American Gothic
The Role of Ministry And The Changing Face of The American Norm
Not My Dream
Throughout my life, the notion of ministry has been based upon
the baseline standard not of the bible but of The American
Dream: a husband and wife, house, car, 2.5 kids, and a dog. This
is the picture in my head, likely in yours as well, of what is
both normal and expected. This is the goal we encourage
individuals and families toward. This is the vision we attempt
to build or keep intact. It is this ideal, not biblical
admonitions, that underscores harmful and often hateful sexual
reorientation efforts and has churches literally writing hate
into their bylaws—banning specifically if not exclusively gay
persons from taking leadership roles in the ministry. It is from
this baseline perspective, what we consider “normal,” that many
of us interpret scripture. It’s how we write our sermons, these
“family values” forming the platform for our view of life and
what we consider “normal.”
The problem is, none of that is biblical. The “American Dream”
is a mostly modern invention, the phrase coined by historian
James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book Epic of America.
Historian Ted Ownby links the ethos to what he describes as The
Four Dreams of Consumerism: The Dream of Abundance, The Dream of
Democracy of Goods, The Dream of Freedom of Choice, and The
Dream of Novelty. This ethos is exclusive to the United States
of America and has no real standing within Christian doctrine.
Relying on this well-ingrained imagery to guide the Christian
toward what is considered normal and expected of healthy adult
life is extremely poor exegesis, as American consumerism is
completely at odds with the pastoral instruction of The Apostle
Paul and the personal example of Jesus Christ. And yet, this is
what is routinely taught in our churches—get a mortgage. And,
while it is not explicitly taught, Sunday is typically a day of
flaunting materialism—expensive cars, lots of bling, and a
fashion show—none of which has a biblical model.
The American Dream is not my dream, has never been my dream. But
I, and I guess, many others have suffered some sense of
inferiority complex or, worse, failure at not having achieved
it. I am not married. I don’t own a dog. I have no children. I
miss none of those things. None of that has an allure for me.
The American Dream is not a path that appeals to me. Having been
married, I know what a challenge marriage is and how it
absolutely consumes everything you are and compromises—yes it
does—your aspirations and dreams. Which is not to impugn
marriage, if that’s what you want, go get you some.
Not everybody wants or needs this American Dream, yet this
two-kids-and-a-dig scenario remains the unofficial baseline
standard of American life. Many LGBT persons suffer emotional
duress because they’ve grown up with this movie playing in their
head, a goal they will never fully achieve. Many professional
women, choosing career over this domestic picture, feel pressure
if not emotional blackmail to try and make this formula work in
concert with a demanding career. Many of us feel like
failures—even if we don’t desire the house and the kids—simply
because everything in our society and media regards that as our
baseline standard and we have either failed to achieve it or,
worse, failed to even desire it and are, therefore, considered
deviants. And there are, I promise you, millions if not tens of
millions of miserable people out there who’ve abandoned their
own hopes and goals and ideals and are trapped within this snow
globe of Americana, this American Dream, which they pursued
because *that’s what they were expected to do.” This is why the
divorce rate is so high, people forcing themselves and their
lives into this picture when it isn’t a right fit for them.
Brainwashing:
From birth, we're fed a steady diet of this nonsense:
everybody smiling,the Nuclear Family.
A Hobbled Doctrine
The problem I am wrestling with, at the moment, is the question
of the purpose of ministry. For 38 years, I’ve more or less
proceeded with the practice of my faith and ministry from the
perspective of this two-kids-and-a-dog baseline standard. Most
pastors I know counsel from that perspective, whether they
articulate or realize it or not. They are encouraging conformity
to this notion of the nuclear family without understanding there
really is no biblical model for it. As human beings, we eat,
drink and sleep culture—whatever your culture may be. Our
culture is bonded with our tribal DNA and thus, for no rational
reason, we begin shaping ourselves, shaping our children, and,
as pastors, counseling others with respect to this dynamic of
happiness: two kids and a dog.
Look all you want, there is no model for this in the bible.
Polygamy was practiced in the bible, and people had tons of
kids. But they usually made their own homes, modest little
shacks built with the help of families and friends. They walked
a lot. There were no bicycles, let alone Chevys, and it would be
inconceivable, during biblical times, for people to take on a
quarter of a million dollars in debt or pay $200 a month to
watch TV. None of that is even remotely biblical. But it all
seems normal to us, because that’s what we’ve been sold since
the postwar era. In order to be complete, to be considered
successful, you need this thing and that thing and the other
thing. And this is the movie playing in our heads, in our
pastors’ heads, as we go about our lives.
Not everybody is cut out for this. But pastors, including
myself, have routinely counseled people to stay in marriages
that weren’t working and buy things we can’t afford or don’t
even need.
