It’s the non-economic uses of money that make money so complicated, even demonic. Jesus saw the demonic side when he saw money as a rival god capable of inspiring great devotion. “You cannot serve God and mammon.” Note that only money is put on a par with God, not knowledge, not family nobility, not reputation, not talent: only money is elevated to divine status. No wonder Jesus talked more about money than any other subject, except the kingdom of God.
—William Sloane Coffin Jr.
If someone stopped me on the street and asked, “What is the greatest threat facing America?” I would not hesitate to answer—greed. If the question were phrased differently to inquire about the greatest threat facing the church, I would have a hard time responding differently. Two heresies seem dominant in our age. One is the heresy of docetism, the belief that Jesus was not human at all, but God masquerading on earth as a human being. The second is the so-called prosperity gospel, the heresy of believing that God wants believers to get rich and that material abundance is proof of God’s love.
Strangely, these two heresies are directly connected. The docetic heresy at its heart reveals a kind of doctrinal greed, taking the metaphysics of the incarnation to its most selfish extreme. The literal consequences of such a heresy would suggest that during the earthly ministry of Jesus the heavens were empty, so to speak. When Jesus prayed to God, he was really praying to himself. When he spoke in God’s name, it wasn’t really blasphemy, but the original Source. Thus it was God who died on the cross, and God who raised Himself, returning to the “right hand of Himself,” until He returns again Himself in disguise. Quite literally one could thus argue: if you don’t know Jesus, you’ve never met God—or vice versa.
The prosperity gospel, on the other hand, hardly blushes when it comes to the object of faith. Never mind that it turns the Bible’s teachings about wealth upside down. It is spreading like wildfire in our time, crossing over from white evangelical megaministries to black Pentecostal churches and sweeping the continent of Africa itself. Its defining proof-text requires a hermeneutical contortion. Preachers tell their flocks that when Jesus said, “I came that they might have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10), it was material wealth he was talking about, and the Bible is like a map that guides us to buried treasure. And it’s all for us.
While channel surfing one day I happened to come upon a broadcast from the Crenshaw Christian Center in Los Angeles. Striding across a stage devoid of religious symbols (crosses are seldom visible in megachurches) was the Reverend Frederick K. C. Price. He is a dashing symbol of wealth and all its trappings. The suit was tailored silk; the rings and the Rolex caught and reflected the studio lights. He waved a Bible above his head, its gilt-edged pages sparkling like his cuff links, conferring scriptural link to his personal success. The message was obvious: I have made it, and this is why; you too can make it, and this is how.
He looked out upon an audience of thousands and asked: “When you read that Jesus says, ‘I came that you might have life and have it more abundantly,’ what does ‘abundantly’ say to you as an individual person? What?”
The congregation roared back the answer: “A whole lot of stuff!”
Price responded, “A whole lot of stuff. Talk to me, brother. A whole lot of stuff.”
When asked recently to explain his defense of the prosperity gospel, Price responded, “God gives us the power to get wealth. Does that sound like he wants you to be on welfare? That’s in the Bible! He gives you power or the ability to get wealth. Notice what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say God will make you wealthy. It says he’ll give you the power to get it.”1
I can at least admire the apologetics here. Not even Reverend Price wishes to claim that God alone will make people wealthy. Such claims are absurd on several levels, not the least of which is Mary’s song, the Magnificat (Luke 2:46–55). In the great reversal of the reign of God, the hungry will be filled with good things, and “the rich he has sent away empty.” Price also assumes that when Jesus speaks, God is speaking, yet the claim that God causes wealth makes him a bit uneasy. For one thing, since “with God all things are possible,” then why are we not all rich now? Certainly, it would not be for lack of praying.
Stranger still is the remarkable distortion of the meaning of “abundant life” as having to do primarily with material wealth, an interpretation that must, for the sake of this preacher’s own “abundant” life, turn a deaf ear to a chorus of warnings issued by Jesus of Nazareth concerning the dangers of wealth. At precisely the moment in American history when there is a growing consensus that we are living unsustainable lives because of unsustainable appetites, the church has lost its own voice. Once considered a deadly sin, greed has been made over into a sign of divine election and blessing.
