Mammon

Unshackling the American Church: Mammon

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No servant can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.
—Luke 16:13 MKJV

Faith in Fashion or in Christ?Strong’s Concordance lists that troubling word mammon as “avarice (deified).” A better definition one cannot possibly hope to unearth. Unearthing a Church buried under layer after layer of avarice deified, on the other hand, poses a challenge to us American Christians, so inured are we to the materialism that masquerades as legitimate culture in this country.

What else can explain the horror pictured at right? As frightening as this “innocent” figurine might be, I suspect that the manufacturers sold a boatload to Christians so ensnared by mammon that they couldn’t discern the conflict. The double entendre of “Faith Is Always in Fashion” works doubly hard to prove the case that we’ve developed a consumerized faith that isn’t necessarily in Christ, but in the art of the deal.

(Don’t you just love the little ICHTHUS fishes embroidered down the side of her jeans? Somewhere, a Christian fashion designer is thinking, “Man, they stole my idea!”)

The nauseating text for "Faith is always in fashion"What I cropped out of the picture is the sickening description for this figurine. You can find it at left. As a freelance commercial writer who’s a Christian, I’d rather be dragged over a pile of broken glass with an alcohol bath chaser than write what you see reproduced here.

Now I’m not one to call for burning at the stake, but the person who greenlighted this abhorrent project at The Hamilton Collection should at least receive a hotfoot or a Roman candle dropped down his or her briefs.

But then it’s difficult to be angry at the perpetrators of this excrement when we consider how a love for mammon defines Americans today. Too many of us in the American Church can’t see our hypocrisy. While Evangelicals rail against the secularized liberal elite that preaches a nonstop stream of dissolute sexual freedom, at the same time that same Christian Right has few hang-ups about unimpeded avarice deified. We certainly wouldn’t champion being “pro-choice” when it comes to abortion, but try to take away our consumer choices (two hundred breakfast cereals, anyone?) and we’ll holler just as loud as the pro-death leftists we say we oppose.

We of all people, the ones who fully understand the depths of human corruption, should be the folks casting a wary eye on economic systems run by fallen men. Yet we so easily fake blindness to unrestricted markets and the devastation they bring through the hands of unregenerate men and women. What does it say about us that all too often we’re capitalists first and Christians second?

I don’t get political on this blog because there’s a million and a half Christian blogs out there talking politics, but I find it astonishing that so many Christians claim to be political conservatives, but the only thing they seem to be interested in conserving is a middle to upper class consumptive lifestyle. Their Christianity adheres to politics like velcro, but does it inform a reality that conserves what is most important to our Lord?

What is the natural outcome of unrelentingly pursuing cheap items? On our way to that sale at Macy’s, are we aware we might be sacrificing the very values Jesus Christ came to reinforce? TV has programmed us to be jealous of the Joneses, so while we champion family values, it’s become every family for itself. I don’t see that in my Bible anywhere.  And as much as we talk about Christian community, do our church folk eat together in each other’s homes daily like the early Christians did? Does the community of saints even see each other regularly outside of our Sunday meetings? If not, then how are we truly a community if we’re not investing in each other’s lives more than once or twice a week?

The Industrial Revolution ultimately birthed all this consumerism, killed countryside communities, broke apart our families, left our youth with nothing else to do than to shop and hang out at malls, put us in soul-killing jobs, and saddled us with this nagging, modern ennui. Yet the American Church never questioned it. Even today, we’re unwilling to step back and ask if we went wrong on our little trip to Modernism.

We can question it now. We can stop accumulating and start thinking about conservation of what is right before God: strong families working with their neighbors creating strong local economies that grow strong communities and strong churches that make disciples, create beauty, conserve the sacred, and steward the Creation.

We can serve God or we can serve mammon. We’ve spent too many decades serving the latter. Time to try the former.

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This is the last post in the “Unshackling the American Church” series based in part on ideas in Rod Dreher’s book, Crunchy Cons . I would encourage everyone reading this blog to read that book with an eye on what Christians should truly be valuing in this life. Even though many Christians are political conservatives, we’ve gotten off the path of what in God’s eyes is most worth conserving. I could probably blog more on this topic, but I’ve previously touched on many of these ideas in the Best of Cerulean Sanctum posts you can find listed in the Sidebar.

Don’t accept the status quo. Much of what we live out today in normal practice in the United States is not inherently Christian, though we’ve gilded it with enough spiritual talk to allow it to pass. We can’t live like that, though, because God will judge us for what we did with the things He considers valuable.

The American Church is shackled by consumerism, wastefulness, disregard for the Creation, disconnectedness between people, a penchant for the cheap and ugly, and a shockingly low regard for what is sacred and lasting. But like I say so many times here at Cerulean Sanctum, it doesn’t have to be that way. If enough of us take the time to consider if a more Christian way to live exists, we’ll eventually find a way to live it, even if it never fully mirrors our ultimate destination.

Thanks for reading.

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Other posts in the “Unshackling the American Church” series:

More Cowbell Award III

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A reader wondered a couple weeks ago why I had not posted a “More Cowbell Award” in recent days. More Cowbell!The fact is that there are entire sites that have sprung up in the last few months that do nothing but assault harebrained practices in the Church, so I felt like all the good commentary was already being rendered up for bloggers. Why add more?

