Claiming Our Kin, or, Can we be Christians in the ‘Burbs?

My dad and I went to the big, fat, totally awesome used bookstore in Manassas this week (a Bill Bixler ritual) and I found a book called Justice in the Burbs: Being the Hands of Jesus Wherever You Live. There are some good dad-friendly contributors, like Christine Pohl and Brian McLaren, so I handed it off to him and he said he would read it. This is actually one of many books on Suburban Christianity published recently.  Understandably, it’s a hot topic, especially as Evangelicalism has begun a social justice makeover. Al Hsu, author of The Suburban Christian, has a blog dedicated to the subject, as does Sub*Text.

I appreciate that these conversations are happening, often thoughtfully and imaginatively from what I’ve read. Christians live in the suburbs and we must learn how to be disciples wherever we live. But I worry about the hint of quietism that is lurking under the surface of these Suburban Christianity arguments. Yes, Christians live in the suburbs, but if we are truly resident aliens, we sure as hell shouldn’t feel at home there.

My friend Derek is currently writing a book that makes a connection between Baudrillard’s simulacrum and suburbia, and calls Christians to recover and prioritize “the real” over the simulated, Truman Show fantasy land of suburban America. I must say, I have a lot of sympathy for Derek’s argument. There are too many Christian churches (white, middle to upper class, highly educated benefactors of the status quo) languishing in the suburbs, completely isolated from their needy neighbors, even the needy in their congregation. They are turned in on themselves, obsessed with doctrinal (and administrative) minutia and meetings and capital campaigns to build new, million-dollar education wings. I think Derek would argue that suburban culture necessarily creates such isolation and self-focus. It’s the nature of what suburbia is and how suburbia formed historically — as safe, white enclaves for the ‘ideal American family.’ Perhaps even the ideal Christian family.

But here is the kicker – MOST churches in America are suburban churches. More than 50% of Americans live IN the suburbs. Every single church I’ve gone to in my short life has been white, upperclass, suburban. Furthermore, I AM white, upperclass, suburban! I can moan and complain and demonize suburban America as much as I want, but to do so feels a bit like cutting off my own arm (well, maybe more like ripping off my sneakers). I am imbedded in that world. I know that world. And I can’t really escape that world, especially as a Duke Divinity School in Durham, NC. Sigh.

I responded to an article Derek posted on Duke Div’s online journal, The Confessio (he has since taken it down, probably for copyright reasons).  I was actually responding to another comment from a fellow student who was trying to deal with the same tension. The student was worried that anti-suburban rants have become sort of “hip” in Christian subcultures, though those hip Christians still live out their lives, sip their lattes, and read their emergent theological books in the very neighborhoods they claim to despise.  The student argued that we, as suburban Christians, must go through a process of conversion before we can ever hope to fellowship with those on the margins. Essentially, you can take the privileged white girl out of the suburbs, but you can never take the suburbs out of the privileged white girl… without true conversion.

My response centered around the issue of power as something both inexcusable and inescapable. Such tension often causes us highly-educated, well-meaning (blogging) Christians to feel paralyzed in our response to poverty. Yes, I have the power to move out of the suburbs and into the ghetto, but isn’t that move in and of itself is an act of violence against the powerless who are trapped in poverty? Yes, I can give away all my belongings, but my social capital will always be present, a safety net that will inevitably catch me before I end up on the streets.

Perhaps the bigger danger is not our own power but our rationalization of and submission to that power. It is just as much a sin to wield this power for evil as it is to allow this power to handicap our ability to follow Jesus. Yes, we have the power of choice. But what choices are we, Christians marked as Christ’s own in baptism, called to make?  I do believe a part of our conversion or “revolution of the heart” is recognizing our power of choice. But we cannot stop here. We must move beyond this by acknowledging that it is God, not us, who has the ultimate power over this earth and that God calls each of us, poor or rich, to care for one another.

The first step to relinquishing our power is to kneel at the foot of the Cross, where the king of the universe submitted himself to a humiliating death.  Christ was rich, and became poor for our sakes. Christ chose to leave his throne so he could wash our feet. The Incarnation has rendered the powerful powerless, and the last have become first.  Therefore, we have been freed to serve the least of these with the understanding that we are serving Jesus. And if we are called to follow him, we must follow him to those uncomfortable places where human pain and despair are laid bare, at this risk of our own bodily discomfort and at the risk of coming face to face with our own complicity in the suffering of others.

Barbara Brown Taylor, in her sermon, The Silence of God, writes that God is not interested in upholding our illusions, whether it be our illusions of power, our illusions of suburban comfort, and the like. Instead, God is interested in “the demolition of our illusions: that we can hold ourselves up from one another, that we are not related to one another, that some people are simply destined to be winners and others to be losers and that there is nothing to be done about it, except perhaps to build some walls and install some security systems and relocate some neighborhoods in order to keep the one from spilling over into the other.”

Taylor goes on to confess that she was guilty of this relocation , moving from Atlanta “where bullets flew and babies’ stomachs growled and old people froze to death in their beds because they could not pay their utility bills,”  to a small town in North Georgia. But even there, away from the big city, Taylor witnessed poverty – immigrant children playing in drainage ditches, Laotian women working in a meat processing plant, the elderly in the grocery store with little food in their carts, deciding between beans and cereal for dinner. She writes, “I had an illusion that the country would be different, but God disillusioned me. Hiding ourselves from our kin is not a city issue or a rural issue but a human issue.”

Perhaps we are getting too hung up on the suburbs and not getting to the kernel of the issue, which is this: as human beings, particularly as rich, privileged seminary students, we will do whatever it takes to avert our eyes from the needy and vulnerable. And we do this at risk of our own damnation, for we cannot ignore the needy without ignoring God. But God has given us another way. As Taylor states, “We can surrender our illusions of separateness, of safety and superiority. We can leave our various sanctuaries and seek God where God may be found, gathering in the streets…to figure out how to untie the fancy knots of injustice and how to take the yokes of oppression apart…Above all, we can learn to claim our kin, asking them what their names are, telling them our own, and refusing to hide from them anymore.”

What choices can we make, particularly regarding our residential choices,  that will help us “claim our kin”? What residential communities (rural, suburban, exurban, city, you name it!) build walls between us and the poor and powerless? Which communities allow us to no longer hide from the beggars and the addicts and the “least of these”? If poverty is everywhere, it’s also in suburban America. And if poverty is in suburbia, it means Jesus is there, too, even if he is sometimes hard to see.  If we really want to be the church in suburbia, we must first find Jesus – in the group home two doors down, in the prison three blocks over, in the battered women’s shelter down the street, in the soup kitchen on Main, in the hospital waiting room at Duke Medical Center, in the elderly neighbor’s house whose heating was cut off two weeks ago. And then we must work hard to introduce Jesus to the rest of the neighborhood. This is the godly work of disillusionment. As Christians, we are called to abolish the simulacrum of prosperity and comfort around us and show people Jesus, even in neighborhoods that would call the cops on Jesus for sleeping on their sidewalks (Luke 9:58) or eating scraps from their trash (Luke 6:1-5).