Trivializing Faith.
Rod Dreher has just recently criticized the merchandizing at the annual convention of the Christian Booksellers Association, writing that he "can't stand seeing how Christians who traffic in most of this stuff trivialize the most important thing in the world."
I agree, though the juxtaposition of his complaint and his focus on sacramental tomatoes is jarring. More than that, I wonder Rod's opinion about a recent book review by his good friend, Caleb Stegall. In it, he writes, "In the quest to 'find Jesus,' much, perhaps everything, may hinge on the environment of the hunt."
He explains: if you live in the suburbs, your chances of being a Christian are slim to none.
In making such an absurd claim to advance his agrarian agenda, is Caleb Stegall not guilty of trivializing Christianity, making it little more than a function of one's environment? Is he not trivializing Christ Himself, making God Incarnate impotent in the face of tract housing and strip malls?
I continue to wait for any indication that Rod's aware of this piece.
I agree, though the juxtaposition of his complaint and his focus on sacramental tomatoes is jarring. More than that, I wonder Rod's opinion about a recent book review by his good friend, Caleb Stegall. In it, he writes, "In the quest to 'find Jesus,' much, perhaps everything, may hinge on the environment of the hunt."
He explains: if you live in the suburbs, your chances of being a Christian are slim to none.
In making such an absurd claim to advance his agrarian agenda, is Caleb Stegall not guilty of trivializing Christianity, making it little more than a function of one's environment? Is he not trivializing Christ Himself, making God Incarnate impotent in the face of tract housing and strip malls?
I continue to wait for any indication that Rod's aware of this piece.
posted by Anonymous at 3:55 PM
8 Comments:
In this review, Stegall assumes that because he himself would capitulate to spiritual rot if he lived in suburbia, then everyone else would too. Well, apparently I know quite a few people who are made of sterner spiritual stuff than he. Stegall seems to think that this population is limited to "a few saints" which is humorously self-glorifying as well as inaccurate. I can say from firsthand experience that he is wrong.
and i love that caleb prescribes even a "lifetime of patient planning" to get the heck out of the suburbs if that's what it takes. in other words, *that's* where you should put your time and treasure! forget taking in the foster children or joining the peace corps or ministering to the elderly or ill -- just spend all your energy, time and money plotting your escape from the suburbs, lest you fail to maintain sufficiently spiritual life.
of course, if everyone who wanted to get to heaven actually did what caleb prescribes, the rural areas wouldn't be so rural anymore. they'd be ... suburban. or maybe even urban. so what caleb prescribes is a logistical impossibility. seems to me that makes his "prescription" just another opportunity to aggrandize himself and brag about his isolated spiritual paradise that us poor schlubs will never replicate, let alone understand.
K siad:
> us poor schlubs
I agree with Bubba -- does that make me a Bubburbian Schluburbanite?
There's a word for the way Caleb is thinking: extrinisicism. I think he's got a kernel of truth in there -- there is a tendency of some folks to say to themselves "Soul, take thy ease" when they move to the 'burbs. But he ignores that all the non-burbers do the same thing in different ways. Sacramone points that out in his article.
I do think that movies like American Beauty beat this dead horse, but everybody nods their heads at it like "that's the way them doggone suburbians is." A lot of these American folks have never seen Jean de Florette. They should.
My PhD candidate bro-in-law pointed out to me the other day that the first murder recorded in the Bible was committed by a farmer against a non-farmer. Whoopsy! And that was before all that urban sprawl happened at the Tower of Babel.
"The suburbs are an oasis of life compared to the materialist wasteland that once gripped my mind."
This is from my comment on your last post. Not all of us have these views. Moving to farms is not a sustainable to solution. Your broad assertions are correct and I agree with you.
Well, of course it doesn't get many hits if you spell it incorrectly like I did!
Here's the first hit from Enc. Brit:
extrinsicism - In philosophy or theology or both, the tendency to place major emphasis on external matters rather than on more profound realities.
The example I always think of is that of the parents who goes out of their way to shield their children from negative cultural forces (sex/drugs/rock & roll) but does nothing in the way of formation to build up an internal resistance to temptation. Not that all such shielding is bad or unnecessary, but it's incomplete without acknowledging mankind's intrinsic imperfections and vices.
Hello? Anyone here? Oh -- there you are.
