Christianity in North America

Politics, Economics, and the American Church

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Empty pocketHere at Cerulean Sanctum, we talk little about politics and much about economic justice issues. Today, we'll see how those two items intersected in the election last week and how we American Christians must wake up to a brutal reality.

Pundits galore propounded the reason that Republicans got tossed off Capitol Hill, but they missed the real voter zeitgeist. Given the glowing economic news trumpeted in the usual Republican-sympathetic media sources, the talking heads looked only to non-economic federal issues to explain stunning Republican losses.

But to update a famous phrase, "It's still the economy, stupid."

While voters may talk about the Iraq War, terrorism, and a number of other global issues Republicans bungled, they'll vote based on local issues. Only people satisfied with their local outlook will vote global and national issues. If the local outlook is grim, forget about anyone looking beyond his own backyard. Local economic health, in particular, drives voting.

Here in (formerly, as of 11/7/06) Republican-dominated Ohio, the state with the worst job prospects in the country, a poll showed that 83% of Ohioans viewed economic issues as "very important" or "extremely important" in determining their Senate pick (Source: The Wall Street Journal, 11/8/06). But Republicans, thinking the economy was superb for everyone, continued to campaign on any issue but improving the economy. They expected folks to suck down the hoopla over the "great economy" despite seeing bare cupboards. As a result, Ohio incumbent Republican senator Mike DeWine got slaughtered by his Democratic challenger, Sherrod Brown, who took a more aggressive stance regarding Ohio's economic health. We talk about Virginia tipping the balance of power in the Senate, but DeWine's loss was potentially a greater news story, since it highlighted voter unease with the supposedly terrific economy. Plenty of people took one look at their bank accounts and the collective sigh sounded a lot like "*&^%!"

Ohio can't be the sole state with hurting workers. As we'll see, national figures could scare the heck out of anyone, regardless of state. So I suspect that many of the Republican losses reflect middle-class voters facing economic pressures, voting with their empty pockets.

As we know, money talks.

Consider the following realities:

  • The American savings rate hovers in negative numbers. (Source)
  • While salaries in the United States rose substantially in the United in the period 2000-2004, that wealth was almost entirely concentrated in the top one percent of wage-earners (household incomes of $300,000+/yr). That one percent saw a 19.8 percent increase in their income over the period. The other 99 percent? A 3 percent increase—not even close to keeping pace with 3 percent year-over-year inflation. (Plus, recent analysis of 2005-2006 shows a continued widening of the salary discrepancy.) (Source)
  • Consumer debt continues to rise. As of August 2006, Americans have never carried greater debt. (Interestingly,  those numbers backtracked a bit in September. I suspect people smelled trouble on the horizon. Perhaps that further proves Election Day results, especially since Republicans polled better against their Democratic opponents before September.) (Source)
  • For the first time since records began, highly educated Americans saw their earnings potential decrease in 2005, demolishing the accepted wisdom that more education translates into higher salaries. (Source)

While some debate that the negative savings rate ignores overall wealth, the information becomes even more dire when factoring in leverage and who holds investment wealth.

Many Americans leverage their home equity. With housing prices falling in almost every state, that leverage only eats away wealth and consumes retirement savings, compounding the problem. In addition, overall wealth incorporates investments, and again, that top one percent controls 93 percent of all investment wealth. (Just wait until those rich Baby Boomers start retiring, too, and begin pulling their money out of stocks.)

Given the rich are getting richer, what does the economic news tell us of the average family? For starters, the typical worker watched upper management prosper, while his or her real world dollars lost buying power. I know many people in their peak earning years whose companies reported record income, yet watched helplessly as their employers eliminated bonuses, cut back on insurance compensation, and froze or reduced cost-of-living increases.

I can't speak for you, but in our area in the last year alone, the cost of consumer goods skyrocketed. The box of cereal I bought last year for $2.29 is $2.99 now—a 31 percent increase. Broccoli cost $1.59 last November, but $1.99 a year later—25 percent more. Our electric company raised area rates 30 percent. And don't get me going on gasoline. I paid $1.59/gal. in the summer of 2005 and almost a dollar more now.

