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A few weeks ago, I visited a church in a locale I'll call Levittown. The building was mid-century churchy: stained glass windows; deep, dark wooden pews; prominent pulpit and altar; upright piano on a dais. But about twenty minutes into the service, something decidedly contemporary caught my eye: a giant (should I say venti?) Starbucks cup sitting proudly on the piano. How's that for contemporary iconography? I wonder if it was a paid product placement.
Death by Suburb: How to Keep the Suburbs from Killing Your Soul
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Starbucks is an icon of suburbia, of course, even if the great coffee institution did start in Seattle, and it is fashionable to decry suburban living. Indeed, one of the few things agrarians and urbanites share is their utter horror for the suburbs, whose gated communities and starter mansions are poison for the soul. Even suburbanites themselves often engage in anti-suburb diatribes, albeit a tad sheepishly.
Two new books propose to redirect the conversation. David Goetz, a former editor at Leadership Journal, and Albert Y. Hsu, an editor at InterVarsity Press, ask what a spirituality of suburbia, a spirituality for people who drive mini-vans and tend manicured lawns (or pay someone else to tend them), might look like.
Suburban life, if pursued unheedingly, "obscures the real Jesus," writes Goetz in Death by Suburb. "Too much of the good life ends up being toxic, deforming us spiritually." But if obscured, Jesus is there somewhere, and Goetz's book aims to help suburbanites find him in the ocean of lattÉs, in the aisles of Pottery Barn, and in the bleachers at the soccer field: "You don't have to hole up in a monastery to experience the fullness of God. Your cul-de-sac and subdivision are as good a place as any."
Goetz identifies eight "environmental toxins" that plague suburbia and offers a spiritual practice to purge each toxin from your system and help you realize that "even in suburbia all moments are infused with the Sacred." By packaging his insights in this self-helpy formula—7 habits, 8 practices, 40 days to a more authentic Christian life—Goetz obviously opens himself up to criticism: this blueprint recapitulates some of the very problems of the suburban mindset that he is trying to offset. But I suspect he knew what he was doing, and chose the idiom to convey a subversive message to his target audience.
The Suburban Christian: Finding Spiritual Vitality in the Land of Plenty
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Consider environmental toxin #8, for example: "I need to get more done in less time." Do you constantly wish you had more time—more time to catch up on email, get to the grocery store, pay your bills, please your boss, maybe even take your wife out to dinner? Consider keeping the Sabbath, a discipline sure to reconfigure the understanding and inhabiting of time for all those who faithfully practice it. (Scripture offers us a similarly counterintuitive antidote for the related sin of credit card debt: if you want to get out of debt, start tithing. Giving money to the church won't get our Visa bills paid, but there is no surer way to escape being owned by money than giving it away.)
Environmental toxin #6: "My church is the problem." Goetz has no patience for Americans' pernicious church-hopping: "Only in relationships that permit no bailing out can certain forms of spiritual development occur." Rather than switch churches because your pastor said something you disliked or the new church plant down the street has a livelier youth group, practice the discipline of "staying put in your church." This manifestly countercultural advice cuts to the very heart of America's restless anomie.
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