The creative exegesis this requires is breathtaking. The aforementioned Reverend Price, however, gives us an example. He says, confidently:
Jesus had plenty, and then he was always giving to people, always giving to the poor, and so he had plenty from a material point of view. He was responsible for 12 grown men—their housing, their transportation, their food, their clothing—for a three and a half year period of time. He had to have something. This concept of Jesus being physically poor is not biblically true; it’s traditionally true.2
There you have it. Everything you have ever been told about the poverty of Jesus—his counsel to his disciples to take “no bread, no bag, no money in their belts” (Mark 6:8); his challenge to the rich young ruler to sell all he has, give the money to the poor, and follow him; the liturgies of his death on a cross with a robe as his sole possession—has been not just adapted but reversed. The “tradition” that brought us this misconception, according to Price, has distorted the true facts. But that very scripture, including those passages that speak of “abundant life,” is the tradition!
From the earliest writings of Paul to the last line of John’s Revelation, there is nothing in or out of the Bible that even hints that Jesus was wealthy. To the contrary, although he is systematically deified by the early church, he is never elevated socioeconomically. He lives and dies a peasant, and although there were obviously wealthy patrons in the early church from the beginning, the relationship between the Jesus community and material possessions was downright Marxist: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need” (Acts 2:44–45).
The transformation of the social gospel into the prosperity gospel (also called the “name it and claim it” or “blab it and grab it” gospel) did not occur in a vacuum. It is the inevitable devolution of the power of positive thinking movement that became a mainstream movement in America with the sermons of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. The idea that God wants individuals to be successful, as opposed to socially responsible, and that faith itself is a success strategy had its roots in nineteenth-century existentialism. Even in the Great Awakening, the emphasis in religion began to undergo an experiential shift from surrender of the self to transformation of the self—and now, sadly, to self-aggrandizement.
GOD THE COSMIC BELLHOP
A tectonic shift has occurred in Western Christianity, mostly in the past century. The chasm now separating Christians from their own gospel concerning wealth is so wide and deep that when someone shouts across it we think they are talking nonsense. But before faith got wrapped seamlessly in the garb of the good life, followers of Jesus used the gospel wisdom to lance the boils of ego. The enemies of the spiritual life were pride and vanity. Worshiping earthly power, or failing to see that all blessings belong to God and should be managed on behalf of the less fortunate, was a sin.
The gospel and the community that formed around it provided the possibility that by grace one might escape the prison of self. They taught the virtues of humility, generosity, and compassion. God’s power had been “made perfect in weakness,” said Paul (2 Cor. 12:9)—an idea that to this day is so radical and counter-cultural that it deserves the scorn heaped upon it. Nevertheless, a follower of Jesus would never have considered the covenant of faith to be an individual covenant, much less a strategy for success. Jesus had names for religious leaders who cloaked themselves in piety in order to acquire status and power and wealth—a “brood of vipers” is just one example (e.g., Matt. 3:7).
This “humility rule,” if you will, prevailed as the ultimate test of any claim to religious faith until the purpose of religion itself began to shift—away from a way of life that required sacrifice and service to a sanctified form of private ambition. The preaching of the church reflected this shift in a consumer society in ways that dulled the damnation of greed and brought God on board as a kind of spiritual Retailer. To sharpen this point by a comparison, consider this line from the renowned preacher Charles H. Spurgeon, uttered just over a hundred years ago to what was then the largest congregation in all Christendom:
I believe that it is anti-Christian and unholy for any Christian to live with the object of accumulating wealth. You will say, “Are we not to strive all we can to get all the money we can?” You may do so. I cannot doubt but what, in so doing, you may do service to the cause of God. But what I said was that to live with the object of accumulating wealth is anti-Christian.3
The meaning here is unmistakable and conforms to numerous scriptural warnings about the love of money as spiritually debilitating. In the twentieth century, however, a New York City preacher who went by the name of Reverend Ike turned this teaching on its head by saying, “The lack of money is the root of all evil!” and “If you have trouble handling money, send it to me.” 4
When John Wesley preached his famous sermon “On the Use of Money,” he said that if you make and save all that you can honestly, but do not give all you can away to relieve poverty, feed the hungry, and heal the sick, you may be a living person, but a dead Christian. Our luxuries, according to Wesley, should always come after someone else’s necessity. What’s more, before we die, we should have given all our money away.