One doesn't need a PhD in mathematics to note that no one out there's received a 35 percent cost of living increase in the last year! Increasingly, middle class folks like us watch helplessly as our incomes buy less and less.

Five years ago, I knew several families where dad worked and mom didn't. I can't think of a single one like that now. While the unemployment figures look strong, do they merely reflect more families forced to put both parents to work to keep pace? If more women enter the job market (primarily in low-wage retail or service industry jobs) just to make ends meet at home, that puts a damper on much of that ecstatic job info, doesn't it?

My mother-in-law told me a new Wendy's opened in her small town. To her shock, most of the employees are over forty. Is working at a fast food restaurant the goal of people in their peak earning years? If so, we're in deep trouble.

In March 2006, I asked readers about their financial stability. More than sixty replied, about half via personal e-mail, the others through comments. Almost universally, people under 35 were better off at the end of 2005 than in previous years. That's to be expected, since many of them are young marrieds with both spouses working and few (or no) children. But the real shocker—and almost all these replies came through personal e-mails—concerned the state of people over forty. Many were far worse off than just five years before, having lost jobs (often multiple times) or  relegated to underemployment, compromised financially in what many consider peak earning years. Those tales broke my heart. I understand that kind of pain and what happens when the Church has no response—and none on the horizon, either.

And in the end, that's what this post is all about. I just completed a series on community , and I believe that our churches must start working toward some kind of money pool to help fellow congregants who fall on hard times. With so many families' money highly leveraged, and the reality that the middle class is fighting a losing battle against rising costs, something needs to be done on a macro level to fix some of the financial injustices people face today.

But the pulpit is silent. Sure, you'll hear about Ron Blue or Crown Financial stuff from time to time, but they only address individual issues. Who in the Church in America speaks out against the real problem, our broken system? 

Sure, we Americans spend too much of our incomes. But if the middle class continues to erode, it won't be a matter of spending too much on a consumeristic lifestyle. The real problem will be how to cope when curtailing excess spending simply won't halt the slide. You can shave expenses down to the bone, but when the bone's gone missing…

All it takes is a minor recession, I think. Or Ford or GM collapsing. With so many precariously perched families with no savings, high credit card debt, loans taken against homes of decreasing value—it won't take much.

Church, are we ready? Truly?

Time to wake up and start preparing for that day. It's coming faster than we think. 

UPDATE: I only got to see this last Saturday's Wall Street Journal late Monday evening. A front page story shows that Democrats running on anti-free-trade, anti-offshoring, and anti-outsourcing platforms crushed their Republican opponents in North Carolina, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. This further proves my theory that middle class voters smarting from job losses and inequities in the economy voted with their wallets, not with an eye toward Iraq, terrorism, or any other topic.

UPDATE II: Some who have read this post knee-jerked and assumed I was a Democrat or some other kind of liberal. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, I consider myself a pure conservative in that I believe in conserving what God values. I hold to many of the ideas espoused in Rod Dreher's book, Crunchy Cons. Also, I have a dim view of most political parties, Republican or Democrat. Both have sold out to special interests and forgotten the average American. Lastly, I firmly believe that politics is not the answer; the Kingdom of God is. The sooner American Christians realize this and start living it, the sooner we'll see many things come to pass that we're now foolishly hoping politics will give us.

Strong Man, Weak Man

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I’ve been wanting to write this post for some time, but never found a perfect time to do so. In light of the Ted Haggard scandal, with so many advocating a greater honesty, more openness, and a greater reliance on personal confession (myself included), I wish to discuss one enormous barrier to that advice.

Two months from now will mark the 30th anniversary of my conversion to Christ. I’ve witnessed plenty of trends in the American Church during that time, but only in recent years has the Lord opened my eyes to one of the more intractable prejudices.

