Austerity and the American Dream

My friend C. sent me this article, written by an Australian:

American dream comes with a heavy cost

Ros Coward

The US debt debate reveals a nation living beyond its means.

ONE word is missing in the American debate over the debt crisis: austerity. It's a revealing absence. In spite of the vast deficit, and despite the US being the home of individualism, no way is being offered for individuals to make a difference by changing their lifestyles.

People in Britain have become familiar with talk of the ''new age of austerity''. Politicians of both left and right use the expression to frame the narrative about the cuts Britain is now facing. While both sides ''warn'' about this coming era, austerity is not negative in the British psyche. Associations with wartime Britain soften it. Austerity is associated with personal changes that benefited society and made sense to people who learned to tackle wastefulness, to ''make do and mend''.

Long before the current cuts, austerity was making a comeback in Britain, associated with the environmental issues of recycling, cutting consumption and reducing our carbon footprint. Indeed, the New Economics Foundation recently launched the New Home Front, arguing that wartime lifestyles are positive models for reducing environmental impact.

 Not so in the US. In the five months I spent there earlier this year, I never heard the word austerity in political discussion. There was nothing about individuals living beyond their means. Yet the US deficit is founded on overconsumption, made possible by too much consumer credit and, less well recognised, too much environmental credit.

In the current war of words in Congress, there is no reference to the immoral lending that encouraged people who could not afford it to invest in the American dream. Yet that is what led to the property crash and the financial crisis. From individuals I heard nothing about the need for prosperous people to change their ways. There are, of course, many worthy ''green shoots'', such as the ''locavore'' movement or the ''greening the campus'' initiative at the university I was visiting, where a newly appointed sustainability officer tries to cut energy use. But people like him have their work cut out.

The whole of the east coast and the rust belt are vast, shocking landscapes to which many Americans seem oblivious. This is a society that has lived not just beyond its economic means but beyond its environmental ones, too, as the hundreds of miles of abandoned buildings, abandoned cars, and endless highways bear witness to.

Yet the American dream survives. You're either in it, or out of it. Being out means destitution. In Britain I know many people who reject consumerism, getting involved in poorly paid environmental or political work. We regard them as rather honourable. In the US, if you don't have money you don't count.

None of this is supposed to indicate Britain has got it right. Far from it. The relaxation of planning controls with the potential to trash the environment is a case in point. But at least words such as thrift and sustainability don't carry such negative connotations. They suggest a place to work from. In the US, the ideological mindset makes these negative terms, which in turn makes the future there look bleak. Their problem isn't just fixing government spending, but ultimately counting the real costs of the American way of life.

Here's my response:

Austerity is not an American virtue. Making a profit and consuming are. "The concept that making money (employment) and spending money (consumerism) is the primary goal of individuals within a market economy, and the assumption that individuals must work for an employer to "make a living" and that such activity is the most meaningful and desirable of human activities." wikipedia

So we have tended to equate consumption with success and happiness and being good Americans. We define ourselves in terms of our quarterly earnings reports and our "stuff." Buying and selling on credit just allows us to have more stuff, feel better about ourselves, and keep the economy rolling. Austerity is taken to be un-American, because it is a refusal to participate in this economic and social engine.

The housing crisis stands as a challenge to all this, because it means the conveyer belt has stopped. See this. Austerity is being imposed upon us, whether we want it or not. The question is, in the process, will we come to realize that the culture of capitalism is a false kingdom? If sin is missing the mark, then the gyrations between the extremes of consumerism and austerity are evidence that we are not where Christ intends us to be.

Rob Bell: crypto-Covenanter?

Okay, so I finally broke down and read Bell on hell. I don't usually read the latest evangelical best sellers until at least a couple of years go by. That way anything that isn't worthwhile will be remaindered and forgotten, and I won't need to waste my reading time. If something is still around, then it merits my attention.

However, Bell's Love Wins has created quite a fuss among some New Hope students and faculty. Wayne Cordiero, NHCC president, is a close friend of Francis Chan, who has recently written his own book in response to Bell. I certainly didn't want to be drawn into discussions and pull a Piper so I figured I should have a look.  (I am grateful that a good friend loaned me the book, so I could save my money for something more deserving, like James Dubay's The Evidential Power of Beauty or Peter Leithart's Defending Constantine. )

Anyway, it's my first Bell book. It's easy to read, full of questions, very, very popular and deliberately non-scholarly. In fact, it's downright sloppy about exegesis. That's really frustrating!  find myself agreeing  with Kyle Small, writing in the June 2011 Covenant Companion, that the book isn't really about heaven and hell: it is about election, and that Bell is reacting against his Reformed Calvinist tradition. This might explain Bell's stridency at various points. For those of us who do not share that tradition, reading "Love Wins" is not all that upsetting or enlightening.

