Hard to be crunchy

Your comments struck a strong chord in my wife and me. As you said, we have generally found that evangelicals are pretty good in identifying worldliness in the church with regard to sexual issues: adultery, fornication, pornography, divorce and the vulgarity of the media. The sin of lust is well recognized and condemned. But with regard to the worldliness of consumerism there is near silence. The sins of greed and envy are virtually ignored. There are prayers for "financial freedom" but this is understood as "God, give us more money so we can pay for all our stuff."

This may be so because it is such a struggle to get our bearings; if we are not Amish or monastics we are just lost at sea in such a capitalist/consumerist world . Like you, we would like to live close to downtown in a smaller house with sidewalks and trees,
but find that these have been bid up to where they are now quite expensive and
"objects of desire" in their own right, with polished hardwood floors and granite and stainless steel kitchens. We would like to buy the small, frayed, 1930's rental house we live in now, but it is in a "tear down" neighborhood close to the cultural district. It will soon be sold by our landlord for 300K plus and replaced by a million dollar, zero lot line house. The "new urbanism" developments are also expensive, so
the houses that are affordable for ordinary people are in the decaying 1960's suburbs, ranch houses with no sidewalks, no front porches and fenced backyards, or in the new, desolate, crackerbox subdivisions far out of the city.

Tim Keller, a wonderful preacher and teacher at a PCA church in New York, Redeemer Presbyterian, has a theory on why dealing with our own greed always escapes us in America. He says that no matter how much money we make, or how rich and indulgent our lifestyle, we always have friends who have more and better possessions than we do, so in comparison we feel we aren't and can't be the greedy ones. People who make 60K, have nice used cars and a 3/2 in the suburbs have friends who make 100K, have new cars and a 4/3 with a pool out back. People who make 400K and have a million dollar home in Plano know people who make 900K and have a two million dollar home in Highland Park, as well as posh vacation homes at the lake and in the mountains. And so it goes, on up the ladder.

It seems to me that the competitive instincts of men have been almost totally corralled by this race for success and acquisition in western, corporate culture. This may be preferable to having these instincts gathered for war, as in the Crusades for example, but still not ideal. (It seems that militant Islam has decided that war is preferable to capitalist modernity as the employment of male competitive energy. That is why we need to fear them; they will be a formidable enemy for a long time. We have the wealth and technology, but they have the will, the patience, and the bodies to sacrifice.)

I don't know if these instincts can be marshaled in a quest for virtue or holiness in the culture at large; maybe this can only been done in a monastic or small sub-culture setting. In Jefferson's and Kirk's rural world, in the world of the southern agrarians--Tate, Percy, Ransom and Berry--it may have been easier for these instincts to be tamed on behalf of family and community (although, as you know, real and perceived racism has always plagued this vision.) It may be only Jesus who was able to value his own local, particular, tribal world and still be universal in his love for those who were different.