Now let’s be honest. Most of us don’t plan to give all our money away before we die. Most of us plan to leave most of it to our kids. As for the seductions of wealth, we should begin by stating the obvious: about nothing are human beings more hypocritical than sex and money. In the case of the former, we enjoy reserving for ourselves the right to engage privately in what we condemn publicly. In the case of the latter, we love to hate the rich people we secretly long to become!
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the letter of James was written in and on behalf of a poor congregation: “Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you. Your riches have rotted, and your clothes are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire” (5:1–3). Take that! Now let’s go buy a lottery ticket.
Since confession is good for the soul, let me begin with myself. Because none of us are immune from the seductions of stuff, I recently found myself secretly lusting after one of those flat-screen high-definition television sets. But I knew perfectly well that as a minister I am supposed to at least temper my consumer impulses, especially when it comes to such an obvious status symbol. After all, people brag about the size of their flat-screen TVs the way some people speak about the number of vintage labels in their wine cellar. When you tell someone you bought a flat-screen TV, the next question is guaranteed—“How big?”
Even so, I had to admit that watching programs in high definition was quite wonderful, and increasingly I felt like a dinosaur with rabbit ears in a world of megapixels and liquid crystal displays. Then along came my teenage son to help me out of my dilemma. We connect as father and son around our mutual love of college basketball (especially our beloved Kansas Jayhawks), and so right in the middle of March Madness, Cass came to me one day with a proposal specifically designed to assuage my guilt.
“Dad, we need a high-def TV to really enjoy the tournament. You know you want one, so what better time? Think of all the fun we’ll have watching it together.”
This was the sign from God that I’d been waiting for! I went out immediately and bought one, although I debated in my own mind what was “big enough” versus what was “too big.” Come to think of it, that is a debate that goes on every day on this shrinking planet. But in the end we find ways to rationalize what we want, and we want a lot.
The largest church in America is now led by Joel Osteen. It meets in the Compaq Center in Houston and regularly draws twenty thousand people to worship. Osteen’s approach is more sophisticated than that of Reverend Ike, but the message is essentially the same. Not only does God want us all to be rich, but the down payment required is a level of giving to Osteen’s church that corresponds to the prosperity gospel formula: one can expect to be rewarded in ways that are commensurate with one’s giving.
Giving, in other words, is not really an act of devotion without strings attached. It is an investment. Joel’s wife, Victoria, put it this way in a recent worship service: “He not only wants to enrich you, but do things for you you know nothing about. Let him breathe the breath of life into your finances, and he’ll give it back to you bigger than you could ever give it to him.” The congregation says “Amen” and the buckets go around.5
If we can step back a moment, after admitting to our own culpability, there is still something remarkable going on here. This is no small step away from the biblical ethic of how the strong treat the weak. The gifted preacher Ernest Campbell put it this way. Consider the fact that much preaching today revolves around telling people, “Invite God into your story!” But the message of the Bible is entirely different. The invitation of scripture is to ask, “How can you be invited into God’s story?”
