Commerce and Amusement or Simplicity and Discipline?

The tallest buildings in American towns and cities used to be the houses of worship. The cross stood atop Baptist Church steeples, and skyscraping bank buildings did not then jut above them, neither literally nor figuratively. I remember that day. In more than eight decades, I have been an eyewitness to many changes in my homeland, and to attitudes and aspirations giving rise to much of that.

There was a day when insightful thoughts (some would say platitudes) like, “Enough is as good as a feast,” actually expressed a commonplace and honored view of matters and their truth. And there was a day when I heard my grandparents say, “You can’t wear but one suit of clothes at a time.”. Their meaning was clear: “People don’t need a closet full of clothes.”. They had one change of clothes for everyday wear and one extra shirt or dress for Sunday wear, generally.

What a strange day that seems to us now. But many houses had not even one built-in closet back then. A tall wardrobe, matching the bed, dresser, and chest, in our company bedroom furniture, was our single “closet” in the cotton mill houses in which I grew up, in Bladenboro and Kinston. Now, a house without at least one walk-in closet is rare, I imagine.

Commerce and credit cards, with other deeper-down matters of the heart and spirit, gave rise to a different world in the years since then. Here is how I described it, fictitiously while also autobiographically, a few years ago:

“In a day when hospital insurance was unheard of and probably didn’t exist, Temperance surmised, in any case not among the poor, her parents had a mammoth hospital bill hanging over them….maybe Stedman had just sold his car and paid the debt off in one lump sum….the plan would have fit his character. He hated to be in debt; it was a trait he shared with most of his kin and community. Post-World War Two credit cards and patriotic consumerism still lay in America’s looming future. What a peculiar, future world that would be to those who had managed the Great Depression. It would never be Mae’s and Stedman’s world….

Temper’s thoughts stuck on this theme of paying for things as soon as debts were incurred and items were purchased. She had lived through all the decades since the Great Depression, decades which had dismantled frugality and put credit in its place. It was not as if folks back then had done without, although they did, and a good bit of it was voluntary, so much as there had been a lack of covetousness for things superfluous to their needs, which had made that time so different from the present. It is true that most folks preferred to do without, rather than go into debt. Living within one’s means was fundamental to the post-Depression perspective.

Commerce undid an entire way of life in the second half of the twentieth century, Temperance saw, and it did not happen organically. Clever economic theories and practices and those who promulgated them dismantled a social world and put in its place, inventively and methodically, an alternative to sanctioned avarice and consumerism.

But in the forties, old-fashioned simplicity and discipline….got them through the Great Depression and enabled them to do the now nearly obsolete thing, living within one’s means….,” I wrote, in about 2010.

Simplicity, discipline, living within one’s means….how commonplace are those values today? Frugality, thrift, and gratitude are connected virtues that have faded discernably, as well, I fear. Withal, love of amusement has grown apace, alongside sanctioned avarice and ostentatious consumerism.

In one of Adrian Rogers’ last sermons, he pointed out that the verb “to muse” means “to think.”. Whether etymologically on target or not, he concluded that placing the letter “a” before “muse” changes the meaning to “not to think,” just as the meaning of “typical” changes to the negative when it is written as “atypical.” Dr. Rogers went on to preach that our age is addicted to unthinking amusement and seeks to be amused, obsessively. Unthinking, and craving distraction, whatever the price, a consumerist, greedy society, addicted to amusement’s mind-numbing pleasure, has no interest in God, Dr. Rogers alleged. His “no-holds-barred” preaching style made his point effectively, I can assure you. Like me, this preacher who is now with the Lord grew up in a post-Depression world and saw what I, also, have seen taking place around us, in the years since then.

What is the Church’s responsibility now? Are there new believers, young Christians, who can, and will, hear the Lord’s call on their lives, to be “repairers of the breach,” to be “soldiers of the cross,” in a Death of God era? I believe so. Despite the formidable circumstances facing them as followers of Christ Jesus, commissioned by Him, to proclaim the Gospel to an unbelieving and hostile 21st. century world, I believe that those young men and women will answer God’s call. I believe that God is calling them, even now.

Thanks be to God.