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发帖数: 1709 | 1 【 以下文字转载自 Military 讨论区 】
发信人: beijingren3 (), 信区: Military
标 题: The Gospel of Wealth
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Fri Jan 15 19:15:58 2021, 美东)
Maybe the first decade of the 21st century will come to be known as the
great age of headroom. During those years, new houses had great rooms with
20-foot ceilings and entire new art forms had to be invented to fill the
acres of empty overhead wall space.
People bought bulbous vehicles like Hummers and Suburbans. The rule was, The
Smaller the Woman, the Bigger the Car — so you would see a 90-pound lady
in tennis whites driving a 4-ton truck with enough headroom to allow her to
drive with her doubles partner perched atop her shoulders.
When future archeologists dig up the remains of that epoch, they will likely
conclude that sometime around 1996, the U.S. was afflicted by a plague of
claustrophobia and drove itself bankrupt in search of relief.
But that economy went poof, and social norms have since changed. The
oversized now looks slightly ridiculous. Values have changed as well.
Today, savings rates are climbing and smart advertisers emphasize small-town
restraint and respectability. The Tea Party movement is militantly
bourgeois. It uses Abbie Hoffman means to get back to Norman Rockwell ends.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Next, Platt takes aim at the American dream. When Europeans first settled
this continent, they saw the natural abundance and came to two conclusions:
that God’s plan for humanity could be realized here, and that they could
get really rich while helping Him do it. This perception evolved into the
notion that we have two interdependent callings: to build in this world and
prepare for the next.
The tension between good and plenty, God and mammon, became the central
tension in American life, propelling ferocious energies and explaining why
the U.S. is at once so religious and so materialist. Americans are moral
materialists, spiritualists working on matter.
Platt is in the tradition of those who don’t believe these two spheres can
be reconciled. The material world is too soul-destroying. “The American
dream radically differs from the call of Jesus and the essence of the Gospel
,” he argues. The American dream emphasizes self-development and personal
growth. Our own abilities are our greatest assets.
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. Take a year to surrender
yourself. Move to Africa or some poverty-stricken part of the world.
Evangelize.
Platt’s arguments are old, but they emerge at a postexcess moment, when
attitudes toward material life are up for grabs. His book has struck a chord
. His renunciation tome is selling like hotcakes. Reviews are warm. Leaders
at places like the Southern Baptist Convention are calling on citizens to
surrender the American dream.
I doubt that we’re about to see a surge of iPod shakers. Americans will not
renounce the moral materialism at the core of their national identity. But
the 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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