to Iraq or Sudan. I don’t want to demean those efforts, but that is theater at the margins of the empire. Empire today has learned that, when it kills its “own” people as martyrs, they spring up one thousandfold. And so it won’t dare touch us. It will instead bog us down in absolutely unglamorous political machinations. Most of us mock that work as being futile, just as revolutionaries in Jesus’ day rejected his work on the cross as futile. But that is the cross that we have to bear in our time. We have to bear it like Jesus: not as a messy, self-serving compromise; but as a messy, beautiful, selfless triumph over death.

OK…so I’ve written about 50 pages in an attempt to get the rest of this post right over the last week…and then I realized that this is just a blog. So I’m just going to put it up in little, very imperfect pieces. Stay tuned.

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“The Hauerwasian Mafia” May 1, 2008

Posted by Zack in Minnesota | 4 comments

Tim Keel (who was good enough not to get upset at me for grossly oversimplifying his point of view a couple posts ago) sent me this link, that has a lot to say regarding my current topic.

Here, Tony Jones locates the roots of the clean hands syndrome that plagues Christian radicals these days in a “Hauerwasian Mafia” of theologians that has grown up over the last half century.

So the question becomes, what relationship should a follower of Jesus have with public life? Should Christians be involved with politics?

The HM advocates an ecclesiological solution: the church should be a counter-polis, a self-enclosed system that can serve as a model to secular systems (governments, corporations, etc.). In reading the HM literature, you’ll run across many references to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, especially the part about being a “city on a hill.” The church, the HM claims, is just such a city, shining the light of its moral rectitude for all the degenerate world to see and emulate. And you’ll find HM book titles like, Resident Aliens and A Peculiar People, promulgating this tendency, a tendency that has been dissed by critics as “sectarianism” and “Christian enclave theory.”

…

Instead of watering down their distinctives to the point of meaninglessness, the church should close ranks and develop an internal coherency that would serve as an example to the world.

Read the whole article.

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The Next Step for Christian Big Thinkers: Part 2 May 1, 2008

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 24 comments

I grew up an atheist, but recently I have fallen in love with a movement that seems to be the most dynamic element of Christianity in American today. It’s a movement based on radical idealism, a faith that “all of creation will be redeemed.” These people are working toward a world with no poverty, no violence, no hatred or racism. And they believe they can do it. Even some of the most conservative evangelical churches are beginning shift away from the narrow, exclusive theology of “personal salvation” to a holistic gospel that calls Christians to build the “Kingdom of Heaven” right here on Earth. My whole life, I’ve been searching for a movement that has the guts to try to truly save the world. The progressive movement in which I grew up has been in a downward spiral of lowered expectations. Meanwhile, Christians are charging forward with revolutionary zeal—and are even calling themselves “revolutionaries”!

There is one big problem, though: These revolutionary Christians have adopted a theory of social change that is just as narrow and unimaginative as the old theology they just left behind.

Revolutionary Christians are throwing themselves into direct, person-to-person anti-poverty projects at home and around the world—sometimes with reckless abandon, sometimes with careful planning, but always with passion and love. And it’s a beautiful thing. It’s helping a lot of people, and it’s teaching wealthy Americans a lot about the world. (In this context, middle class Americans are wealthy.)

Even the Christians who are doing the most see that what they’re currently doing is not enough to really fix this broken world. And so they feel God’s call to do more. But most think that means only more of the same: dig more wells, fund more micro loans, build more schools and orphanages, etc… And for sure, God is calling us to do as much of that as we possibly can.

But a certain dogma regarding social change has taken hold of the Christian imagination, and limited it to only projects that are small, local, “relational” and that they can personally witness themselves. Those who have been bitten by this dogma go on the faith that, if we all just live as followers of Christ in our neighborhoods, churches and workplaces, then God will work out the rest. They believe it’s wrong to work for social change at the level of the whole society because that requires political power, and therefore leads to all kinds of messy compromises, unintended consequences and, ultimately, corruption.

For me, this selective limitation of imagination is heartbreaking because these are the only people I can find with an otherwise boundless imagination and faith that we can make the impossible possible. And it’s totally unnecessary.

This dogma, which is strangling the radical Christian imagination, has nothing to do with the Bible or any Christian tradition, but is actually just old-fashioned laissez-faire economic doctrine recast in a new role. We’ve been fed this doctrine all our lives in many forms, so it’s understandable that it should shape our instincts, usually without us even knowing it. (Those of us who went to college have been especially dumbed down by this doctrine.)

Radical Christians are dreaming of big, deep social transformations—such as reshaping a whole economy to make sure everyone has the means of making a living, and cleaning up the environment while we’re at it. Laissez-faire says that only families, small communities or individual companies can plan collectively, inside themselves, for goals like that. If you want any higher-level organization, then what you can do is form a “community of communities,” a trade association, or something like that, where no one member can be coerced by the larger body. The minute you try to plan on a social level, let alone a global level, then your on the road to serfdom with Stalin, Mao or…Caesar.

If you’ve read radical Christian writers like Shane Claiborne or Greg Boyd, that all sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it? How did it happen that the global capitalists who party at Davos share the same fundamental ideology about society’s role in economics as the people camping out at Christian anarchist festivals?

Well, the doctrine of Laissez-fair is so alluring because it is so beautiful in its simplicity: Every individual, family, community and company only needs to take care of itself and act responsibly towards others*; if we would all just do that, then the big picture would take care of itself. It all goes back to Adam Smith (and a bunch of other classical economists) who created these ideas when feudalism was breaking down in order to justify the rising economic system that would eventually be called Capitalism. Nowadays, laissez-faire economists (also called neo-liberal, neo-classical and conservative) have math equations and charts to show how it works. But Smith said the “invisible hand” of God was the driver. In a way, laissez-faire is the big brother in economics of biology’s theory of “Intelligent Design.”

But is it biblical? Obviously, my answer is no. But before I get into that, let’s dig a little deeper into what exactly we’re talking about here.

planningLaissez-faire doctrine says that whenever society tries to organize and plan big solutions, it always fails. But for clarity’s sake, it’s important to understand that laissez-faire is OK with some types of organizing and planning. Most liberals and progressives believe in strong use of regulation and tax incentives to coax the economy in the right direction. And they believe in heavy investment in infrastructure (roads, research, etc…) and public services (schools, healthcare, etc…). All that is perfectly consistent with the laissez-faire doctrine, at least in it’s most honest form. If that sounds odd, just go to Frederick Hayek. He was the 20th century’s Godfather of laissez-faire who inspired and popularized the revival of the dogma after it had almost died out forever. Check out his book The Road to Serfdom in which he supports strong regulation, taxation for social services, socialized medicine, universal public education and more.

So, because of our upbringing/brainwashing in the laissez-faire ideology, we are OK with the society doing public services, regulation and tax incentives. But also because of that upbringing, we are terrified of the idea of we, as society, intentionally retooling our for-profit industries to make their impact on the environment sustainable, or to reduce the work week to give people more time with their families, or for any other non-accidental (a.k.a. “market-driven”) purpose.

The only way to do that kind of big transformation is with political power. And the rising generation of radical Christians are against anything that has to do with political power.

But, once again, is that biblical? I’ll have to get into that in the next installment.

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