How many different ways can people worship Mammon?
American culture is inherently materialistic. The Enlightenment arose from a period of time when European middle-class people were finally doing well enough to get a decent education. They liked the pretense of upper class wealth, but lacked the inward character of nobility that aristocrats often learned. The middle-class merchants wanted the comfort and respect without the actual patrician frame of mind. Eschewing actual nobility was a major element in the Enlightenment philosophy into which America was born.
By default, American children absorb materialism very early. God alone knows how I managed to escape that. As a child, I often gave stuff away to my friends. It was simply an instinct. During those years, my family was homeless part of the time, so I never took seriously the idea of having stuff. I was always focused more on gathering experiences.
As I walked through my early adult years, I never worried too much that some of my career choices would lead to poverty. To this day, I am not embarrassed that my kids grew up in ratty old housing during their early years. A part of me knew that I was passing up chances to be more well off because those options included things that felt morally wrong for me. Trust me: I have no regrets about that.
The Lord provided me an opportunity to get a good education. I didn’t waste that; I got good grades. My final GPA was 3.8 out of 4.0. But I always knew that my mission was to bring the high intellectual stuff down to the level of folks I grew up with. There are still a huge number of people out there who are homeless, as I was at times, and their numbers are currently growing. Among them are God’s Elect.
So, it disturbs me to this day that those with solid biblical scholarship seem utterly unconscious of this vast audience they never touch. It’s not that they aren’t willing to try, but too often it just doesn’t register with them the barriers they have raised. For example, some of the best books in the field of biblical studies cost almost as much as my bicycles.
Honest truth: I have no conscience at all about having pirated some of those books by patronizing Z-library and Pirate Bay. There is no way I could afford those books. By no means do I envy people with a high income and comfortable life. I don’t wish them ill at all. What I wish is that they were aware that they never even think about how they have been taught by the system to expect their high incomes, as if they could not possibly minister without it.
Everyone they know, all the people with whom they were educated and with whom they rub shoulders today, live in the upper-middle class. They are desensitized to the disparity.
Well, there are a few like me who scavenge that expensive education second-hand and we are trying to pass it on to folks who might not be welcome in their churches. I’m not referring to people who are merely smelly and dirty; I’m talking about people who are homeless because they find themselves excluded by the mainstream of society for other reasons. These are people who aren’t willing to make the moral compromises the system demands. Or perhaps they simply have peculiar social habits that offend the mainstream. Not everyone homeless is a crook or moral slimeball.
Many years ago I wrote about something called “Unchurch”. I’m need to drag that stuff out and present it again here.