Just a couple more posts on the same theme:
Takes on the Pope's remarks
More thoughtful thoughts on the big S
Bubba, yes, certainly that is the summary of my problem with Caleb's assessments here and elsewhere: he goes too far.
To deny that externals matter would be to accept an unrealistic presumption even as the extrinsicists seem to hold to an unrealistic despair. Both attack the virtue of hope whose object in this case is the possibility of changing one's self and one's environment, both of which, to a Christian, are accomplished with the help of divine grace.
I am seriously considering buying the "Death by Suburb" book. Despite the radical-sounding title, the author, David Goetz, seems to be writing a "survival guide", not an absolute and total condemnation a la Ra's Al Ghul's judgement upon Gotham City in "Batman Begins". I'm not sure I'll get much from his assessment on "suburban religion" since Protestants have a hugely different expectation of what a church community is all about than Catholics, but I like some of his insights.
Goetz has an article on CT which gets a little tedious, IMHO, but he states at the top "The land of SUVs and soccer leagues tends to weather the soul in peculiar ways, but it doesn't have to." I'll grant that modern suburbs might tend toward certain sins and sinful attitudes (e.g., aforementioned acedia, the "soul take thy ease" attitude) in general moreso than other times and places. But I think Caleb goes too far when he states that except for a few saints, "literal escape plans" are needed or the "inmates" will "live a disembodied spiritual life." Suburbia isn't like a believer's eye to be plucked out as in the cited parable; suburbia is a place, a type of place. I think the shear stretch of this analogy with Christ's hyperbole regarding sins of the flesh is enough evidence that Caleb is straining for absolutes here.
Here's another post from a blogger, Matthew Fish, along the same lines as Stegall's review. I like what blogger Tom (who has commented on this site) says in the comments: "Well, of course it is impossible to live in Suburbia, since as you say "Suburbia" is a symbol, not a place. The places people do live, the actual suburbs that exist, are quite a different matter, one not nearly as susceptible to grand theories. When the theories collide with the actual places, the theories tend to shatter into tautologies." Brilliant as always. Fish responds, I let y'all read & comment further.
Diane wrote: "A question: Do Stegall & co. include all suburbs in their sweeping condemnation, or just the McManisiony kind? There are all sorts of suburbs, after all..."
Diane, I brought up this to Caleb in an email directly back in March. This was his response:
"Yes, 'suburb' is a word with loose definitions. But I think its meaning is clear enough for the purposes of a blog-type discussion...."
For the same reasons you provide, this didn't/doesn't satisfy me. Tom's remark provides insight into the word-play they're engaging in here. IMO, it's the same type of lazy, biased shorthand that the media uses. So "fundamentalist Christian" means "guy who hates gays and kills abortion doctors". Member of the NRA equals "cross-eyed militia member."
I know Christians, conservatives, everybody falls into this, too. When we get called on it we should acknowledge it: "Alright, yeah, I know not all gays have a gay agenda" or "I know not all liberals are drugged out freaks – let me clarify which liberals I’m talking about." This is only fair. It's a turnoff when anyone does this "broad-brushing" and it does a disservice to any argument.
I recommend reading the Wikipedia entry for suburb. There is a lot of room for subtlety in the terminology. I think you can see a huge differentiation in things like suburb-as-bedroom-community, suburb-as-developed-small-town, suburb-as-subdivision, suburb-as-gated-community, etc. But follow all the links to the big scary words and please learn this stuff, folks. Then we can shoot these guys like clay pigeons; "Um, professor, do you think that an exurb which is basically polycentric can be derived organically and if so, is the conurbation, or rather, the exurbation, as it were, subject to economic agglomeration and do you feel this is a positive development?"
"Such silly generalizations and stereotypes simply do not fit the wonderfully diverse crowd of folks I know in Real Life." It's funny because my wife and I were just saying the same thing the other night. Almost all the "good Catholics" we're close friends with right now lives somewhere referred to as the "western suburbs". Obviously this doesn't prove Caleb's assessment wrong because he allows for a few saints to survive the evil suburbs. But it does make me wonder who buys this "evil suburbs" model. My guess is that it's people who are already convinced and they just want to pile on more invective for lack of evidence. More laziness... ah! I know the vice first-hand, believe me.
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