Several years ago while getting ready for work, I enjoyed some quick calculations about how much money I’d have at retirement, more than I would have ever imagined. “Let’s see, 10 more years at 14½ percent per annum like this year, and—wow! Not bad for a guy who knows more about Walt Whitman than about Wall Street.” I’d be financially secure, not wealthy by American standards, but certainly comfortable. Probably enough cash for a cruise or two, a couple of weeks in an over-water buré in Tahiti, a place I’ve wanted to see since reading Mutiny on the Bounty years ago, maybe a visit to Wordsworth’s cottage in England’s Lake District. . . .

The best kind of money

Salem city officials had developed a troubling habit of changing the zoning where I live at the edge of town. Suddenly a three-story apartment complex was banged together 20 feet away, and warehouses were planned for the sweet green fields across the road. This was great news, according to the mayor, because it would increase the tax base—more money for the city. Even better, the apartments were heavily subsidized with federal grants, the very best kind of money—meaning, of course, somebody else’s. This was no longer the quiet neighborhood I’d invested in, the one I thought was guaranteed by a zoning designation of agricultural-residential. It was now a municipal cash cow. But if the market kept on this way, I could think about escaping the rising noise levels to some peaceful acreage outside the city limits. And an upgrade from my aging Ford would improve my commute.

And I didn’t even have to do anything—just watch the numbers rise as my paper wealth grew by the month. What fun!

Economic obesity

As the Trix cereal ads used to say, “Silly rabbit.” Had I forgotten all the history I’d read, history that included accounts of repeated economic downturns following periods of overheated growth? Well, no, but I enjoyed reading economists who assured us that with the advent of the microchip, the game was different. The old cycles had given way to unending economic growth.

And maybe to some degree I had begun to ignore what I knew most deeply: the dangers that accrue when our appetite for acquisition brings about a kind of economic obesity. I saw a dramatic example of this several years ago when, having uncharacteristically neglected to bring along a good book, I passed some time on a long flight by taking a look at the airline’s magazine and catalog tucked into the pouch in front of me.

For $100, I learned, I could buy a pen that writes upside down and under water. Or a remote-controlled metalized Mylar blimp, the perfect size, the catalog pointed out, “for hovering around your home in eerie near silence.” Or for the same hundred dollar bill I could acquire an 11-inch-high waterfall lamp that, along with emitting the expected light, also dispensed the “soothing aroma of violet-scented oil (included),” and get a dollar change.

For 200 bucks I could order the Total Gym: “Feel Terrific With The Body You’ve Always Desired,” the ad urged. And if my workout left me feeling not so terrific, I could get relief for a mere $19 by replacing the strap on my shoulder bag with a “patented magnetic strap” that would offer the benefits of “12 therapeutic bi-polar magnets sewn invisibly into the light padding.”

There was a bubble machine, to improve my parties; gold-plated brass collar stays; end tables in the shapes of zebras and giraffes; and for $125, a cartoon moose standing on his hind legs, forehooves casually crossed on his chest, his antlers supporting a round glass tabletop.

What kind of greed and cynicism, I wondered, must lie behind the manufacture and marketing of such rubbish? Did these peddlers actually believe people were so wealthy, bored, and destitute of taste that they would burden their credit cards and clutter their homes with these objects?

Apparently so. And apparently when we have more money than is actually useful, when we have bought everything we need and our lust for acquisition is still unsated, we will buy things that are useless—worse than useless, things that are ugly and ridiculous and a shame to a civilization so anesthetized by its own casual wealth that it can’t think what to do with it all.

Jesus warned about giving our lives over to the pursuit of stuff—“bigger barns” in the parable recorded by Luke, the notion that because we have plenty of goods our lives have been successful—all the while forgetting that our goods are not us, that they can easily disappear, and that trading our lives for things is a foolish bargain.

Thoreau, conducting his “experiment in living” at Walden Pond, observed that the cost of something is the amount of life required to be given in exchange for it, and asked, “Shall we always study to obtain more . . . and not sometimes be content with less?” In his chapter titled “Economy” he pointed out, when we have “obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities.”

Bill McKibben, writing in the November issue of Harper’s, points out that “the only thing we’ve asked of our economy for a century has been growth, and it’s gotten us in a world of trouble.”

Another alternative

I’m no economist, but I suspect Mr. McKibben is onto something. If all we want is more, then we had better expect to pay the price of a degraded environment, of rising noise levels, of work schedules stretched beyond what God intended, of absent and exhausted parents. The consequence of inexhaustible expectations confronting exhaustible resources of time, energy, and raw material is sure to create a rising tide of anxiety and discontent. Paul had no such anxiety. He noted that he had sometimes had plenty, sometimes little, and in whatever circumstance had learned “to be content.”

I’m going to take a deep breath now . . . and suggest that what is true for individuals and municipalities can also be true of churches. I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only person who knows of at least one church that has been wrecked by an overly ambitious building plan. At a time when some members of the congregation have lost pensions and jobs, it seems appropriate for churches, too, to take a careful look at their corporate spending habits. Maybe they are all in order, but I don’t think we should assume so without checking. Does every new church need a gym? Can we get along without that coffee bar we had planned for our new wing?

I wonder if we American Christians have not grown accustomed to a life of luxury that is not so different from the life valued by any other prosperous American, the one advertised as the good life by people who want to sell us things. For example, I’m uneasy at the ads I see in Christian magazines for Christian cruises. They look pretty much like the ads I see in all the travel magazines: extraordinarily good-looking people—models, I should think—very well dressed, and gleaming tables laden with the best food money can buy. I am not opposed to cruises; my wife wants to take the inside passage to Alaska, and I hope we can do it one of these summers. But how did luxury cruises become a thread woven into the tapestry of a supposedly distinctive Christian system of values and behavior?

In the midst of the roaring cataract of news about failing banks and the recklessness of huge mortgage lenders, maybe it’s time for me to be content with less: less space, less travel, fewer dinners out. And, given the very real poverty facing some people in a period of heavy job layoffs, to make more contributions to my church’s food bank.

Maybe it’s a good time for all of us to have a garage sale of the mind and spirit, to sort out who we are and what we most profoundly want and need, to let go of some of the gaudy economic furniture that has cluttered our lives and our thinking. Maybe it’s a good time for a wealthy and politically powerful American church to make sure we are not like the church in Laodicea, who boasted, “I am rich, have become wealthy, and have need of nothing,” when in fact they were “wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked.” To them God said, “Anoint your eyes with eye salve, that you may see” (Revelation 3:17, 18).

It’s likely that this economic crisis will force some changes upon many of us, will at the least require us to take another look at the way we have grown accustomed to living. And maybe that’s not a bad thing at all.

Jim Hills teaches American Thought and Culture at Corban College.
He can be reached at jhills@corban.edu.