In its purest sense, ministry must operate objectively and
separate itself from culture. Our Christian doctrine is
routinely hobbled by our leaders’ tendency to either (1) fail to
separate Paul’s words from the cultural accretions of his day
or, worse, (2) pursue a wrongheaded doctrine of cultural
morality based on our current cultural norms. Both approaches
are wrong. God’s word needs to be unshackled from our opinion of
right and wrong, our thinking of what is moral or not. The same
God Who sacrificed His only Son to save us routinely ordered the
slaughter of hundreds of thousands. Genocide was frequently the
Old Testament order of the day. By His own testimony, God never
changes, and many people struggle to reconcile the vengeful God
of the Old Testament with loving God of the New. That’s mainly
because we’re applying our flawed sense of right and wrong—our
own righteousness—to the equation. We are imposing a moral
standard or rule onto scripture, which upholds no moral standard
whatsoever.
This is the main flaw with the “moral” conservative Christian
movement: their improper mixing of morality and doctrine,
infecting doctrine by subjecting it to a moral standard. God’s
word presents no moral standard. He is God. That’s it. Open the
book, here’s what it says. Our response to God’s word, how we
choose to govern our lives based upon it, forms our sense of
morality. A doctrine of moral objectivity also demands a
doctrine of cultural separation. We should not compromise God’s
word in order to reconcile seemingly extreme or archaic
instructions with the world as we know it. We should not exhaust
ourselves trying to change the world as we know it in order to
sync with the bible’s extreme and archaic instructions.
We should distill truth, and make God’s truth, not the TV, not
American consumerism, the center of our existence.
Happily Ever After: Harder than it looks. This is not for everybody.
One-Size-Fits-All Pastoring
As ministers, we seek to encourage and to “fix” people from this
point of view, moving broken lives back into the mainstream and
back on the path toward this baseline standard of what we
consider normal: crushing debt, screaming kids, an overwhelming
sense of obligation and an abandonment of one’s own dreams in
the service of creating more people who will grow up and abandon
their own dreams in the misguided notion that procreation is
somehow life’s highest calling. It is not. Serving God is life’s
highest privilege. Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and its
righteousness, Jesus said. If God so ordains this other stuff
for your life, good for you. But it is the rare pastor’s wife I
have met who will not lie to me, even by omission, about the
pros and cons of her existence. Happy or not, she is, to one
extent or another, living in his shadow and often carrying the
grief and burdens of a single mom because he is pouring so much
of himself into the lives of others.
The truth is the church, black, white, Asian, Greek Orthodox,
spends much of its time and resources jamming round pegs into
square holes. There is commonly not a lot of regard for the
unfettered pursuit of the id: our ultimate being, who we are,
who we were born to be. Human weakness, human loneliness, and,
yes, this insidious “American Dream” falsehood drummed into us
from childhood leads us to make mistakes. What’s new is,
increasingly fewer people are content to spend the rest of their
lives repressing their own selves or ignoring their calling in
the name of keeping up appearances.
The crushing weight of maintaining material things drives us out
of the zone with God. Most people I know use their kids as an
excuse for compromising themselves and their walk with God, all
for the sake of the enormous struggle to maintain this lie of
the American Dream. They stay together because of the kids. She
keeps her mouth shut and endures his unfaithfulness because of
the kids. Keeping our kids pampered in a comfortable house can
and often does teach them to be shallow, thankless,
purposefulless little snots.
They don’t appreciate what they have because they’ve known
nothing else. Fear of struggle keeps us compromising ourselves,
when it is, in fact, struggle that helps us discover who we
really are.
I don’t want to encourage people to stay in bad marriages. I
hate divorce because God hates divorce. What’s between the two?
Our obligation, as pastors, as friends, is to counsel from a
biblical perspective. That means making every effort to wipe the
Etch-O-Sketch of this dumb fantasy, which we have confused with
some edict from God. God has not commanded us to get married.
God has not commanded us to buy a house. Debt is sin. Millions
of families in America, having bought into the American Dream
and believing home ownership is the path to wealth, have lost
everything in The Great Recession. There’s nothing wrong with
home ownership. Buy that fancy car if that’s what you want. I am
preaching, here, not about things but about mindset.
Don’t pursue these things simply because you think, on some
level, that’s what you are supposed to do, or that you feel
somehow less than perfect because you don’t have these things.
If you feel incomplete, buying more stuff won’t fix you.
Loneliness, as I see it, is a simple lack of creativity. You
should never get married because you are lonely. You should only
get married because you are led by God into a Godly covenant,
without making excuses for your spouse or looking away from his
spiritual deficiencies. He needs to be invested in your dream,
whatever that may be, as much as you are invested in his, and
your path forward should be based on what God has for you, not
on some illusion of the kids and the dog.
I believe the point of ministry is to help people discover
themselves. Not in a selfish sense, but in the sense of God’s
appointment for their lives. To serve God is a great privilege,
one most of us take for granted or discard early in life by
giving in to human weakness. Later, as damaged adults in bondage
to family obligations and/or crushing debt, we begin to see with
enormous clarity the many opportunities we missed to be of use
to God and to others.
Pastors should counsel us toward finding ourselves
again—wherever that leads—and not mind-screw us with this
unbiblical idolatry of “The American Dream.” If we follow Christ,
our dream will come to us with intensity and clarity. We need
only to discover the strength to follow it.
Christopher J. Priest
14 October 2012
editor@praisenet.org
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