“You’re right,” I said, “you have to make that commitment if you want your kids to be successful at soccer. But the question I keep thinking about is why we don’t care as much about our kids becoming successful Christians?”
.. The discussion about how youth sports affects church attendance is a perfect illustration of this dynamic. Wanting our kids to be successful and fearing that our kids will fall behind their peers, we push our families to a point of exhaustion where we no longer have the time or energy for Christian community and spiritual formation.
.. At the end of my last post I said it’s time for Christians to start opting out of the rat race of modern, capitalistic societies. And that’s what I think should be at the heart of a Ben Op “withdrawal.” By withdrawal we mean opting out.
.. Theologically, a better word might be renunciation. If Christianity is going to become a locus of resistance to Empire we have to be formed into people who renounce–opt out, psychologically withdraw from–the way Empire defines success and significance. In the empire I live in that means opting out of the American Dream.
.. In the sermon I gave at ACU’s Summit last year, I shared the story of a young man who left a prestigious educational institution to teach history at a poor, inner-city high school. That’s opting out of the American Dream. That’s resisting empire, pursuing a very different path toward success and significance.
.. And notice how the opting out in these two examples–youth sports and career choices–face the exact same challenge: social shaming and stigma, the fear of “falling behind,” the neurotic anxiety about not being successful. If we opt out of youth sports we fear that our kids will not be successful or will fall out of step with their peers, making them odd and weird. If we say no to a prestigious career opportunity to pursue more servant-oriented work we fear looking like a loser or a failure to our peers, neighbors, colleagues, families, and even, in our heart of hearts, to ourselves.
In short, to opt out of empire is to experience shame. Which means that we have to become shame-resilient if we want to resist empire, individually and collectively.
And that’s why we need the Ben Op. Shame-resiliency.
.. In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods.
Despair, American Style
You see a somewhat similar pattern across regions within the United States. Life expectancy is high and rising in the Northeast and California, where social benefits are highest and traditional values weakest. Meanwhile, low and stagnant or declining life expectancy is concentrated in the Bible Belt.
.. So what is going on? In a recent interview Mr. Deaton suggested that middle-aged whites have “lost the narrative of their lives.” That is, their economic setbacks have hit hard because they expected better. Or to put it a bit differently, we’re looking at people who were raised to believe in the American Dream, and are coping badly with its failure to come true.
.. Ross Douthat and Paul Krugman writing on the same topic and ending in a similar place! I hope both political parties pay attention. This urgent, and will get worse.
The causes are many. Here is another. We are living a game of musical chairs. An economy which doesn’t value people’s efforts, which throws millions of people on the scrap heap with every recession, crushes people’s self esteem. If you grow up in a middle class family, with the expectation that if you’re willing to work, you can have a family, be respected, then find this is impossible, the result is depression and too often suicide.
It’s a terrible thing, but this happened in my own family.
.. Ask almost any white male in his 50s and 60s and he will know of many of his cohorts in the same age group — including himself — who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own.
Age-and-wage is the No. 1 discrimination factor in the American job market today. And education and experience (years of service) are of little help and make matters worse as seniority and education usually mean higher pay.
The Downsizing of the American Dream
The American dream has long been equated with moving up the class ladder and owning a home. But polling leading up to the 2012 election revealed something new—middle-class Americans expressed more concern about holding on to what they had than they were with getting more. Echoing these concerns, Pew reported in 2015 that when asked which they would prefer—financial security or moving up the income ladder—92 percent selected security. This is a seven percentage point increase since just 2011, when 85 percent selected security over economic mobility.
.. people are downsizing their definition of the American dream. Today, the desire to own a home or to move up economically is often replaced by a desire to be debt free and to have financial stability.
These developments point to a possible change in the underlying psychology of the American dream, and thus for the country more broadly. When people are more concerned about falling down than they are with moving up, planning ahead and having big goals is not only pointless but painful, since time and again something outside of one’s control comes along and upends their plans. There are grave consequences to this: People stop making investments in their education; they delay or never have children; they stop buying homes, they are less likely to take entrepreneurial risks; and they defer their dreams, often indefinitely.