INTRODUCTION 
THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN DREAM
For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.
I AM ON A WALK IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD in January. The air is cold, the ground is wet, but the sun breaks out for a few moments. I see sidewalks on a side street and am struck by the green moss growing on them. It reminds me of old growth; the moss has been there for a long time, and it will remain until whatever it is affixed to crumbles into dust. Other things I see on my walk: a used diaper, a pile of orange-colored vomit, the father of my daughter’s schoolmate driving away in a small red car. Two For Sale signs on houses. Hot sauce packets scattered on the ground. Trees bare and stretching to the sky.
Yet the moss hums with a vibrancy, it clings and covers that which remains. My son calls it fairy carpet because I taught him to say this. I am working on seeing little bits of magic where I can. I teach my children, and they teach me, our sight lines going to such different places. Look up, look down. I am learning to look at the ground again, to marvel at the good and the bad equally. I am learning to let the place teach me. This is probably as zen as I will ever get: meditating on bright green moss on a cold January day. This is how I am paying attention today.
I used to prayer walk, bold as brass, longing to witness to others. Now I walk the streets that make up my underresourced, glorious neighborhood, and I try to lean into in the gift of being a witness to the good and the bad of the world, to articulating the reality of my neighbors, to God’s presence and God’s absence. I guess this means I’ve undergone a conversion of sorts. I suppose this means I am probably trying to convert you too.
Here’s the story of one of my many conversions: when I was young and convinced the world was mine to save, I started volunteering with Somali Bantu refugees. They had survived the worst the world had to offer only to come to my city and suffer in new and different ways. This shocked me, as it would shock most people who have been sheltered from the realities of the world. I tried to be strong, I tried not to flinch as every one of my most dearly held beliefs about the goodness of God and the goodness of my country wilted in front of me as I started to see life through the eyes of the refugees of the world.
One day I went into the apartment of a Somali Bantu family. There, on the counter, was a stack of bills. No one in the family could read in any language, and translators were few and far between. They asked me to read the bills, and I thumbed through the stack, the costs of the American Dream piling up in that apartment with just a few curtains hung up for decorations, a pot of stew bubbling on the stove. One of the envelopes contained a staggering sum, the cost of the plane rides from the refugee camp in Kenya to the United States for this family of six. The bill was for thousands of dollars.
I held it in my hands, my fingers burning. I hadn’t realized that refugees have to pay back the very tickets that supposedly mark their lucky chance to become a part of the dream. What should I tell my new friends? That they were already in debt, already in a hole that I saw no clear path out of? Looking at the faces smiling expectantly back at me, I felt a great chasm grow in my chest as I realized how wide the gap was between how I wish the world was and how it actually was.
When I was young, it was so simple. I thought God was good. I thought God rewarded those who obeyed the rules. I thought my good news was accessible to everyone if only they had the ears to listen. I thought my country was a place where hard work was rewarded on a level playing field, no matter where you came from. Luckily, my life was complicated in beautiful ways that scraped at my very soul. I was plunged into a situation where I was confronted with my privilege and there was no way to wriggle out of it. Volunteering with, working with, and eventually living alongside people who had experienced forced migration help to shatter the unspoken norms I had built up in my mind—what I call the myth of the American Dream, but which can also be called empire or dominant culture ideology.
I slowly realized I did not have a worldview or an ethical framework that accounted for realities different from my own. I was unable to solve the problems of my new friends with my correct doctrine, a Protestant work ethic, and the belief that I was at the tail end of a long line of people who had perfected the art of getting everything right about how to be a human. While the bills and stories and heartbreaks piled up in the lives of people around me, I had to recognize that there were larger forces at play that negatively affected people in my own city, country, and the world—and these systems seemed to harm people in particular who were not White, middle-class evangelicals like me.
This has not been an easy conversion, and I am still in the throes of it. White evangelicals like myself are uniquely unprepared to engage in issues from an institutional or systemic perspective.1 Our belief in individualism (especially free-will individualism, where each person is accountable to God for their own choices) can lead to the denial, dismissal, or erasure of larger problems or one’s responsibility to them. Many White evangelicals grow up believing sin (including large issues like racism, sexism, and economic exploitation) to be a heart issue, due to our original sin nature, solved by a personal relationship with Jesus.2
If you had asked me what Jesus came to do, growing up the daughter of a pastor I would have said he came to die and pay the price for the sins of those who believe in him. A few years ago I realized something: that is not actually how Jesus defined his own life and work. Instead, Luke 4 tells us that when he wanted to announce his ministry, he went to the synagogue in his hometown and read a striking passage of Scripture. He went straight to the heart of the religiously upright, those who knew all the right answers and quoted their own wild prophets right back to them.
