The Myth of the American Dream: Reflections on Affluence, Autonomy, Safety, and Power

by D.L. Mayfield

I had to recognize that there were larger forces at play that negatively affected people in my own city, country, and the world—and these systems seemed to harm people in particular who were not White, middle-class evangelicals like me.

when people of privilege pursue affluence, autonomy, safety, and power above everything else, not only do they miss out on the liberating and restorative work of Jesus, but they participate in greater inequality, segregation, and suffering for the most marginalized people in their community.

When people of means pursue what is best for them and their own in an unequal society, their actions inevitably harm the common good. People like myself end up disobeying the central commandment of Jesus—to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves—all in the name of pursuing a dream life for ourselves.

Jubilee remains a sign to the rest of the world that God’s ideal economy is one where righteousness shall flourish, which involves limiting the disparity between the wealthy and the poor, where creation is valued.

Or do we follow the lead of Christians like Oscar Romero, a Jesuit priest in El Salvador, who wrote, “Not having land is a consequence of sin. . . . The land contains much of God, and therefore it groans when the unjust monopolize it and leave no space for others.”4 His faith led him to listen to those who did not have access to land, and his faith led him to see it as sinful that some monopolized what God so freely gave—and called it good.

I know how affluence works, how different it is from a God who provides manna, who gives enough for everyone as long as some people don’t hoard. How affluence needs segregation and amnesia to thrive, how it convinces us to forget God and instead take pride in our own choices and abilities. I know how affluence works because I see it in myself. I am forever trying very hard not to notice a world as unkind as the one I actually live in.

In 2008 the CEO of Walmart made as much in one hour as many of his full-time employees made in a year.

Consumeristic societies, like the one I live in, only exist by making the individual supreme. Everywhere we look there are people who are seen by God in an empire that despises and devalues them, even as it exploits them for profit.

I felt supremely silly at Safeway muttering, “Thank you, God, for your provision,” as I swiped my credit card. But I did that every day for a week, and it broke loose something in me that was trying desperately to keep my money and how I spent it separate from how I related to God.

Because when well-meaning, well-intentioned privileged people hear only the financial success stories, they are being discipled in how to judge and belittle all of those who fail in the landscape of the American Dream.

The problem with easy dominant culture mantras like “live within your means” is that they give the privileged more ammunition to judge those who aren’t making it while at the same time it makes no moral demands on those who make more than enough. If living within your means becomes one of your mantras, then who’s to say it’s wrong to buy a second or third beach home if you can afford it? It gives those with wealth permission to spend without constraint.

“We confess to being fools and wish that we were more so,” she wrote in an editorial for the Catholic Worker in 1946. “What we would like to do is change the world—make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe and shelter themselves as God intended them to do.”4 If we should choose to live so foolishly like Jesus, we will be rewarded not so much with earthly pleasures but with the imagination like Dorothy had to hope another world could be possible. That we can live simply, justly, generously, and most of all gratefully: both for the blessings of our money and for the blessings of our neighbors who teach us how costly wealth can be to our souls.

“Thanksgiving reminds us of how the world was meant to be in its original condition. . . . [W]hen we can no longer see the stars because of light pollution, the words of Thanksgiving should awaken us to our loss and spur us to our restorative action. Like the stars themselves, the words can guide us back home.”

Jesus, who reminded us to live like the birds and the flowers that his Father so desperately loved, would receive what was given to him that day in faithfulness. He would celebrate with those who had hard stories, as an act of resistance in an empire of scarcity.

Autonomy is the right to act, speak, live, or govern as you want without restraint. It is independence. For those who have been imprisoned, it makes sense why freedom is something to long for. It makes sense that Jesus came to proclaim liberty to people who had very little control over their lives, who often lived without knowing where their next meal would come from, their lives governed by the whims of a tiny minority of wealthy and powerful rulers.

I do not view Maryan’s troubles as my own, as my responsibility in the way that families care for one another. I do not buy my food or my clothes or my cars in a way that connects me to the “unescapable web of mutuality.” I am lonely in my small car, saving on my gas bill, isolated as I hurtle down the streets to take care of my own personal errands. But friends who cook me good meals and tell the truth about their reality and mine help burst the bubble of my own making, time and time again.

