4 December 2009
Properous and Self-centered American Christianity
Posted by pastorjoe under: Articles .
As I sat in McDonald’s this morning, eating my chicken biscuit breakfast, typing emails on my laptop, listening to Christmas music over the Internet on my headset, waiting for a text message on my PDA cell phone, making notes in my book with a Sharpie highlighter, and preparing for the usual indulgences of the Christmas holiday, I read the following quotes:
“Most of us in the U.S. have grown up in prosperity and have never known anything different. Although there have always been self-centered people, it has probably never been seen on the scale we have today in America. However, because we have grown up this way it seems normal to us. But there is a reason jesus spoke of ‘the deceitfulness of riches.’ (Mark 4:19) Indeed, we have been corporately decieved and now obliviously pursue our self-centered lives. . . .
Christians indulge the lust of the flesh like never before through countless forms of pleasure (indulgent eating, viewing pornography, abusing drugs, etc.) and entertainment (following sports, playing video games, viewing television, etc.). American churchgoers have the financial means to give themselves nearly any possession for which their eyes lust. Prideful ambition is driving people to ever greater heights of outward success and prominence. Yes, evangelicals are fully engulfed in a love for ‘the things of the world’ and are seemingly oblivious to the fact that their ‘love for the Father’ has grown ice cold. They can claim to love God, but their daily lives are a denial of it. . . .
Most of us who have been raised since the 1960’s have never known what it really means to do without. We have grown up in a level of prosperity the world has never before known.
A couple of statistics I recently read say much about the U.S. lifestyle. The living standard of the average welfare recipient in America ranks within the middle class of the other top 10 countries of the world; our poorest people live better than the middle-class folks of over 240 other nations. The second stat states that the average American cat eats better than at least one billion people on our planet – people just like you and me!
In the U.S., we enjoy a more opulent lifestyle – full of luxury, pleasure, and comfort – than many kings down through world history. No monarch from past centuries ever enjoyed indoor plumbing, electricity, television, newspapers, toasters, automobiles, ambulance service, telephones and all of the other things that we now consider to be the absolute necessities. Yesterday’s luxuries have become today’s necessities. Recent examples include cell phones and personal computers. It wasn’t that long ago that only the rich could afford such devices. Now, nearly every American has both.
This tremendous prosperity tends to keep people in a constant state of wanting more. Moreover, advertisers do a remarkable job of training us to never be satisfied. Everywhere we look we are being told about some new item that we just cannot live without. Clothes, computers, cars, vacations, house, and furniture are paraded before us to keep us in a fixed state of covetousness: always lusting for more, we are never satisfied.
There is no question that our culture has become increasingly self-centered. We have been taught to see ourselves as the center of everything: what I want, where I want to go, what makes me feel good, what fulfills me. ‘The very air you breathe is a poisonous fume’ of selfishness. We have corporately achieved the great American dream and it has left us miserable and unfulfilled. Surely the spirit of the age in which we live is self-centeredness. Self-love rules the day.”
~ Steve Gallagher (in Standing Firm through the great Apostasy)
How sobering and convicting!