Thanks for saying this! I tend just hide behind my reactive fantasies. This is good stuff to consider.

However, I still do think we need to strive for ideals. I think Jesus commanded us too!

You make some good points, and I thank you for your insights.

Blessings,
Don

If we as the Sojourners community hope to remain truly prophetic, we need to critique both the right and the left when they stray from the Kingdom values of peace and justice. Does the issue of the Afghanistan war not matter anymore now that Bush is out? Is FOCA in line with what we like to call “a consistent ethic of human life”? Just because Obama was the best person for the job doesn't mean we have to get behind all of his policies. Many progressives are unaware of his support for capital punishment for example.

After the last eight years of failed leadership, I understand how hard it is to resist the “victory lap” urge to take few more swipes at the GOP and cable's talking heads like Buchanan. They are easy to find fault with. But if “God is not a Republican or a Democrat,” this should mean that followers of Christ will not be one-sided in speaking truth to power.

Indeed. That's the question McLaren is asking, buddy.

The carbon economy is doomed. Of course McLaren doesn't know what will replace it–nobody does. But it will be replaced, one way or another. The earth itself is crying out. The only thing we know now is that we must put our minds together and work for solutions.

And yes, maybe it will mean a lowering of our standard of living. Moving from an exploitative, consumer economy to one based on stewardship and conservation might force some people to forgo their Hummers–even their RVs.

Forward-looking people are often thought of as mad by their contemporaries. But history often demonstrates that that they, of all people, were really the most sane.

The government can legislate and administer the best of all possible recovery programs, but we, who have caused the mess, will not have changed – at all. So we will merely take the money, tax breaks, and other incentives and recapitulate the problem all over again. WE HAVE TO DEAL WITH OURSELVES FIRST.

We are all addicted to having money and stuff, and the proof of it is that most of us, if confronted with it, will deny our addiction. Denial is the giveaway. And then of course there are our houses and apartments full of stuff, much of which we don’t need but merely want in order to massage our egos.

When each of us begins to face our own addiction we have a chance of making a difference. The hitch is that, alcoholics and drug addicts have a place to go for recovery – there is AA and a host of treatment and recovery programs. But where do we consumer addicts go to recover?

One would think that since Jesus taught, as Brian says, that we should not be egocentrically piling-up ‘stuff’ and that instead we should be focused on the needs of others, that we addicts could simply go to any Christian congregation where treatment and recovery would be the primary service offered – and we would all get better!
Except that people in most congregations I know of are not only in deep denial themselves, but are happy enablers of other consumer addicts. It’s not a complete desert out there, though. There are exceptions: the Amish, Old Order Mennonites, and other Anabaptists, along with a number of Catholic religious orders. But that’s a tiny fraction of the Christian world and most of us would not be able to find our way to any of those, or be accepted even if we did.

We need to create Christian recovery programs – convert our contemporary congregations into halfway houses which would be capable of helping all of us to begin living simply, sustainably, and faithfully instead of being pawns of an obsessively materialistic culture based on the bankrupt and immoral neoclassical economic model.

I feel so strongly about this that I created a website, http://www.christiansimpleliving.org, to promote that kind of change. You can’t buy anything on the site and you can’t even donate any money there, nor do you have to join anything, but I would appreciate anyone’s ideas on how we can get together and make a difference right here in our own families and towns and perhaps even spread the idea.

Then maybe we can recover and find a real solution to the crisis.

1) We should not expect (or desire) to return to the level of material prosperity we once enjoyed. We are reaping what we've sown.

2) On a detached philosophical level, it would certainly be nice to be free from our collective “addiction” to carbon, weapons, fear, possessions, money and political slogans. Sign me up for the 12-step program!

On a more practical level, however, McLaren offers little substance beyond the typical jabs at conservatives for their contribution to this mess (excessive military spending, de-regulated corporate greed, fear of non-WASPs, etc). When it comes to a discussion of progressive leadership and ideas, McLaren suddenly has nothing to remotely critical say.

How long can we keep looking back at the Bush years before we have to start being prophetic in the here and now? Even if you grant that Democratic Party control is the lesser of two evils, this should not be license for progressive and moderate Christians to give them a free pass on everything. Last I checked, right-wing Republicans don't have a monopoly on the use of fear, cheap slogans or military spending.

If McLaren is so concerned about addressing the complexities of the economic crisis with “the hard work of acquiring wisdom”, surely an author as accomplished as he could have at least offered some ideas on how “trillions can be made caring for the planet wisely and caring for people justly.” Apart from the stimulus package, where will this kind of money come from? How realistic is it to expect businesses to survive these days with a “triple bottom line — financial sustainability, social sustainability, and economic sustainability”?

Also, since America's “addiction to weapons” is high on his list, can we expect McLaren to use his influence to advocate against Obama's expensive Afghanistan war policy with even a fraction of his disdain for Bush's military strategy?

Whose Kingdom are we trying to build here?

Not that I agree with a word of it: our use of oil doesn't flow from emotional neediness but from practical matters of chemistry and engineering — distill oil into gasoline and what you have is a remarkably powerful fuel for running engines that can do useful work. One can argue about specific applications, like RVs, but if God forbid Brian McLaren should have a heart attack, a gasoline engine is — still — the best way to power a vehicle that will get him to the hospital quickly.

But at least McLaren is honest about what he wants, the end of the strong America of the 80s, 90s and the first few years of the 21st century, an America that had a potent military and a sophisticated market economy with energy drawn from fossil fuels. And if he is vague about just what he would replace it with, at least he doesn't pretend to be overly concerned with the prospect that material living standards might go down dramatically. What's important to him is that we be emotionally healthy.

Again, I think this is all pretty loopy. There's no guarantee that sudden poverty won't just drive us even crazier. But if Brian McLaren is a crackpot, at least he's an honest crackpot. His program, and the vision that motivates it, are right out in the open.

LV

Brian is right and both parties need to wake up. Nobody out there is going to start lending so we can start spending. The banks are bankrupt. The economic house is collapsing like a big domino game and the days of happy motoring, malls and suburban sprawl are over.

I thought the bank and Insurance bailouts were wrong. The stimulus package could help but we need major cuts and the biggest expense is the bloated military budget. The urgency of time seems more real than the bank bailouts and the Republican adjustments are really lame. Rebuilding schools is a good idea and a good training ground for an energy efficient building program, will also reduce burdens on states and localities.

It is nice to have a president who can talk and who thinks in clusters of his own paragraphs rather than repeating the last 2 sentences beamed into his hearing device. I only wish he was the radical reformer he was accused of being.

I really wish we'd read our history. I really wish we'd learn our lessons from FDR and Hoover. Both were interventionists, and both exacerbated the depression.

Try: http://www.gettomontv.com/

Quick video about the money supply (and a plug for his book which was released today).