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

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 21 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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The Next Step for Christian Big Thinkers: Part 1 April 26, 2008

Posted by Zack in Missouri | 12 comments

As an activist and organizer, I used to have a vision of my role in social change that kept me protected in a certain way from people and their problems. When I was a union organizer and community organizer, I spent countless hours at workers’ kitchen tables listening to their problems. Often they cried. I consoled. By a few months into a campaign, I knew enough about so many interconnected lives in a workplace or neighborhood for 100 John Sayles screenplays.

But my purpose wasn’t to help people, it was to “help them help themselves.” I wasn’t a social worker. In fact, as hard-nosed organizers, we were taught disdain for social workers who ministered directly to people’s short term needs. We were even advised by many of our mentors not to socialize with the people we were organizing, “because it could complicate things.”

When I met her, my wife Elizabeth became a new mentor to me. As a Christian who had always led a “missional” life, there had never been a time in her life when she wasn’t personally intertwined with a whole bunch of troubled lives. When we were first dating, she was visiting several times a week an old disabled man in one of the poorest sections of DC. Though he was confined to a wheelchair, he had no ramp to get in or out of his house. He was also half blind, and yet somehow was (barely) taking care of his two adult mentally retarded children. The man’s house was a disaster of filth and decay. Elizabeth was organizing a group of her coworkers to clean and fix it up. A few times she tried to get me to go visit with her. I resisted, saying things like, “I think we often just mess things up worse when we get involved in lives so different from our own,” and, “I choose to make a different kind of contribution.”

It’s a few years later now and, thanks to Elizabeth, I have finally gotten out side of my own “four walls” and into other people’s lives as a participant, not just an observer/organizer. It’s been a life-altering experience, even though I’ve only just dipped my toe in the water.

I remember, in college, during one building take-over protest (I can’t even remember what the cause was), when we angrily read/barked Franz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth” (a great book) at passers by through a mega phone. The Christians I’ve been hanging out with lately, spend their lives trying to live with and directly aid the “wretched” of their neighborhoods and towns. So I’m incredibly grateful to Christians for what they’ve taught me over the last few years.

And now I want to give something back.

Too many Christians these days are rejecting the paradigm of “organizing” (intentional, structural social change) just as dogmatically as I used to reject “service” (individual, sacrificial social change).

These days, Christians are asking really enormous questions. They’re asking, “How can we eliminate poverty completely?” and “How can we stop harming the environment altogether.” What’s so great about them is that their faith in Christ leads them to believe that total redemption is possible. That is the miracle that makes their world irresistible to me.

But they’re attempting to answer these questions almost in complete ignorance of humanity’s long history of tackling problems of that scale and scope at the social level, at the level of whole societies. In other words, they’re approaching big social problems just as cluelessly as I have always approached “little” individual problems.

Today I attended Brian McLaren’s Deep Shift conference. One of the agendas of the conference was to get Christians engaged in social problems such as poverty. Both Brian and local pastor Tim Keel told some horrifying stories about what life was like in the slums of some African cities. And through Bible teaching, they left no doubt that Jesus called us to do something about it.

But when it came to, “HOW?” they could only offer the political economy of the personal: Be a good-hearted business person. And consume less.

Brian said something remarkable (if you’re able to place it in historical context): “Capitalism is our only option. So we have to figure out how to practice good capitalism instead of bad capitalism.”

Tim Keel said something equally remarkable (if you place it in the context of Brian’s statement, and have spent some time thinking through how capitalism actually works): “When we consume less here, we can build up prosperity and security over there.”

Those statements represent the two pillars of today’s pop economic thought. And all alone, they’re really harmful. They are the equivalent in political economy of Joel Osteen’s pop theology. “Think good thoughts, make good choices, and all will be well.”

[I should add here that Brian, Tim and so many other Christians are participating in and seeing with their own eyes a lot of *real* efforts where consuming less to give to development projects is working, and where practicing “socially responsible Capitalism” is working. My point isn’t that Christians should stop participating in those kinds of things, it’s that those kinds of personal efforts will unfortunately never be enough to even scratch the surface of world poverty. That kind of personal/relational work does form the foundation of any sincere big picture transformation…but only if we go beyond the personal to the (yes, I know, it’s horrible) political in a really big way.]

I’m not getting down on Brian, Tim or any other Christians—or, for that matter, non-religious lefties, who share the same economic thinking. In the present day, when it comes to economic thought, we’re all starting at zero. For a couple hundred years up to the early 20th century, there was a long tradition of deep, experiential and theoretical work done in economics by passionate people who had the exact same goals as today’s Christians who are saying, “Everything must change.”

But twists and turns of history have hidden all that experience and knowledge from current generations. In some ways starting from zero is a good thing, because so much baggage had accumulated around those old traditions. But it’s wrong for us to simply repeat those two hundred years of trial and error, making every mistake they made, and ending up inevitably crushed by that same old debilitating baggage in the end.

OK…so in the next installment I’ll get into the economics itself. This post is way too long already!

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Interview with Brian Walsh September 19, 2007

Posted by Zack in Toronto | 3 comments
Brian Walsh

While we were in Toronto, we took the opportunity to contact Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat, who we knew only from their book, Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire.

