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Environmental toxin #3: "I want my neighbor's life." Has life in the suburbs turned your skin permanently green with envy and taught you to covet the Joneses' cars, careers, and Ivy League-bound kids? Try developing "friendship with those who have no immortality symbols." That is, stop hanging out with your rich neighbors, and instead find "ways to be with the poor, the mentally disabled, the old and alone…. . essentially, all those who don't build up [your] ego through their presence." When you hang out with less wealthy people, you "begin to compare [yourself] to a different kind of neighbor," and then you experience not envy but gratitude.
The point here is well-taken, but it still finds us measuring our worth against other people. And the examples Goetz offers underscore how hard it is for middle-class Americans to practice downwardly mobile sociability. His model of social "kenosis" is the writer Barbara Ehrenreich, who emptied herself by focusing her gaze on maids and waitresses. But Ehrenreich gazed at maids and waitresses because—on assignment for Harper's for articles that became the book Nickel and Dimed—she was working undercover as a maid and waitress herself. It is worrying indeed if investigative journalism is the principle channel through which suburbanites can "face the humanity of another kind of person."
Albert Y. Hsu's The Suburban Christian finds in suburban living a deep spiritual longing. People come to the suburbs, Hsu says, because they are looking for something, a job or affordable housing or good public schools (or, less charitably, mostly white public schools). Like Goetz, Hsu insists that you don't need to live on a farm or in the inner city to live an authentically Christian life. Nevertheless, "the suburban Christian ought not uncritically absorb all the characteristics of the suburban world."
One excellent chapter teases out what follows from suburban reliance on cars. (Did you know that the average commuter spends three weeks a year commuting?) As a consequence of our driving dependence, says Hsu, the elderly who can't drive are marginalized. Policy makers don't prioritize public transportation. Indeed, we often don't build sidewalks; as Bill Bryson has observed, "In many places in America now, it is not actually possible to be a pedestrian, even if you want to be."
Alongside Goetz's suggestion that we stay put in our churches through thick and thin, Hsu urges us to recover the parish mindset—that is, to go to the church down the block and join in what God is doing there, rather than shopping for the perfect fit and winding up at a church two suburbs away.
Consumerism goes hand in hand with suburban living. How can we "consume more Christianly"? Shop in locally owned stores; create holiday rituals that don't revolve around gift-giving; regularly fast, not just from food, but also from media, new technology, and new clothes; buy organic, fair-trade coffee produced by companies that don't destroy rain forests. (And if you agree with the skeptics who find the "fair-trade" crowd self-deluded, there are plenty of other ways to become a more discriminating consumer.) A basic guideline for simple living, says Hsu, is "to live at a standard of living that is below others in your income bracket. It you can afford a $400,000 house, live in a $250,000 one instead. Or, if you can afford a $250,000 house, live in a $150,000 one."
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