The former is egocentric and selfish. It assumes that God, as Campbell put it, is a kind of Cosmic Bellhop. Where would you like your bags? It reverses the subject-object order of faith itself. To be invited into God’s story is the true meaning of covenant. It means sacrificing what all partners in a covenant are required to give up in order to effect transformation and redemption—as individuals, as families, as communities, and as citizens of the world. Christians are not independent contractors. To assume the posture of a God who exists to meet our shameless desires in a world that begs for bread is only possible in this culture for two reasons: “First, Christianity is the dominant faith tradition; second, the nation permits and rewards extraordinary inequalities of wealth and power.”6
Once again, we see that the present crisis is not just political but theological. The heresy that makes all other heresies possible today is the idea that one can make the Bible say whatever it is that one wishes it to say, and that refusing to participate in such postmodern nonsense is a sign of intolerance or insensitivity to a gospel of “different strokes for different folks.” People mistakenly call this religious freedom. It’s not. According to author and essayist Curtis White:
Religious freedom has come to this: where everyone is free to believe whatever she likes, there is no real shared conviction at all, and hence no church and certainly no community. Strangely, our freedom to believe has achieved the condition that Nietzsche called nihilism, but by a route he never imagined. For Nietzsche, European nihilism was the failure of any form of belief (a condition that church attendance in Europe presently testifies to). But American nihilism is something different. Our nihilism is our capacity to believe in everything and anything all at once. It’s all good!7
At one level, thoughtful people will ask, so what’s wrong with Osteen’s gospel of kindness to others, positive self-esteem, leaving past mistakes behind, and material blessings? Don’t we all want these things, however we seek them or justify them, and isn’t much of the critique of the prosperity gospel tinged with simple envy at its remarkable success? So what if he never mentions sin, suffering, or self-sacrifice? Isn’t that what turns people off about organized religion?
The answers to these questions depend upon what one believes about the meaning and purpose of religion to begin with. If it is truly about getting saved and then getting rich while you wait to die, then the prosperity gospel is the natural result of our collective theological amnesia. But if the message is not infinitely malleable, if it really is about wisdom, selflessness, peace, and social justice, then our way of being the church cannot escape critique. When two ways of being in the world are diametrically opposed to each other, the claims of equal validity for each cannot be made so long as they are both called the same thing! It would be more honest for Osteen to call his enterprise the Osteen Institute for Positive Thinking and Material Prosperity. Calling it a church begs the question of whether all manifestations of the church are equally valid. Can any institution selling any product or behaving in any manner still call itself a church?
“YOUR BEST LIFE NOW” VS. THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT
Few would argue with the assertion that the Sermon on the Mount is the Constitution of the Christian faith. Although clearly part of the “emerging tradition” of the early church and subject to obvious redaction, the essence of the Sermon on the Mount, like the parables, stood a better chance of remaining reasonably intact because of its form. It consists of condensed aphorisms that reverse conventional wisdom and thus could be memorized as part of the oral tradition. The following should therefore give all prosperity preachers pause, including Osteen, author of the bestseller Your Best Life Now:
Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Matt. 6:19–20)
One of the convenient truths about the prosperity gospel is that it either attracts people who are already wealthy but want more with less guilt (our name is legion) or promises a miracle for those who are in desperate straits and on the verge of financial ruin. Either way, it plays on anxiety. There are plenty of both these days (guilt and anxiety), as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. But consider how odd this message is compared to Jesus’ follow-up on living a simple life: “Do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?… For tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today” (Matt. 6:31–34, emphasis added).
Jesus goes on to say that we should seek first the kingdom of heaven, and the basic necessities of life will be provided. This cannot possibly have anything to do with wealth or riches, since he prayed only for enough bread for the day. The emphasis is upon the kingdom, with its open table and social justice, which comes before daily bread. When he is reported to have said, “Ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you” (John 15:7), he cannot have meant that we should pray (as in the popular revision of the “Prayer of Jabez”) for riches, since this is inconsistent with the way he taught his disciples to pray. The emphasis is always “other-oriented,” and this produces “just enough.” The early church was, on the whole, a gathering of the poor. If there can be any doubt remaining about the dangers of wealth, Jesus goes on to say, “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth” (Matt. 6:24).
To use Paul Tillich’s phrase, this has to do with “ultimate concern.” Whatever becomes your ultimate concern is your god. So you cannot pretend to worship both without being a hypocrite. What lesson can be learned from Jesus’ statement “Blessed are the poor” and from the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, except that those who prosper in this life while ignoring the poor will get their just reward?