The book, on the Apostle Paul’s New Testament letter to an early Christian community at Colossae, has been something of an intellectual rallying point for progressive evangelicals as well as the growing ranks of young conservatives who are rebelling against the theology they grew up with. (Check out, for example, this post by a Kentucky evangelical blogger and Baptist preacher who describes himself as a “libertarian-leaning conservative politically and an adventurous pilgrim theologically.”)

Part of Colossians Remixed is about Brian and Sylvia’s down-shifted life in Toronto, but it turns out they now live on a farm a couple hours outside of the city. Brian still comes to the University of Toronto every week, where he serves in campus ministry and teaches classes at the seminary. After we made contact, he invited us to dinner and to his community’s “Wine Before Breakfast” regular Tuesday morning service.

After searching through the basements of Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto School of Theology, we finally found Brian’s office. Walking into the enormous room, we could feel right away that it was the home of a community, not just a professor’s office. Half the room is taken up by well worn chairs and sofas arranged in a circle; the other half by some long tables with coffee urns, breadbaskets and cutting boards.

Colossians Remixed coverLet me back up and tell you how we first discovered Brian and Sylvia’s book. Colossians Remixed is an explicitly anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist work, and yet I found it through a conservative evangelical Church that Elizabeth and I attended occasionally in North Carolina. This was during the first year of our marriage, when I was still getting used to going to church. When I realized that church was a non-negotiable part of the deal, I decided that at least I would like to learn something about the real heart of American Christianity: we would go to evangelical churches, conservative churches, Baptist churches, charismatic churches, etc…. Besides, the liberal mainline services that Elizabeth was trying to ease me in through were just so boring and empty.

It was the third or fourth time we had attended Chapel Hill Bible Church. I liked it because the regular preacher was very historical and usually made a real class out of his sermons. One of my first big surprises in attending evangelical churches was how scholarly and open minded their reading of the Bible was—even while reading it as the “inspired and inerrant word of God.” Most of their preachers have studied the Bible in the original Greek and Hebrew, and their sermons are all about putting scripture in its ancient historical context. For me, it was kind of unbelievable the first few times I saw these giant halls full of suburbanites–soccer moms, Nascar dads, teenagers, and all–delving enthusiastically into deep study of everything from Roman imperial social relations to subtle nuances of ancient Hebrew poetry.

So, church had surprised me many times already, but never as much as on this particular Sunday. After sitting down inside the sea of preppy, polo-shirted businessmen and their perfectly made-up wives, I looked down and read the title of that Sunday’s sermon in the program: “Two fists in the face of Empire,” a sermon on Colossians.

And, yes, the preacher was explicit that, while the empire of Jesus’s day was Rome, ours is America.

I was shocked, and excited. Was this an aberration? When we got home, I read all the bits of the Bible referenced in the sermon and then got on the web and did some Googling: “Colossians Empire Evangelicals”. There were thousands of pages, mostly Christian blog posts wrestling with conflict between the Bible and the modern American imperial mindset. The top ten or so hits were discussions of Brian and Sylvia’s Colossians Remixed. My next stop was Amazon.com, and when the book came, I was amazed to find the same basic argument and ideas from the sermon.

I say that I was amazed because it meant that either the Southern, conservative, evangelical preacher–in a church that, for example, doesn’t allow women hold leadership positions–was preaching from a Canadian anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist tract…or, he was getting it from somewhere else (a broader movement?). Either way, I was made dizzy by how vastly different the world of Christianity was turning out to be–at least very large pockets within it–than I expected.

OK, so, back to our time with Brian in Toronto. We had a very enjoyable dinner at which we got him to tell us stories about his family’s new agrarian life on an organic farm in the country. It was inspiring to hear about how bravely they’ve embraced this enormous change, and about the sacrificial community they’ve formed there with a few other families. We learned about the arduous learning curve involved in beginning to raise, and slaughter, cattle and other animals–in graphic detail. In the interview posted above, Brian talks a bit about some of the compromises involved in moving to the country–not an angle I was expecting to hear.

The next morning we went to the “Wine Before Breakfast” service at the Wycliffe College chapel that the community has been holding every school year Tuesday since Sept 18, 2001. The service was a beautiful mix of singing, litanies, readings from the Bible and a poetic sermon by Brian. It was September 11th, and it was fascinating to learn that this community was started the week after the 9/11/2001 attacks.

The service was largely a lament, a cry of grief out to God, around the event of 9/11 and all the violence that has exploded out of that day. The first reading was from Psalm 13:

How long O Lord, will You forget me?
How long O lord, will you look the other way?
How long O lord, must I bear pain in my soul
And everyday, have such sorrow in my heart?

…But I trust, in Your unfailing love
Yes my heart will rejoice
Still I sing, of Your unfailing love
You have been good
You will be good to me

As a kid, growing up in an atheist household, this was the main thing I could never understand about Christianity: how can Christians believe that God is omnipotent, and that He lets all this bad stuff happen, and yet still love and trust Him? The answer, which I’m only starting to be able to grasp, is that what Christians are doing is surrendering to the mystery of God. They don’t claim to know what God is up to with us (well, some do), they are just taking it on faith that whatever it is, it’s good, beautiful and infinitely important and meaningful.

The Wine Before Breakfast service definitely helped deepened my understanding of all this.

After breakfast, Brian sat down for an audio interview with me in his office. I tried to get him to discuss his book and Colossians with a secular audience in mind. You can listen to the excerpts by clicking on the track titles above, or download the whole interview for your iPod to take with you.

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