I had to laugh at Kyle's observation:

This book is anything but radical for the Evangelical Covenant Church. The Covenant has held strongly to a view of the atonement where “God’s love for the world is magnified” and less so to the more classic substitutionary model of atonement where “the wrath of God is satisfied.” Covenant theology rejoices that God came to love the world and generously gave himself fully to us. I would venture to say that Bell becomes a Covenanter in his middle chapters. He even sounds like P.P. Waldenström in a few places (who was also wrongly criticized for being a universalist). As I re-read sections of the book, I wondered if the Covenant Church (via the Communications Department) had been invited to edit the work, especially the tone and phrasing, would this book have be more palpable? Perhaps!

Kyle is spot on as he concludes his review:

This book that many of us cannot understand. I continually felt like I had entered another family’s argument. Bell is overly polemical throughout these pages. Several friends have commented that wherever Bell says something clear and helpful he uses the next page to make a point that resembles a sword and not a ploughshare. He seems to write as if embattled from the outset.

I think Bell is responding to his theological past—a past that many North American young people continue to revolt against—in profound ways. Bell is a Reformed guy with a love for C.S. Lewis. If you grew up Baptist, Bible church, Reformed Church, or even conservative Presbyterian, this book might deeply resonate with you. And most Americans have a Reformed view of God in their back pocket, even when they are not aware of it (see Sydney Ahlstrom’s A Religious History of the American People). Lutherans would be one of the few groups to be somewhat disengaged from the topic altogether.

Reformed theology is centrally concerned with the theological topic of election. Bell’s tradition most often stresses certainty of salvation and election, including predestination. Reformed folks, like John Piper, read the Bible through the lens of election, asking, “Who has God chosen and not chosen? God chose Israel, God chose Jesus; did God choose me?” This question strikes fear in the heart. This fear responds by seeking salvation because the other options scare the hell out of us.....

American Calvinism has this interesting acronym for their theology called TULIP. I don’t necessarily understand it, but it has to do with the question, “Who is in/out?” If you resonate with John Piper, your perspective is primarily on “Who is in?” and “How do we assure ourselves of this?” If you resonate with Bell, the perspective is “Who is out?” and “How do we welcome them in?” If you resonate with neither and wonder why this book has produced such a firestorm, perhaps it is because you believe in a God who blesses the world, inside and out, or possibly because regardless of debates about heaven and hell, open or closed, you believe that Jesus Christ is the world-concerned story of how love wins.

Precisely. Reformed theology has nominalist DNA.   One of the by-products of nominalism is individualism, and a preoccupation with the problem of how it is possible to "group" individuals. This leads to a focus on a sovereign God who becomes the ultimate agent for grouping. "Either/or" thinking prevails. However, those of us whose theology is informed by a realist metaphysic delight in the way all things are related and ultimately relate to God, who Himself is a perfect community of Three Persons. Sin ruptures relationship, and separates us from God, and this leads us to focus on Jesus Christ, who is the ultimate agent of reconciliation.  As Waldenström writes,

When we started to speak of reconciliation, we raised the question if it was God, or man, or both parties, who was, or were, to be reconciled. Now we have searched the Bible and have found that it does not speak of God as being reconciled. The love of God had not been diminished through man's sin, so that it needed to be improved, increased or restored; nor could God's hatred of sin be done away with, for if He did not hate sin, He would not be righteous; neither could God's displeasure to those who live in sin be done away with, because even yet, this very day, God is displeased with all who live in sin. No change has taken place in Him. He remains the same; with Him there is "no variableness, neither shadow of turning." He is the eternally faithful, unchangeable God, whose name is Jehovah (that is, "I am that I am").

On the contrary, man needed to be reconciled to God....The Scriptures testify that man, as estranged from God, is carnal. It is not the Spirit of God that fills and rules him, but the flesh. But "the carnal mind" ("the mind of the flesh," according to the Revised Version) "is enmity against God," says Paul (Rom. 8:7). That is the chief trouble; not this or that transgression or misdeed; nay, but the very mind, is enmity against God: "for it (that is, this mind) is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can it be." Of the same thing the apostle speaks in Col. 1:21, where he says to the Christians: "Ye were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works." "The wicked works" of the ungodly are never isolated; they are expressions of the wicked, or evil mind. And the evil mind is enmity against God. This the natural man will never admit. Even though he may admit that now and then in his life and in his works he may be at fault or be mistaken, still he will hold that in the depths of his heart he is good. But no, says the apostle, the natural mind itself in man is enmity against God. It is a terrible judgment which the apostle by these words pronounces upon all that bears the name of man; but it is a true judgment.
In short, the heart of the world is estranged from and dead to God, averse to him; and this makes it unblest. Here, as we have said, a reconciliation must take place, a reconciliation which brings man into an entirely different relation to God, if he is to become happy. But how, then can such a reconciliation be brought about? By the removal of sin, and by the justification of man. That which separates must be removed. Otherwise there can be no reconciliation. But that which separates is sin. From this fact we understand why "the reconciliation of the sinner to God" always depends on "the atonement of the sins," that is, on removal of the sins. We repeat it again: By being cleansed from sin, the sinner comes into a right relation to God. In no other way can such a relation be brought about.