We Christian men have a serious disconnect concerning honesty, openness, and personal confession. We may claim that those things are good for the soul, but God help any man who truly practices those disciplines.

How so?

While I’m speaking solely from what my own eyes have seen, men who consistently share their personal failings will eventually get a cold shoulder from other men in the church. Men who talk about their mistakes, who are unafraid to communicate with others, get treated like wimps, pansies, wusses and any other unmasculine name you can think of.  Strong man, weak manOther men will start spending less time with them, choosing instead to huddle up with the group of guys who prefer to talk about last night’s football game—the same group of guys that never lets their inner demons be known.

At a time when Christian men are sucking up men’s books featuring tough-as-nails guys who hunt bear with a pointy stick, the man who weeps over his own sin gets relegated to the quilting bee. How we ever ended up with that sort of thinking is beyond me, but I’ve seen it. Better to be the strong silent type and laugh at a ribald joke on occasion than to communicate one’s failure.

I’d like to think this misperception’s only been around since churches started mimicking the “win-at-all-cost” propaganda of the business world, but I’m not so certain. Perhaps we’ve always cast a negative glance at the man who talks just a bit too much about his failings. Nothing kills more men in their hearts than to have someone think them soft. And nothing is softer than to talk about one’s own sin.

Is it any wonder then that so many men flameout in spectacular ways? And it’s usually the man’s man, not the confessional guy, who winds up incinerated. Why the enormous pressure? Are we that performance driven in the man’s world that we can’t handle a little personal confession?

We’ve got to stop the denigration. We can talk all we want about communicating our own failings and sins, but if we’re still equating that kind of openness with being a wimp, we’ll never get anywhere. I don’t care if it’s fear, pride, or self-loathing that’s driving that shunning, we’ve got to convince Christian men that living a life of honest confession won’t wither their cojones.

Branded for Christ

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My father wore nice clothing. He bought from an old-fashioned men’s store owned by a respected Jewish family that sold top designers at JC Penney prices. The movers and shakers in that family were serious-looking men who walked around with slivers of marking soap in their pockets and tape measures draped around their necks at all times. And when they spoke with you, it was always from over the tops of their half-glasses.

As a teenager, I visited that store with fascination. The owners lived and died men’s clothing. The Steinbergs could take one look at a suit and know the designer. They recognized the cloth, understood a designer’s cut. Cassini, De la Renta, Botany 500, Perry Ellis—it didn’t matter. The brand spoke to them, whispering its secrets, secrets the Steinbergs guarded as they built a reputation for excellence.

In the recent past, I discussed branding with a fellow Christian blogger. He didn’t like the idea of thinking of himself as a brand, but despite the protests, there’s no escaping the marketing aspects of branding. Any public personna, even a blogger’s, has an aura it exudes. That glow attracts others because of the peculiar set of characteristics that define the blog. Cerulean Sanctum’s brand falls into the following set of characteristics:

  • I primarily discuss the American Church.
  • I examine issues within the Church that may be overlooked by others.
  • I offer practical (rather than theoretical) answers to those issues.
  • I try to keep a balanced perspective between warring philosophies, usually because I believe no side today fully sees the bigger picture.
  • The writing here may be controversial, not because it skewers individuals or denominations, but that it forces the Church as a whole to examine itself more thoroughly.
  • Readers consider the commentary here to be passionate, intriguing, unique, and thoughtful.

That’s the Cerulean Sanctum brand. (Notice how objectivity anchors some of those brand characteristics, while others are perceptions.)

You’ll notice I rarely depart from the brand. Diverging from the brand only harms the message. I shared with that other blogger the half-dozen or so things he does well and told him he should consider staying with—and reinforcing—those characteristics of his brand. In most cases, adding too much to the brand or stripping off what people appreciate in the brand spells doom. Imagine if Apple Computer abandoned its well-known industrial design. Or the company decided to forgo ease-of-use.

