how are we doing on the freedom from want?

Freedom.

For a word that has become almost synonymous with the United States of America, the more worldly among us are gradually becoming savvy to the fact that freedom can only be spoken of as a goal, not an achieved reality. There is a huge splotch of grey that exists between free and not free. We should never just toss the word out there unqualified but should always speak of degrees of freedom. A child whose one parent is lacking a high school diploma and who is trying to learn to read in an inner city class size of 45 is quite a bit less free than the child of a cardiologist and a CPA who is learning in a private classroom of 16. A family in a safe neighborhood is more free than a family in a dangerous one, and so on.

As his own country (Germany in the 1930s) was trying to achieve a certain version of freedom at a great cost to its cultural soul, Dietrich Bonhoeffer pointed out that the idea of freedom, if it is only defined in the negative (freedom from), can achieve nothing more than a paranoid hysteria as a society tries to eliminate anything that could be perceived as a threat. Any freedom that is worthy of the name, needs to be defined positively (freedom for), because only after discovering something to live for outside of ourselves, can we escape our enslavement to obsessive self-concern.

In this blog and the next one, I’d like to take the last two parts of FDR’s famous “Four Freedoms” speech—“freedom from want” and “freedom from fear”—and ask the question: how are we doing?

In a not-so-recent Ted Talk, psychologist Barry Schwartz laid out what he calls “the paradox of choice.” The long and short of it says that if you give someone three different kinds of vehicles to choose from at the dealership, she will be a little happier than if you only give her one choice; but if you give her 50 choices, she will be much less happy than if you had only given her three.  That is, our conventional assumption that more freedom to choose is better is true to a point, but that point comes fast and hard. And once that threshold is passed, the happiness graph can plunge downward as far as you like.

Most of us probably know this from experience. At the grocery store, where they give me three brands of cheddar cheese, I can be reasonably confident that I’m walking away with the one that I like best. But when I come away from the golf shop with one of 50 drivers, I’ll always wonder if one of the others wouldn’t have added 20 yards off the tee or reduced my slice. And it’s best for my mental health, if I don’t even consider the possibilities of switching to Romano or Fontina cheese.

Obviously, golf clubs and cheese are fairly trivial issues. But think about what this means for our larger aspirations. I’ve read of a study where people rated their own happiness more and more highly up to a household income of  $75,000 (gallup.com/businessjournal), after which there is a hard cutoff. There may even be some drop-off as added income isolates people and eliminates any impetus for them to build a strong social network. The study depended on self-reporting, which has its limitations, but the findings certainly ring true to my experience, growing up in a part of town where many households would’ve considered $75,000 unlivable but where happiness was scarce.    

It is an old, old insight from a myriad of philosophical and theological traditions that wanting what we don’t have leads to unhappiness. And even modern pop culture is aware of it. The nineties band Sublime’s words, “Life is short, so love the one ya got,” were ubiquitous in the dorm rooms of my generation of young scholars, and the sentiment is just an echo of an older generation’s “Money can’t buy you happiness.” But a few chart toppers and homespun sayings notwithstanding, the modern western world has created an economic and political belief system that is more or less designed to keep raising the happiness high jump bar just beyond our reach, even as, deceptively, it encourages the invention of mechanisms that help us to jump higher. We have colluded with the free market and the advertising industry to make the satiation of our own appetites impossible. Like a child trying to grasp a floating dandelion seed, the prize gets further and further away the faster we fling our limbs at it.

I don’t want to be misheard. Our system does a better job of incentivizing innovation than perhaps any other before it, and this has resulted in creature comforts, convenience, entertainment, and consumer options that I benefit from everyday. I’m definitely not ready to undo all of that just yet. But all great thought traditions have recognized that it’s not easy to discern just what causes happiness. And comfort, convenience, entertainment, and consumer options are regularly given more credit than they deserve by the popular mind.  

As a society, we are forever deceived into speaking, purchasing, and voting as though the stated goal of our society is to “create wealth,” something that we’ve succeeded at indisputably over the last century. But if we think that the wealth we’ve created should be put in the service of happiness and not the other way around, our successes are much more ambiguous.

This is why church leaders should never be afraid to ask people to give up their money.  The primary reason to press this issue in faith communities is not to cover staff salaries, renovate buildings, or pay the electric bill, nor, fellow well-meaning liberals, is it primarily to do good projects in the world (but by all means, let’s, if we have the cash, and we can be intelligent about it). The primary reason to press this is in order to smash idols.

The acquire-wealth-in-order-to-obtain-freedom-from-want experiment failed. We acquired the wealth. We have more money now than any generation before us. I read once that the average middle class home has more different kinds of consumer goods than King Henry the VIII had in his palace. But the “want” remains. It could even be argued that we have more want now than previous societies, which never stated “freedom from want” as a goal in the first place and so never thought to provide so many choices.

The word for something that promises you happiness but doesn’t deliver is an idol.

