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Is that a recent conclusion of yours—that wealth is more fundamentally destructive of the church and its mission than is liberalism?>
No. They go hand in hand. The production of wealth has always been what liberalism has been about, and liberalism understood economically is capitalism. We have arrived at a condition in which it's just inconceivable for us to think of ourselves as Christian and poor. Therefore our great social vision is knowing how to make the poor not so poor, as part of what it means to be Christian. And I think that what God is doing is teaching us that Christianity is very much about knowing how to go on in the face of being poor. I don't want at all to romanticize poverty, but the poor are forced into forms of cooperation that provide resources that we affluent Christians do not have. It takes a lot of money to avoid cooperating with other people. Affluent Western Christians have that kind of money.
We're clearly under the power of greed and we don't even know it. I take it that part of the agony of child-rearing today comes from the fact that any no that you give a child appears arbitrary. "No, you cannot have another Beanie Baby because you've got too many Beanie Babies." And the child says, "How would I know that I have too many Beanie Babies? My best friend has more than I do."
I grew up in a low-middle-class home. I never knew I should, for example, expect my parents to provide me a college education. It never crossed my mind. I didn't know I was poor, as a matter of fact, until I went to college. There I discovered that a lot of people had a lot more stuff. But when I was growing up my parents didn't have to say no because certain things were just out of reach. And now, for many, there seems to be nothing out of reach. So if a parent says no, children can only suspect they're being mistreated. Greed isn't even located.
Now, I say all this as someone who has for many years lived with the benefits that come with academic success. I get paid well. I'm still not sure what to do with my money, but I like being rich. I mean, it's a good thing to be able not to have to worry about whether or not I can really afford to buy books or pieces of art, and so on. It's just very hard to discover appropriate limits in this society.
I hope I'm not being judgmental when I'm saying this, because I assume that we're all captured by it in various ways. But we're captive to a power. That's the way I want us to think about sin: not as something so much that I do as something that I'm captured by and that I don't even recognize as captivity.
And isn't this inability to locate limits related to a widespread feeling of lostness and nihilism? If there's nothing we really can't have or do or must protect, then is anything really rare or precious?
That's why I say the yuppies are the great monastics of modernity. The yuppies are often criticized for not having children because allegedly that's their hedonism—they'll buy a boat rather than rear a child. But I think yuppies don't have children because they see no reason why they should pass on to future generations the meaninglessness of their own lives. That refusal is a kind of ascetic discipline. Why have children in this culture? You're going to have children for them to grow up to consume at a higher level than you? Rather than go to Wheaton, they can go to Harvard? Why are you doing this? I think children catch on. "Why am I here? What am I to do? No sacrifices are asked of me."
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