In the parable of the rich man who foolishly stockpiles his wealth, building larger and larger barns, only to die suddenly without anything of true value (Luke 12:16–21), the wisdom of Jesus runs counter to the premise of the prosperity gospel itself. God does not exist to bless anyone’s standard of living, and there are indeed “no pockets in a shroud.” This unconventional wisdom would be a threat to every investment firm on Wall Street—mocking the idea of retirement anxiety and counseling that we should live in the moment with reckless generosity. In the letter of James is this counsel: “You covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts… You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures. Adulterers! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God” (4:2–4).
Prosperity gospel preachers have even defended their appeal to material wealth by grounding it in the covenant with Abraham. They interpret his blessings as primarily material in nature and then extend those blessings to Christians. Televangelist Kenneth Copeland argues: “Since God’s covenant has been established and prosperity is a provision of this covenant, you need to realize that prosperity belongs to you now!”8 To defend this position, prosperity preachers appeal to Galatians 3:14, but only to the first half of the text, which says that “in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles…” The second half reads, “so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through the faith.” Obviously, these are not material blessings that Paul is talking about.
Some prosperity preachers even distort orthodox views of the atonement, especially 2 Corinthians 8:9: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.” Ironically, Paul was teaching the Corinthians that since Christ accomplished so much for them through his death and resurrection, then how much more ought they to empty themselves of their riches in service to him.
A final example is 3 John 2: “Beloved, I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers” (NKJV). Prosperity preachers like Oral Roberts have used this text as a carte blanche approval of the gospel of prosperity. But this is merely a greeting by John, and the Greek word translated as “prosperity” is only used four times in scripture and does not mean to prosper in the sense of gaining material possessions. Rather, it means “to grant a prosperous expedition and expeditious journey” or “to lead by a direct and easy way.”
Where there is a capitalist will, however, there is almost always a nonbiblical way. So many of us desire material wealth, and our culture offers so few other ways to measure success, that the prosperity gospel is the inevitable result of a faith tradition now completely assimilated into the dominant culture. The appeal is irresistible: you can have all this and Jesus too. Whether it’s Joel Osteen or the Reverend Creflo Dollar (his real name), who brags about the number of Rolls Royces God has given him, there is now a whole generation of high-powered, influential, attractive preachers who are peddling a dangerous myth. They are “drunk with the wine of the world,” to use poet James Weldon Johnson’s phrase. The fact that the prosperity gospel is growing so rapidly in the African American community may be because more blacks have moved into the middle class, and this is a way to justify upward mobility without feeling guilty, according to Professor Michael Dyson of Georgetown University. “The civil rights movement said, ‘You are responsible for your brother and sister. You ought to bring them along.’ The prosperity gospel says, ‘Your brother or sister is responsible for him- or herself, and what they should be doing is praying right, so that God can bless them, too.’”9
This “gospel of bling,” as Robert Franklin calls it, represents what he calls “the single greatest threat to the historical legacy and core vales of the contemporary black church tradition.” It has placed the church in the posture of “assimilating into a culture that is hostile to people living on the margins of society, such as people living in poverty, people living with AIDS, homosexuals, and immigrants.”10
When the church moves away from the work to which it was called and commissioned, the poor will have lost one more ally in a world where we shop with a religious frenzy and step over homeless people on our way to the next clearance sale. Just when we desperately need a gospel that can critique our madness, a “Christ against culture” to use H. Richard Niebuhr’s phrase, we have preachers telling us how to serve mammon by using God.
The church can no longer afford preachers who fail to take a stand when they know that the church is facilitating evil, whether it’s a war based on lies, cruelty toward gays based on fear, or a distortion of the wisdom of Jesus as fantastic as the prosperity gospel. It’s time we faced the hard truth. Selling Jesus as an investment strategy is a sin, and anyone claiming to be a Christian who does not practice simplicity and generosity is engaged in self-deception. After all, the best seats at the banquet mean nothing if, at the final banquet, God starts serving at the back of the line.
BEYOND THE SENTIMENT OF SIMPLICITY
There is a warm and fuzzy movement in the land today whose adherents wink at Thoreau, adore St. Francis of Assisi, and preach the virtues of “green” while parking two Range Rovers in a three-car garage and leaving a carbon footprint the size of Alaska. The verdict is in, and humanity itself faces a challenge to its very existence. The science we say we trust (unless it threatens our way of life or our religious beliefs) has spoken clearly, and our way of being in the world has become unsustainable. The way we consume, the way we farm, the way we go to war over oil—they have all come home to roost, and we are now at the end of our planetary rope.