It’s not “greedy” for church leaders to ask for money (assuming it’s not going into their back pockets, which, if you’ve ever seen the financial statement, is not how it works in your typical neighborhood church). It’s a decision not to enable. It’s the refusal to give in to a lie.

a challenge to millennials from a millennial

Here are some common perceptions about Millenials, their money, and their relationship to the church, followed by what I believe to be the kernel of truth in each and then a challenge to other Millenials who are trying to live faithfully in uncertain times.

1. The church is guilty until proven innocent.

Truth - Every thinking adult 18-118 can recite several scandals and atrocities that have chained themselves to the public image of the church. But where older generations might be able to juxtapose a positive image of their childhood church or a pastor that they remember well, Millenials generally aren’t. Or if they’re lucky enough to at least have that (as I do), it is regularly humiliated by the majority opinion of their peer group.

Challenge – As a generation, we pride ourselves on our ability to keep a conscious check on our biases. But how many of us are paying attention to all the clergy collars anywhere there is a peace protest or a rally for equality? How many of us are thinking of Dorothy Day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Oscar Romero, Desmond Tutu, or Martin Luther King Jr. when we level our critiques at the church? I’m not saying we have to turn a blind eye to the church when it screws up as our grandparents might have been guilty of doing from time to time. Just be fair. And at least recognize the good with the bad.

               

The Church is not a Millenial’s primary clan

Truth - President Obama was wise to promote his health care law on “Between Two Ferns” with Zach Galifianakis not because it shares any deep resonance with his overall message but because the sardonic irony of its presentation is code for a deeper cultural awareness. The intended message was clear: “You can trust me. I’m one of you.” It's an understatement to say that the church lacks that kind of social cachet. A church meeting in some hipster bar or coffee coop might be short term draw for a few, but it's no Regina Spektor.

Challenge - If you want to follow Jesus but need a community more rooted than “pub theology” and not backward like fundamentalist Christianity, and you don’t believe that your down-to-earth neighborhood church gets you, your worldview, or your cultural mindset; then change it. Millenials are certainly too enlightened to be ageist, no? So give Hazel and Ethel a chance. As a pastor of multiple generations, you’d be amazed how many Hazel and Ethel’s I’ve met who, it turns out, were way ahead of me and the words I had to preach when, previously, I might have written them off as too old to accept what I had to say. Repeatedly, I’ve been all hopped up on my “radical Gospel” only to discover Hazels who are on the no fly list for protesting The School of the Americas in the eighties and Ethels who have spent decades teaching elementary school for almost no compensation in Mali and Columbia. Lesson learned: I’m not that radical. But I can be, if I get some skin in the game and maybe even humble myself to learn from these people.

Millenials don’t want to pay a mortgage and electrical bills for a church when they could be giving directly to a cause that they care about

Truth - Fair enough.

Challenge -  This is not an either/or, and most of us give so little to the “causes” that we say we care about, it would be laughable to claim that it is. Beyond that, how many Millenials realize that Lutheran Services in America is the single biggest charitable organization in America in terms of revenue? Last fall, at the drop of a hat, about 70 people from my congregation raised $45,000 to bring 29 families out of extreme poverty in the central plateau of Haiti. A crowd-funding campaign would have required ten or twenty times as many participants to generate that kind of investment. Why was this possible? Because we had also been paying electric bills and a mortgage so that we could gather week after week as a community, hear stories, and develop a common vision around a God whose heart is always first and foremost with the poor and who suffers no either/or-s when it comes to their sake.    

Millenials have no money

Truth - Millenials have no money, mostly (there is no poverty-by-association).

Challenge - Giving money away faithfully doesn’t require a steady income and sure handle on the future. In fact, the word faithfully implies just the opposite. And no one is asking you to compete with the empty nesters in the fourth pew whose house is paid off, and their one child got a full ride to Yale, and now they’re left with nothing but disposable income. A leap of faith for you might be $5 more per week out of your scarcity where another $100 to them is nothing. The church is the only money handling institution in our society whose president and CEO (forgive the language, Jesus) actually gets more excited about the $5 than the $100 (Mark 12:41-44). So don't worry about trying to impress anyone.

Millenials are anxious about the future

Truth – Delayed careers, student loan debt, housing crash; the whole bit.

Challenge - It’s commonplace in our society for us to entrust our future to our money. The theological term for that to which you entrust your future well-being is “god.” The word for a god that is not the right God is "idol." This nation may have spent centuries going to church on Sunday and writing "In God we trust" on its coinage (kind of ironic, no?), but when it came down to our anxiety about the real business of surviving, Christ has never seriously competed with your run-of-the-mill financial planner for the position of high priest. But money is a particularly unforgiving god whose mercy never overrules his cold, calculating logic. He will repossess your stuff and evict you cold and naked the second you anger him. So Jesus’ challenge to people with money anxieties was both counter-intuitive and elegantly logical, get rid of it. Putting money into the plate is an act of defiance against that copper god. In some sense, we’re literally getting rid of him in hopes of discovering a God who is far more gracious.