David Brooks reflects on David Platt's hot-selling book, “Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream.” (HT: Between Two Worlds) Brooks writes:
. . . 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 maybe 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.
Me: David Brooks has established a reputation for being alert to new movements in the culture. Will the "Gospel of Wealth" indeed come under significant revision? Maybe. I've not read the book, but I found one Amazon commenter's observations significant:
The author provides readers with a suggested response, but calling it "radical" is quite a stretch. The first of is five point plan is to read through the Bible in one year. Most Bible read through plans involve reading no more than three chapters a day, about 15 minutes. Step 2 is to pray for the world. He refers to a website which directs the participant to pray for different parts of the world organized so that you can pray for a different part of the world every day. Step 3 is to give some money away to poor people. Step 4 is to go on a one week short-term mission trip. Step 5 is to be involved in a local church congregation. This is hardly radical.
The author is a pastor at a suburban American mega church so I think he's probably used to watering down his message for American consumers.
The goal of all this is for the participant to obtain "ultimate satisfaction". It's really the same motivation as the American Dream. The goal of our Bible reading is not for training in righteousness. The goal of praying for the world is not for the furtherance of the gospel in parts of the world or for the benefit of persecuted Christians in China or Indonesia. The goal of giving money to the poor is not to be a blessing for the poor or support Christian orphan homes in Cambodia. The goal of going on a one-week short-term mission trip is not to bring the gospel to unreached people or comfort orphans and widows in their distress. No. The author sells all this as a means for American Christians to obtain "ultimate satisfaction".
It's the same goal: self satisfaction. Bend a little bit. Make a small sacrifice here or there. Then relish in the self satisfaction that you're not as materialistic as the Joneses.
Radical would be to take one's eyes off oneself. Read and study the Bible because you love God with all your heart, soul and mind. Pick a country or a few countries or a people group or a few people groups, and pray fervently for them because you love them with a love so intense. Pick an orphanage or a chain of orphanages or a ministry, and scrape and save and cut corners and give everything you possibly can because you love those orphans, and when you're thinking about buying that $3 cafe latte know that those $3 is $3 that those orphans aren't going to see. Rather than a one-week short term mission trip, devote your life to reaching a people group or area, and give your money and prayer time to helping those people, and if need be, go visit them to share your and God's love with them. It's NOT about you!
Another commenter writes:
If you're interested in hearing a sermon or two from him, you can find them on iTunes under "The Church at Brook Hills."