The book of Isaiah is chock full of indictments against the oppressive forces of its day, railing against what happens when the people of God forgot how to obey, how they started to ignore and forget the poor. So it is no surprise that Jesus used the book of Isaiah to lay the groundwork of his movement. And this is what he announced to that crowd:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release for the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4:18-19 NRSV)
Perhaps I had never paid attention to this passage because I had never been truly poor or in prison; I was neither blind nor very oppressed. But now, thanks to my relationships with refugees, I did know people who fit these categories, and I was desperate for a God who was good news for them. The more I read this passage, the more I studied who Jesus was drawn to and who was drawn to him, the more it became clear: this wasn’t just Jesus announcing what he had come to do. This was Jesus providing a road map for where we would always find him at work in the world. And what did it mean that for most of my life I had been headed in the opposite direction?
The Sufi poet Hafiz wrote, “Slipping on my shoes, boiling water, toasting bread, buttering the sky: that should be enough contact with God in one day to make anyone crazy.”3
There’s a progression here that I identify with. Waking up to the world, slowly, until you realize that everything is upended. Being faithful to swing your legs over the side of the bed, to put on the slippers. To boil the water for the coffee. And the next minute you find yourself waving your butter knife to the sky—perhaps in anger, perhaps in frustration, perhaps in gratitude. The exact reason isn’t important. But buttering the sky is a way we reach out to God when the normal routines of our life are no longer enough.
For many of us, our lives have been carefully designed to follow certain values: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, perhaps. When I started to meditate on Luke 4, on taking Jesus at his word that this is the work he came to do, my own unspoken values started to shimmer to the surface. I began by asking questions: What is the opposite of poor? Of captivity, blindness, oppression? As I meditated on this question, the answers surprised me. The answers, it turned out, were the defining values of my life, the ones I was perpetually striving for, all in the name of a “good” life.
Affluence, autonomy, safety, and power. Four concrete values that bled into each other and seeped into my bones, affecting the decisions I made every day, from the tiniest to the monumental. I feel drawn to pursue these values with little to no self-interrogation: of course, I want a good house in a good neighborhood, a stable job, the ability to provide for myself and my family, the best education possible for our kids, a life of ease and comfort, the ability to keep death and pain at bay, the opportunity to lead and to be at the top of the hierarchy, to be seen as an expert and accomplished, to take what I am owed by my virtue and hard work.
Fighting for, hoarding, colonizing, and grasping after each of these values was something so ingrained in me that I didn’t recognize how powerful these desires had become or how they had oriented me in the opposite direction to Jesus. And I do mean opposite: when people of privilege pursue affluence, autonomy, safety, and power above everything else, not only do they miss out on the liberating and restorative work of Jesus, but they participate in greater inequality, segregation, and suffering for the most marginalized people in their community. When people of means pursue what is best for them and their own in an unequal society, their actions inevitably harm the common good. People like myself end up disobeying the central commandment of Jesus—to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves—all in the name of pursuing a dream life for ourselves.
The myth of the American Dream comes in many forms, but its most basic iteration goes like this: anyone can make something of themselves if only they try hard enough. This myth is a double-edged sword. If the systems and structures that shape your world have worked for you, then you will believe this idea; it will strengthen your worldview and give you confidence that you’ve done something right, that you’re being rewarded for a job well done. And if other people experience it differently—say, if they are unable to find a job that pays a living wage or get access to education or secure a loan to buy a house—then something must be wrong with them, not the system. The myth of the American Dream not only baptizes the actions and desires of the privileged but also places the blame of inequality on those who are already disadvantaged, instead of turning the focus on changing the unjust systems.
In this book I will consider the narratives lying beneath the surface of so many easy answers that both American culture and American evangelicalism have given to the problem of suffering in an unequal and unjust world. I will attempt to show what it has been like to learn to practice the discipline of lament and how I am being changed by my relationship to people who are exiles from the American Dream—those who have no way to win or who have been excluded from the very beginning. I will share how I have tried, and failed and keep trying to live in opposition to what I’ve been told (even by the church) is best for me. The more I try to follow Jesus, the more I realize that if the gospel isn’t good news for the poor, the imprisoned, the brokenhearted, and the oppressed, then it isn’t good news for me either.
This is a book about paying attention. It’s about being fully alive, not just to the glories of electric green moss stubbornly growing between the cracks of pavement but to the systems and structures and policies that dull our imaginations for a world that truly has hope and good news and beauty for everyone. Parts of it will be hard. We who have been willfully blind will have to commit to noticing it all—the good and the bad, the ugly and the absent, the decay and despair. We will have to pay attention to inequality. We will lament. And we will learn to live as exiles from those who have walked the path before us. What we notice will leave a mark on us; we will be changed and converted. We will feel the responsibility to do something in return. It will feel like a blessing and a curse all at the exact same time.