As Al Gore described global warming recently, “The earth has a fever.”11 We are the major cause of that fever, and after we are gone the fever will eventually break and the earth will eventually repair itself without us. Perhaps this is our fate. Perhaps we are arrogant to assume that we are destined to remain the dominant species on this gorgeous globe. But in the meantime, what on earth is the church doing to save a perishing planet, instead of just our imperishable souls?
The answer is, almost nothing. As writer and critic Wendell Berry puts it, “The certified Christian seems just as likely as anyone else to join the military-industrial conspiracy to murder Creation.”12 Here and there, pockets of religiously inspired conscience are bubbling up, and although they face rejection and condemnation, some brave and thoughtful evangelicals are joining in the call to care for the earth. Mainline and liberal churches ought to do more than just applaud this fact. They should join hands and hearts to do battle with all the enemies that we all agree on: global warming, poverty, and the continued degradation of women. There’s nothing wrong with having a “personal relationship to Jesus,” as long as you know something about the company you are keeping. Liberals and conservatives could actually come together now over what it would mean to follow Jesus on a dying planet. Just think of the numbers.
To save ourselves, however, we will first have to save Jesus from the church—break him out of the stained-glass window in which he is frozen as a two-dimensional superhero without depth, flesh, or breath. We need to turn away from the institutional forgeries that constitute orthodoxy for millions: the blood atonement, fear-based fantasies of the afterlife, “vertical” notions of heaven and hell, selective providence based on human ignorance, and a God who pimps for us on the battlefield. Whatever else we think we know about the Great Mystery that goes by many names, this one fact is true: God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, even on our best days.
A consistent chorus of voices today is rising across what used to be considered impossible divides—political, economic, racial, sexual, and religious. The message is that what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called a “religionless Christianity” is not a new gospel at all, but the recovery of the original. Our faith was not born as a belief system; it was turned into one. We need not fear science, just because we have learned to understand time and space differently. It is not even a scandal now to call oneself an “atheist” (a nontheist) who still believes in the transcendent mystery that we call God. What’s more, a nontheistic understanding of God is what actually makes interfaith dialogue and mission possible. If God is the “Ground of Being” and not a Cosmic Dealer, then faith must be a journey toward wisdom and compassion and not a system of human creeds with divine consequences. This is a journey we can all take together, regardless of our specific prophets, teachers, or revelations. This is our hope.
Since survival itself now depends upon living in sustainable local communities, and the church at its best is a model of such community, it offers more hope than any other institution in our society for leading the way home. It cannot do this, however, if it remains a salvation club, dedicated to the “very strange enterprise of ‘saving’ the individual, isolated, and disembodied soul … as an eternal piece of private property.”13
The resources of creation must be more fairly distributed, and the church at its best could be a kind of fire-breathing dragon of conscience. If not, these growing inequalities will spark the kind of revolution that destroys the good with the bad. Revolution has never come except where conditions were revolting and the veneer of civilization thin. As history has proved with monotonous regularity, when the food finally runs out, the have-nots will grab whatever weapons are available and head straight for the suburbs.
The eminent Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann said once that to “do justice” is to “sort out what belongs to whom, and to return it to them.”14 This assumes that the prosperity gospel has it exactly backwards, or Moses would have said, “Let my people prosper!” What biblical justice does is restore what is denied, whether it’s freedom, human dignity, or the essentials of existence itself. Whether it is David’s rape of Bathsheba and his murderous cover-up or the death-dealing invasion of Iraq under false pretenses, we commit injustice when we take what doesn’t belong to us in order to enrich ourselves.
