The Child in American Evangelicalism and the Problem of Affluence

A Theological Anthropology of the Affluent American-Evangelical Child in Late Modernity

Sims

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781498270069
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This work presents an evangelical theology of the child nurtured in the context of American evangelicalism and affluence. It employs an eclectic theological-critical method to produce a theological anthropology of the affluent American-evangelical child (AAEC) through interdisciplinary evangelical engagement of American history, sociology, and economics. Sims articulates how affluence constitutes a significant impediment to evangelical nurture of the AAEC in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Thus, the problem he addresses is nurture in evangelical affluence, conceived as a theological-anthropological problem. Nurture in the cultural matrices of the evangelical affluence generated by technological consumer capitalism in the U.S. impedes spiritual and moral formation of the AAEC for discipleship in the way of the cross. This impediment risks disciplinary formation of the AAEC for capitalist culture, cultivates delusional belief that life consists in an abundance of possessions, and hinders the practice of evangelical liberation of the poor on humanity's underside. The result is the AAEC's spiritual-moral lack in late modernity.Chapter 1 introduces the problem of the AAEC. Chapters 2 and 3 provide a diachronic lens for the theological anthropology of the AAEC through critical assessment of the theological anthropologies of the child in Jonathan Edwards, Horace Bushnell, and Lawrence Richards. Chapters 4 and 5 constitute the synchronic perspective of the AAEC. Chapter 4 presents an evangelical sociology of the AAEC, drawing upon William Corsaro's theory of interpretive reproductions, and chapter 5 constructs an evangelical theology of the AAEC through critical interaction with John Schneider's moral theology of affluence. Chapter 6, Whither the AAEC?, concludes with a recapitulation of the work and a forecast of possible futures for the AAEC in the twenty-first century.

1

Introduction: Theological Economics and the Problem of the AAEC

This book is a theological-critical study of the child nurtured in evangelicalism and affluence in the United States. It presents a theological anthropology of the Affluent American-Evangelical Child (AAEC) formed in these subcultural and cultural contexts. As such, the work is properly viewed as a theological economics of the child raised and embedded in those formative contexts.

Research began broadly in the theology of family and then narrowed to the theology of children with a view to how liberation theology might apply to the study of the child in critical-theological perspective. As the scope narrowed to the child in American evangelicalism and the socio-cultural problem of affluence, the pertinence of liberation theology became attenuated. How could it be argued plausibly, much less persuasively, that the child raised in evangelical affluence needed liberation? Research began to focus on the historical, sociological, and theological aspects of the child embedded in evangelical affluence in the United States. Questions relating to nurture in that context were raised in the process of researching and forming the central thesis of the work, which ultimately indicated the need for a theological anthropology of the AAEC in late modernity.

The following six subsections present an overview of the course of research and contours of theological-critical analysis undertaken:

1. The problem of affluence and the AAEC

2. Overview of structure and content

3. Key terms and phrases

4. Theological-critical method

5. Survey of pertinent literature

6. Aim and goals

The Problem of Affluence and the AAEC

Mass affluence, or the condition of abundant wealth and material goods for an increasing number of human beings, is a late modern phenomenon unequaled in history. The phenomenon has been so remarkable that economists have resorted to language of mystery and miracle to describe it.1 As the product of technological consumer capitalism, affluence marks the nations and economies of Western Europe, the United States, Japan, and more recently the East Asian Tigers (also known as Asia’s Four Little Dragons): Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore.

China and India have learned from the success of economic liberalism in the West and the Asian Tigers and are moving toward free-market economies as well. From 1981 to 2001, China and India made remarkable gains of affluence for their people, along with other Asian countries such as Malaysia. As a result of the rapid economic growth in eastern and southern Asia, it is estimated that 500 million people were liberated from poverty during this twenty-year period. Since 1981 global poverty has decreased by approximately fifty percent primarily as a result of rapid economic growth in Asia. Thus, the march of global affluence is underway.