But in the last couple weeks I’ve noticed a theme coming to the fore. So the award no one wants to win is back with a vengeance. Though the winner of this week’s More Cowbell Award is widespread and well-known, it has nearly vanished from our perception because we now take it for granted. Having had some awful encounters with this recently, I hereby bestow the uncoveted More Cowbell Award III on

Christian “Adware”

I would guess that just about everyone recognizes the Ichthus symbol, be they Christian or not. It has a long history dating back to the earliest days of the Church. Ichthus symbolA story broke recently that archaeologists unearthed a third or fourth century church and found the symbol on everything. The Ichthus fish has even been co-opted by Darwinists by adding legs to it, and of course the Christians countered by having an Ichthus fish swallowing a Darwin “pseudo-fish.” Can’t miss the obvious point there, can we now, folks.

I’m venturing a guess that at least a third of the people who read this post will, in reality, have an Ichthus or some other Jesus ID on their vehicle. I think about three-quarters of the folks at my church self-identify that way, but I’m sure that’s countered by all the Presbyterians out there who would rather die than affix anything so kitschy to the Lexus. (Ha, ha! That’s a joke. Don’t flame me.) So, I’ll stick with the one-third guesstimate.

If you’re one of those in that singular third, you may hate me for what I have to say, but here goes:

Scrape the fish off your car. Please! I’m begging.

Why? Here’s a sampling of what I’ve seen in the last four days:

  • A guy with an Ichthus fish on his car goes hurtling past me doing over eighty in a sixty zone.
  • A car with a prominent Ichthus fish on it, filled with revelers, dumps all manner of trash out the window after passing me on the highway. (I witness this about once a week anymore.)
  • A couple whose car not only has an Ichthus fish but about ten other Jesus-related stickers on its back end also sports a large “High on the Hill” logo in the rear window. High on the Hill is a notorious head shop in my area.
  • A car sitting in the nearby grocery store parking lot not only has an Ichthus on its rear, but also a “Does not play well with others” bumper sticker and another with a stylized grimacing face whose meaning is lost on me. (Hey, it took me about a year to realize that the large italicized number on some people’s cars and trucks corresponded to their favorite NASCAR driver’s car number, so what does that tell ya?)

To be perfectly blunt (and when am I not perfectly blunt?), I can’t see what having any kind of Jesus fish or bumper stickers gets us except another reason for unbelievers to be hacked off at our lousy driving habits or the sheer hypocrisy of the plethora of other stickers we might have on our cars that cancels out that Ichthus. If a nut goes screaming past me doing twenty miles over the speed limit, he’s just a menace. But if he’s sportin’ the old Ichthus and doing it, well then he’s now a Christian menace.

    “Will ya take a gander at that car with the Jesus bumper stickers weaving all over the road right in front of us? Better get around this fine driving example and—oh, she’s not only talking on her cellphone, but she’s putting on the face paint at the same time. Martha, is my bazooka still in the glove compartment?”

    “Yes, dear.”

    “Well, lock and load, woman, and hand that thing over here….”

It’s hard to demonstrate Christian charity to someone else while driving. Other than signaling to another person that it’s okay to merge in front of you—in which case they never see your Ichthus on the rear of your car anyway—or perhaps letting an elderly person take the parking spot closest to the store while you park farther away, the only thing that can be accomplished by having Christian adware stuff on your car is negative. (I take that back. There is one “positive” thing. Back in the days before Internet porn, I think a few guys with Jesus fish and stickers on their cars may actually have thought twice about driving into the “adult” bookstore parking lot with a car advertising the fact they were about to do something really stupid. You think I’m kidding, but I’m not.) Otherwise, like the four cases I cited above, what we get through Christian adware instead of a life-chaging profession of Christ is a soul-killing anti-witness. By advertising the fact that we’re Christians and we can’t obey the law, can’t drive rationally, or can’t figure out that Jesus and the great prices on bongs at the head shop don’t mix—well, you don’t have to be R.C. Sproul to see that it’s just not worth demeaning the Lord via a plastic fish slapped on our cars.

With just three chords—Em, Am, C— it was the first song I learned on the guitar. “They’ll Know We Are Christians By Our Love” says it all. That great chapter of the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13, says that only one thing speaks the true language of the Kingdom of God. Not fish. Not bumper stickers. L-O-V-E. And it doesn’t come through pithy sayings above the exhaust system on our cars, nor through “This Blood’s for You!” T-shirts, or any of that other “here today, burn tomorrow” kind of junk that’s already passing away even as it’s rolling off a Chinese conveyor belt in Shanghai.

We need to ask ourselves what does more for our neighbor, showing her the love of Christ by being there for her in her time of need -OR- showing her the Ichthus symbol on the back of our Chevy when we pass her on the road?

That ancient church they just dug up had it right. If we want that Ichthus symbol in our churches, let’s go for it. But when we go out those doors into the world, we’re ambassadors for Christ. We should never give anyone a reason to think less of the Lord because we’re having a bad day; when we put big old Ichthus fish on our cars, we’re just asking for someone to find fault with us—and too often our fish-labeled stupidity gives people the ammo they need to not take Christ or His Church seriously.

Why do we have all the Ichthus fish, the “You sinned, but Jesus got nailed for it” bumper stickers, and the “His Pain, Your Gain” T-shirts? Do they advance the cause of Christ or merely give others a reason to find fault with it? Doesn’t Christian adware do little more than trick us into thinking we’re somehow evangelizing other people when we’re really not—or worse, driving them away from Christ instead?

Isn’t it time to scrape the fish off the car?