Perhaps the time has come for all of Christendom to sit at the feet of the Quakers and the Mennonites again. Perhaps we should all try to emulate the Friends and other nonviolent groups like them and practice simplicity and integrity as a lifestyle, not just as a politically correct sentiment. I have come to believe that of all those attempting to recover the essence of New Testament Christianity, the Quakers may have been the most faithful to the wisdom of Jesus. Believing that everyone has the ability to experience the love and leadership of God and that no ecclesiastical authority has to mediate or direct that experience, they live and act in ways that seek to remove anything that fosters pride or compromises one’s relationship to God—wealth, striving after success, or fashionable dress.
“Live simply so that others may simply live” is often thought to be just a standard liberal bumper sticker, but it has taken on an apocalyptic urgency. There is, quite simply, no hope for survival if we do not simplify. The church should take the lead by explaining that in the upside-down world of the reign of God, there are actually blessings to be found in “downward mobility.”
In what has become a prophetic statement about the sickness of the age, Emma Lapsansky framed the Quaker imperative this way: we must “dampen the noise of everyday life” in order to be open to the voice of the Inward Teacher.15 Contrary to the prosperity gospel, “plainness” becomes a personal virtue, and individual excesses are considered unethical because, as William Penn put it, “what aggravates the evil [of adherence to fashion] is that the pride of one might comfortably supply the needs of ten.”16
It has been our habit of late to separate the causes of war from our lifestyle, when in fact the seeds of war are planted there. A Quaker teacher and antislavery advocate, writing over two centuries ago, argued in one of the earliest analyses of the structural roots of poverty that the accumulation of wealth was itself a form of violence. “May we look upon our treasures, and the furniture of our houses, and [our] garments, and ask whether the seeds of war have any nourishment in these our possessions.”17
If the rest of the church could recognize this as the ancient concept of stewardship and rescue that word from its narrow application to fund-raising, we might discover that simplicity is not just practical, but liberating. It is, after all, the lesson of every enlightened teacher that material possessions beyond what is necessary for survival and simple pleasures should be disowned. The cycle of always wanting and acquiring more—and then storing, insuring, maintaining, and protecting all this stuff from theft—is expensive, time-consuming, and idolatrous and gets between the soul and life itself. To choose what is “plain and sober,” as Robert Barclay put it, is to battle vanity.
There is another way, and in the present crisis might lie the seeds of a different future. Expensive gas may actually help to bring back the joys of walking and bicycling, the socialization of mass transit, even the underrated beauty of just staying home. Americans may give up, finally, one of the most debilitating myths of Western culture: that there can always be more and more of everything. Besides, less is not just inevitable; it can be redemptive.
If you have ever lived in a house where nothing was ever discarded, you know that clutter closes in on the soul—as if you will eventually be found dead in the only space left free of knickknacks. To become a minimalist, therefore, is not just to express an architectural preference. Rather, it is to sweep the inane thieves of perfectly empty space out with the trash and gaze in astonishment on the forgotten beauty of a bed, a lamp, and a book. Austerity intensifies everything left standing.
More is not more, and excess may yet become the tattoo we regret from the weekend when we tried, but failed, to purchase happiness. It may become fashionable again to repair something, rather than to replace it, and to send away the chemical truck as it pulls up to spray poison on our yards in pursuit of the perfect lawn. For Jesus’ sake, send those trucks back where they came from. You may have more weeds, but the chemicals won’t all end up in mother’s milk.
It is a foolish dream, perhaps, but it’s mine—and faith is always against the odds. In my dream, people will plant vegetable gardens again and sit outside, watching the sky. They will learn to sew on buttons and make something with their own hands. The will take their own shopping bag to the store, and they will recycle everything as if the earth depends on it. Nothing will seem stranger than an “all you can eat” restaurant, and nothing will bring more shame in the future than to sport a grossly distended belly in a world of skeletal children.
Remember, in the church we should know what community means. Our bodies are part of the Body, and our open table is an exercise in sublime absurdity. The elements of bread and wine are so minuscule that we appear to be daring God to satisfy us out of all proportion to their size. Perhaps—even only maybe—we will begin to slow down, breathe deeply, dig in the dirt again with our own fingers, and save a small enough slice of the world to become contagious, even beautifully corrupting, “like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened” (Matt. 13:33).