Words'nTone

Securing Home, Adjusting Our Signs and Symbols
Luke T. Johnson reminds us that, “Idolatry comes naturally to us, not only because of the societal symbols and structures we ingest from them, but also because it is the easiest way for our freedom to dispose itself.” This understanding of the function of idolatry is captured well by Berger and Luckmann, who have demonstrated that “reality is socially constructed.” However, to fully understand “the everyday reality” of human beings, it is simply “not enough to understand the particular symbols or interaction patterns of individual situations.” It is the “overall structure or meaning within which these particular patterns and symbols” are experienced. As we seek to apply the significance of texts that present Laws, land-stipulations, warnings, and judgments regarding our relationship and social action toward the poor and economically vulnerable, it is important to understand the social life-world experienced by the non-poor, how it was formed, and how non-poor Christians participate in the outcomes of this social location.

Religion once offered an integrating principle that helped to provide a “life-world” that was “more or less unified.” Modern life not only provides a less unified everyday life, now religion often aligns itself with the socio-economic forces that give meaning to such everyday life that inoculate the Christian from the idolatrous forces embedded in the social-location and its institutions. Over time different symbols and signs, rather than religious (or biblical) permeate the various social-locations the modern non-poor experiences as everyday life. In fact the very habit of experiencing the fragmented, often unintegrated social-locations over and over everyday might feel like a freedom granted by our socio-economic system, but weakens the plausibility our faith forming a true “home world.” We, then, find ourselves in need of affirming a “this worldly” system and its institutions in order to be at home, even as Christians. The individual, then “plots the trajectory of his life on the societal ‘map’” provided by such institutions and apparent freedoms in order to relate—comfortably, plausibly, securely—to the overall web of acceptable meanings in the society. “Because of the plurality of social worlds in modern society, the structures of each particular world are experienced as relatively unstable and unreliable.” Consequently the institutional order undergoes a certain loss of reality. The security comes on objectifying the subjective reality. The separated sectors of our social world are rationalized and relativized, forcing the non-poor Christian to religiously justify “this worldly systems and institutions” in order to feel less exposed and vulnerable and more relevant and secure.

Although there is some movement among younger evangelicals to embrace social action, much is simply a political realignment rather than truly counter-cultural expression of faith (“justice issues are trendy and participation gives good feeling”) and alien or detached from actually poverty (“they get to go home to the suburbs after their social action is done for the day”). Nonetheless, for the most part, the non-poor evangelical Christian living in the suburbs, benefiting from limited government and the promise of upward mobility, feel at home in the burbs, a life sustained and enabled by capitalism and the free market. After decades of political alignment and religious justification, the remedy for the alienation and loneliness and self-doubt of modern, segmented life is democratic freedom and capitalism—all biblically text-proofed.

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