The other day, my entire day (nearly) was consumed in reading Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream, by a Southern Baptist minister from Alabama named David Platt. I can think of no other way to describe the book than as a punch in the gut, a wake up call, or some other similarly overused phrase.
From the title it is probably evident that Platt advocates a reconsideration of the American Dream, a Dream that all too often in our Christian culture has received merely a Christian spin on the secular convention. Platt accuses American Christianity of embracing many of the principles and the morality of American prosperity and the desire for bigger, newer, and more expensive things. This co-opting of a secular, capitalistic Dream is, as Platt argues, antithetical to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
It is ironic that though we claim to follow a man who owned no home, did nothing to secure a comfortable retirement for himself, and who promised his followers persecution and troubles in this world that we are now more comfortable with McMansions and ideologies of prosperity than we are with serving the needs of the widows and orphans. The call of Christ is a call to take up a cross, daily, and follow him. The call of Christ is to be willing to lay down our lives that we keep them. The call of Christ is a call to go to the nations.
Platt is not a reactionary, and by affirming his central thesis I don’t want to appear the same way. I am not anti-American, or even anti-wealth. I believe this country has provided me with immensely valuable and rich opportunities that so many in the world can never hope to receive. One of the supreme blessings of my life is to have been born and raised in the United States and live a life more prosperous than 99% of the people alive on this planet today. However, I must believe that God has provided this country our extraordinary wealth and resources for something a bit more valuable and lasting than nice vacations, comfortable houses, and a new car every few years. God has given us a trust along with our wealth. From those to whom much is given, much is expected. Our resources exist for the spread of the gospel, to fulfill God’s purpose of taking the message of grace and salvation through Jesus Christ to every tribe, tongue, nation, and people. We abdicate that responsibility when we use our wealth to further our own ends.
What was most striking to me about Platt’s book, though, wasn’t merely that everything he was saying was true. What struck me most significantly was how poorly I emulate Christ, how little I desire what he tells me I ought, how little my dreams are his own. In other words, when the book began I found myself nodding along, agreeing that too many other Christians were living for the American Dream and they needed help finding their way back, but by the end, as I reflected on my own pursuit of the Dream with my own twist on it, I realized how far I have missed the mark and how I have done so in a subtle way.
There is a profound amount of arrogance within me. You see, I have given up on the conventional American Dream: I don’t care about owning the beach house, the mountain cabin, and the McMansion in the suburbs; I don’t care about owning the boat, the snowmobiles, and the luxury cars; I don’t even care particularly about vacations to fancy places or a well-stamped passport. But this doesn’t mean that I do not daily pursue my own version of the American Dream. I believe that Dream, in its starkest terms, consists in being an autonomous being, beholden to none, who can work out whatever their own conception of happiness happens to be as long as it doesn’t infringe on the happiness of the collective. So my Dream isn’t for fancy possessions and a massive bank account, rather, my Dream is for a little mountain cabin with a wood burning stove and with plenty of singletrack trails for trail-running in the summer and snowshoeing in the winter; a quiet life with a few good friends; a job teaching English and coaching cross country at this small mountain high school; an opportunity to run in some of the major ultramarathons across the country; a den in the cabin well-stocked with books; a nice marriage, a nice family, and a nice, comfortable existence.
And because that Dream is counter to the traditional American Dream I can imagine it is less pernicious for a follower of Christ than the more conventional Dream; I can imagine that I am somehow more righteous for dreaming this Dream than the person chasing wealth and all the accouterments of wealth. But I am not sanctified by being countercultural; there is nothing inherently valuable in a hippie spin, or an athletic spin, or an intellectual spin, or a hipster spin, or a mountain man spin on the American Dream. The Dream having more to do with our own wants and desires, our own autonomous will rather than a will in conformity with the God the universe who bought us with the blood of his Son, is exactly the problem. My goal, then, is not to reach for a more Thoreauian version of the American Dream, something quaint and simple, but to reject the idea of autonomy altogether. To reject my will for comfort and ease and to accept the life of discipleship. This is the calling of a follower of Christ. We are to be ready to go where he went and live how he lived.
Platt’s book has blessed me, then, not because it confirms what I think about others and their shortcomings. It has convicted me to face my own. To consider what I consider to be of more value than Christ, my ostensible treasure in the field. And, as Christ told us, I need to be more concerned about the plank in my own eye before I worry about the speck in my brother’s.
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