Stumbling Blocks

The intensity and devotion of intentional Christian communities such as that of Shane Claiborne (see Doug’s post below) can sometimes in and of itself be a stumbling block to others to even begin to think about realignment of values. We can think also along this line of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the semi-exile pastoral community, realizing that they were under the constant threat of Nazi imprisonment.

There are people with the same concerns who have staked out an intermediate path. Rod Dreher, a columnist for the Dallas Morning News and frequent contributor to National Review Online, now wears the label “Crunchy [as in granola-eating] Conservative” given by his NRO friends for his intentional path of simultaneous suspicions of traditional government liberalism and the excesses of our materialistic consumer culture.

I think its worthwhile to remember a couple of points about the relationship between “Crunchy Christianity” and the marketplace.

First, there is no conflict between Crunchy Christianity and an appreciation for the market. In the market, preferences are what they are. There is no market-based economic reason to care if I, for example, drop my subscription to Sports Illustrated in order to donate more money to Compassion International. The economic outcome will be different, there will be winners and losers, but it is not better or worse according to any market criteria.

Likewise, those who undertake a personal values transformation must be careful not to be a stumbling block for others. Different people might consider SUVs, Sports Illustrated, big screen TVs, iPhones, back-packing trips in Europe, or $4 brown hot, brown water filled with cream and sugar to be consumerist excesses while other might consider each of these to be necessities. We aren’t going to be able to resolve such debates in the Bible, so we might as well adopt a radically Calvinist view that the condition of our neighbor’s consumerist “soul” is none of our business, and address our own choices with prayer and humility.

Finally, I do detect in some of these types of writings a transference of hostility towards consumerism as such to a hostility of the marketplace itself. Rod Dreher comes closes in this article by misusing the word capitalism, but I can still see his distinction between an admiration for the market as an institution and a dislike of the look of our consumer culture. Nevertheless, it's no stretch that Jonah Goldberg at NRO captioned Dreher's article "The Left-Right Anti-Market Convergence". One might reject the necessity of an SUV for one's own single-person commuting, but if one is using an SUV to transport many homeless people to a shelter, or if a family has several children, the decentralized market process that provides for the production, distribution, and eventually the purchaser's choice between a Durango and a Yukon remains a marvelous economic feat.