At the same time, roughly 2.8 billion people, almost half the world’s population, currently live on less than $2 a day. Of these poor, approximately 1.3 billion live on the margins of life with less than $1 a day. Most of these poor are in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. The most dramatic impact is seen in children. The contrast between affluent and nonaffluent countries demonstrates this clearly. In affluent countries, less than one child in 100 dies before reaching age five, while in the poorest countries the number is five times higher. Fewer than five percent of children under the age of five are malnourished in affluent nations, whereas in poorer countries as many as fifty percent of the children suffer from malnutrition.2

The child nurtured within the context of growing global affluence is thus confronted with its blessings and curses. There are goods and poverties of affluence to which the child is subjected in late modernity. Affluence is good insofar as its abundant wealth and attendant cultural, social and economic formations lead to the greater fulfillment of fundamental human needs such as food, clean water, better health care, adequate shelter and meaningful life.

For instance, over the past three hundred years humanity in Western Europe, North America, Japan, and the Asian Tigers has escaped from hunger and premature death in quantum leaps surpassing all preceding human generations.3 Robert Fogel, 1993 Nobel Prize winner for economics, and Dora Costa, an MIT economist and biodemographer, coined the phrase “technophysio evolution” to describe the synergistic effects of the scientific, industrial, biomedical, and cultural revolutions of the last 300 years that have vastly increased humanity’s control over the environment and led to the escape from hunger in the West. The complex interaction between technologies of production and improving human physiology measured in terms of increased life expectancy and stature during this period are offered as proof. These resulted from increased food production made possible by technological advances during the modern period. Thus, the “interaction between technological and physiological improvements has produced a form of evolution that is not only unique to humankind but unique among the 7,000 or so generations of human beings who have inhabited the earth.”4 Fogel contends that this evolutionary process continues presently, will likely accelerate in the twenty-first century, resulting in profound benefits for poor countries as well.5

As a result of such advances, many economists maintain that there is a reasonable basis to believe that absolute poverty (i.e., those living on less than $1 per day) will be eliminated early in the twenty-first century. Jeffrey Sachs, for example, envisions a world without such extreme poverty by the year 2025. Noting that global economic development is both “real and widespread,” Sachs argues convincingly from recent economic history and empirical data that “extreme poverty is shrinking, both in absolute numbers and as a proportion of the world’s population.”6

Cultures and societies enjoying affluence not only have basic needs met in abundance but also experience unprecedented enjoyment of luxuries and leisure previously reserved for elites in the premodern and early modern periods. Although the problems of poverty and affluence continue, it appears that for the first time in human history increasing numbers of humans are experiencing the benefits of affluence while the actual number of the poor is decreasing. Greater opportunities to make the transition from poverty to affluence present themselves to the poor each year.

At the same time, those enjoying affluence are confronted with a problem of overabundance, saturation and waste that seems immoral in the face of 1.3 billion humans presently living in grinding poverty. Fogel notes that in the United States “we have become so rich that we are approaching saturation in the consumption not only of necessities, but also of goods recently thought to be luxuries or that only existed as dreams of the future during the first third of the twentieth century . . . In some items such as radios, we seem to have reached supersaturation, since there is now more than one radio per ear . . . The level of many consumer durables is so high that even the poorest fifth of households are well endowed with them.”7 Fifteen years later, Fogel’s observations are a fact of life in the United States. In addition to radios, we now have cell phones, televisions, DVD players, iPods, computers, laptops, and a host of other technological consumables at our disposal.

Thus, the good of affluence is attenuated by two realities. First is the daily existence of hundreds of millions of humans suffering in poverty. The second is found in the supersaturation effect affluence has on the affluent.

This is the problem of affluence identified here and addressed with the AAEC in view. What are the effects of nurture within a subcultural context of evangelical affluence in the United States? Does nurture in ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction: Theological Economics and the Problem of the AAEC
• Part One: The AAEC in Diachronic Perspective
• Chapter 2: Formative Theological Anthropologies of the Child in American Evangelicalism: Jonathan Edwards and Horace Bushnell
• Chapter 3: Born in the U.S.A.: Lawrence Richards and the AAEC in Evangelical Affluence
• Part Two: The AAEC in Synchronic Perspective
• Chapter 4: An Evangelical Sociology of the AAEC
• Chapter 5: An Evangelical Theology of the AAEC
• Chapter 6: Conclusion: Whither the AAEC?
• Bibliography