I often do not agree with David Brooks' columns in the New York Times. Today, however, he has one that is very much on target in terms of looking at one of the examples of the extreme sickness of Christianity in America: the concept that if one is religious, then one ought to be raking in the money. Locally in Virginia, one need only think of Pat Robertson as an example of unbridled greed dressed up as the reward of piety. Related to the concept is the phenomenon of churches spending immense amounts on buildings and plush facilities at the expense of feeding the hungry, giving shelter to the homeless and being the good neighbor described in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Too many congregations of every denomination act more like the Pharisees roundly condemned by Christ rather than following Christ's message. Having attend the local equivalent of the mega-churches - where services are more like a contemporary rock concert than what I as a former Catholic and now Lutheran consider to be church - described by Brooks I can identify with the lament: self-satisfied individuals riding to church from their mcmansions in bloated, gas guzzling SUV's and similar gas hogs. Here are highlights from Brooks' op-ed piece:*
In the coming years of slow growth, people are bound to establish new norms and seek noneconomic ways to find meaning. One of the interesting figures in this recalibration effort is David Platt.
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Platt earned two master’s degrees and a doctorate from the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. At age 26, he was hired to lead a 4,300-person suburban church in Birmingham, Ala., and became known as the youngest megachurch leader in America.
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Platt grew uneasy with the role he had fallen into and wrote about it in a recent book called “Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream.” It encapsulates many of the themes that have been floating around 20-something evangelical circles the past several years.
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Platt’s first target is the megachurch itself. Americans have built themselves multimillion-dollar worship palaces, he argues. These have become like corporations, competing for market share by offering social centers, child-care programs, first-class entertainment and comfortable, consumer Christianity.
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Jesus, Platt notes, made it hard on his followers. He created a minichurch, not a mega one. Today, however, building budgets dwarf charitable budgets, and Jesus is portrayed as a genial suburban dude. “When we gather in our church building to sing and lift up our hands in worship, we may not actually be worshipping the Jesus of the Bible. Instead, we may be worshipping ourselves.”
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But the Gospel rejects the focus on self: “God actually delights in exalting our inability.” The American dream emphasizes upward mobility, but “success in the kingdom of God involves moving down, not up.” Platt calls on readers to cap their lifestyle. Live as if you made $50,000 a year, he suggests, and give everything else away.
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[T]he country is clearly redefining what sort of lifestyle is socially and morally acceptable and what is not. People like Platt are central to that process. The United States once had a Gospel of Wealth: a code of restraint shaped by everybody from Jonathan Edwards to Benjamin Franklin to Andrew Carnegie. The code was designed to help the nation cope with its own affluence. It eroded, and over the next few years, it will be redefined.
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One can hope that Brooks is correct. Being a cynic, however, I doubt that folks like Maggie Gallagher, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Joel Osteen and other professional Christians/leeches will get on board. They still see religion - or at least feigned religious belief - as the road to self enrichment. WWJD?
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