 Hell, then, is that condition of being estranged from, averse to and dead to God, just as heaven is that condition of being in a living, loving relation to Him.  Rob Bell gets it right when he writes,

There are individual hells
and communal, society-wide hells,
and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously. (p. 79)

Eternal life doesn't start when we die;
it starts now.
It's not about a life that begins at death;
it's about experiencing the kind of life now that can
endure and survive even death. (p. 59)

Jesus invites us
in this life,
in this broken, beautiful world,
to experience the life of heaven now.
He insisted over and over that God's peace, joy, and love
are currently available to us, exactly as we are...

There's a heaven now, somewhere else.
There's a heaven here, sometime else.
And then there's Jesus's invitation to heaven
here
and
now,
in this moment,
in this place. (p. 62)
       

Bottom line:  IMO Bell asks good questions, but doesn't have the personality, mind and theological tradition to provide good answers.  I'm going to look for Jerry Wall's Hell: The Logic of Damnation. It's been out for 9 years now, and it has infuriated some Calvinists, so it ought to be good. ; )

Languages Christians Speak, and how it affects Christ's mission

Ala. Governor Apologizes to Muslims, Hindus, Jews 
Posted on 01/20/2011 by Juan

Gov. Robert Bentley, the new governor of Alabama, created a firestorm of controversy on Monday when he said that if you are not a Christian he does not consider you his brother or his sister.

He added, “… so anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their saviour, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister…” Ironically, he was speaking for Martin Luther King Day at an African-American church, and was probably attempting to stress religious commonalities as a way of stressing that he opposes racial prejudice. Unfortunately for him, not all Alabamans are Christians.

Jews, Muslims and Hindus in Alabama were upset and contacted Bentley with their concerns.

Rabbi Jonathan Miller of Temple Emanu-El in Birmingham, Alabama, among other members of religious minorities in that state, let Gov. Bentley know that he felt that the remarks were ‘disenfranchising.’

Bentley apologized on Wednesday. His spokesperson issued a statement saying, “The Governor had intended no offense by his remarks. He is the governor of all the people, Christians, non-Christians alike…”

The controversy arose because Bentley did not understand American civil religion, which requires that in the public sphere, sectarian differences be put aside.

Sociologist Robert Bellah defined it this way:

‘ “an institutionalized collection of sacred beliefs about the American nation,” which he sees symbolically expressed in America’s founding documents and presidential inaugural addresses. It includes a belief in the existence of a transcendent being called “God,” an idea that the American nation is subject to God’s laws, and an assurance that God will guide and protect the United States.’

Civil religion discourse is the way that various kinds of Protestants, and eventually Catholics and Jews, participated in the American public sphere. It is a way of sidestepping sectarian commitments for the purpose of doing the business of the Republic. (Obviously, it somewhat disadvantages non-believers, now 14% of the population, but most of those are not atheists but agnostics and so far have not mounted a concerted challenge to this tradition of discourse).

Bentley, and new governor, tried to go on speaking his own evangelical language of difference, which is all right in the private sphere. But as a public person, he has new responsibilities, of speaking in a way that unifies.

Since 1965 in particular, large numbers of immigrants have come in from Africa and Asia who practice religions beyond the classic ‘Protestant-Catholic-Jew’ trinity. Thus, the Hindu American Foundation and the Muslims were among those who protested, along with Jews. There are about one million Hindus in the US, 2 million Buddhists, and about 5-6 million Muslims if you count children. They are clearly as committed to a public civil religion discourse as are Catholics and Jews.

It seems to me that the groups that protested Bentley’s statement have some international responsibilities. Would the governor chief minister of Gujarat in India be willing to say that Muslims are his ‘brothers and sisters’? Would Avigdor Lieberman in Israel accept Palestinian-Israelis as his ‘brothers and sisters?’ How many Pakistani Muslim politicians would speak of brotherhood and sisterhood with the country’s 3 million Hindu citizens? Maybe some letter-writing to those figures is in order, too.

It isn’t just in Alabama that there is a problem.

Bentley is simply a good Protestant nominalist. "Bentley, and new governor, tried to go on speaking his own evangelical language of DIFFERENCE, which is all right in the private sphere. But as a public person, he has new responsibilities, of speaking in a way that unifies."

The question is, should the language Christians speak be one exclusively of "difference?" (That is, the language of "either/or.") Can Christians engage in the unity language of "civil religion," (the language of "neither/nor") or do we have a responsiblity to speak the language of BOTH unity AND difference? If the latter, under what circumstances do we we use which vocabulary? ISTM Bentley's semantics and pragmatics "missed the mark." Mercifully, he was open to correction and apologized. Unfortunately, to people like professor Juan Cole, the belief that evangelicals only speak "either/or" is still intact.





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