My son has a London Fog winter coat. Growing up, London Fog epitomized for me classically-tailored men’s outerwear. The Steinbergs sold London Fog; it was my dad’s coat of choice.

But my son’s coat is nothing more than the name London Fog stitched into a coat that could be any generic outerwear made anywhere in the world (Bangladesh, in this case). Nothing of London Fog’s brand can be found in the coat. With no sense of tailoring or style, it’s just a coat. I can’t even say that it will weather like a London Fog. Given its cost and origin, probably not. I’m not sure I even noticed the London Fog name when I bought it. One thing I do know: I’ll cast a wary eye at anything else branded London Fog that I might find on the racks today.

Diverging from the brand or simply tossing the brand name on any old item dilutes the power and prestige of a brand.

Whether we like it or not, Christianity has a “brand.” Certain characteristics of the Faith contribute to its objective practice and to the perceptions of others. Good or ill accompany those practices and perceptions. Holy Spirit stained glass by TiffanyI’m sure every person reading this is intimately acquainted with both the good and the ill. Still, I’m sure we can come to some agreement on what the Christian “brand” entails.

Or can we? Maybe even that’s the wrong way to go about understanding what people know about being followers of Christ. Perhaps there’s a better source for understanding our brand than asking ourselves how it’s viewed.

Many of the posts on Cerulean Sanctum begin with me wondering how other people—whether in the Church or outside it—comprehend Christians they encounter. Sort of the “walk a mile in another person’s moccasins” view. In the case of people who don’t know Christ, reasons exist for their reluctance to listen to the Gospel we bring them. Before anyone drops a “Christ said the world will hate us” bomb now, let me ask whether the perceptions of the Church by others are formed…

…because our light is exposing their darkness…

-OR-

…because the American Church’s own state is so dim, the unbeliever’s darkness looks like high noon on a clear Antarctic day in comparison.

Much more difficult choice, isn’t it? That sneer on the face of a coworker whenever Christ is mentioned may have more to do with the lousy experiences he’s had with Christians and the Church than it does with any hatred he may have toward Christ Himself.

We’d do well to find out from non-believers what it is we’re doing wrong. I’m not talking about megachurch demographic sampling nonsense here, but asking the hard questions. For instance, the next time we sit down with someone who doesn’t know Christ, ask the following in casual conversation:

What do you appreciate about Christianity?

What bothers you about it?

I can promise you this, you’ll learn a lot from those two questions. The question we should then ask ourselves is how we go about reversing negative perceptions while reinforcing the good. Since I can promise that most trait perceptions come down to the way we practice the faith, we’ll get a firm dose of reality, plus a roadmap for prayer and growth.

I’ve said many times here that we’re not in the initial stages of evangelization in the United States, we’re in mop-up mode. Nearly everyone living in this country has heard the name of Jesus. Now all they need to see is an American Church that practices what it believes.

Let’s face it: We’ve diluted the brand. We’ve added too much garbage to Christ’s message. We’ve tacked on enough Christianized cultural artifacts to derail millions. Or we abandoned the very heart of the Gospel to the point that people aren’t really sure what defines Christianity anymore. And it’s not just the unsaved who face that dilemma. I know solid Christians searching for Christ in the midst of a Church that has largely forgotten the truth of what it means to follow Him in simple discipleship.

I grew up singing “They’ll Know We Are Christians By Our Love.” The title of that song grabs me every time because it’s essential to our brand. Christians should always be characterized by their love for others and for the Lord. But are we known for our love or for the fact that ten times yesterday someone from a Christian organization phoned to remind us to vote against godless heathens? (If only just one person a day called you or me to remind us we are loved by Christ and by the brethren!)

What do non-believers say? Trust me, they’re getting our message—especially if that message doesn’t match our practice or the true call of Jesus. We need to ensure when we mention Christianity to others, the response is positive rather than negative. Otherwise, we need to fix how we live.

In more ways than one, we’ve been branded for Christ. Whether we believe in the value of that brand enough to protect it and communicate it effectively is quite another thing altogether.