We are never as autonomous as we would like to believe; someone usually pays for our freedoms, as so many have been trying to tell us. And the only way those of us obsessed with freedom can learn a new way of living depends on taking the time to become connected to the real teachers, our neighbors: the ones who feed us from the deep wells of their one experience. The ones who have the keys to truly liberating us all.

I never felt good enough, not ever, that I was afraid of harming the communities I most wanted to help because of my stubbornly ingrained savior complex, my ever-present desire to be found right. I told her that I was angry because the world was falling apart and scared that by trying to help I was only making it worse.

I sat quietly, thinking about this admission. I could see my life stretched out in front of me. I could see where all my good works would lead me, crippling me from enjoying the blue of the sky or the white of the clouds. I was tired of trying to pretend I was good, that I could control the chaos of the world with my small actions.

My individualism grew in me a classic savior complex: a desperate longing to be of use, coupled with an inability to listen, love, or be transformed by others, especially those I wanted to help.

Instead, I want to talk about impact. I want to talk about what happens when we all choose what we believe is best for ourselves or for our children in a world that’s set up for some people to exploit and benefit from inequality.

Nikole Hannah-Jones

one that assumes that the sacrifice is worth it and that their children need to somehow get ahead in a world where some will be the captors and others will be the captives.

Unfair assumption that we homeschool out of fear or for test scores.

I’ve had to ask myself time and again what my highest value for my family is: Do I want my child to “succeed” in the cultural-achievement oriented sense, or do I want her to succeed at loving her neighbor as herself? Which value is stronger?

I do not think homeschooling is incompatable with the value of loving our neighbors over societal success. Honestly checking our motives and then asking how our actions reflect our values would be a practical excersize of examination.

He lived his life in light of the reality of the Holocaust and of Jim Crow laws and of children who were abused and neglected by their own hurting parents. He was angry at what television did for children, how it aimed to pacify them and make them consumers, teaching them to long for material things and gain knowledge without any guidance about its purpose. And so he made his show, and lived a life of ministry, to help children see themselves as God does: as beloved and as people capable of creating a neighborhood where everyone can flourish.

“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

Think about this.

for others, those already drowning in bills, in children, in an inability to get out of bed to tidy up, this kind of hospitality is a millstone around their neck.

In order to love the stranger we have to love the people who are the most estranged from us. And that would involve upending the entire system, how neighborhoods and shopping centers and schools and churches are all built by people wanting to be with those who are just like them.

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I was theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of the separate holy experience is a dream. . . . And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around like the sun.1 He goes on to write that monks live in the same broken world, the world of the atomic bomb, of race hatred, mass media, technology, and so on. The difference is that monks are conscious that they belong to God, but the truth is—everybody belongs to God. Why should they consider themselves different or better? “Thank God, thank God,” he wrote, “that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others.”

But there’s also a sense that this loneliness is on purpose, though we never say this aloud. That we believe people are supposed to be affluent, and they are supposed to be autonomous—even if it turns out to be very bad for their souls.

Just like affluence, autonomy can be hard to see unless we are given a different perspective through relationship and education and the Holy Spirit working in our hearts.

There is a reason an entire culture can choose to fixate their collective fears on vaccines or terrorist attacks or sharks. While all of these categories do contain some risks, the fear and paranoia are not relative to the actual odds of something bad happening. It’s similar to the logic I hear when certain groups of people love to tell me how dangerous immigrant and refugees are to the United States. It’s a convenient way to blame an outside group for the anxieties we carry within.

When distant friends and family members post meme after meme on Facebook about the horrors that Muslim refugees are supposedly committing in Europe—how they’re hell-bent on coming here and killing people (or perhaps just taking jobs and welfare), how we need to take care of our own first—there’s no real way to argue. People who share and promote ideas that demonize entire groups of people are not interested in sharing truth—they’re interested in peddling fear. And it works, wonderfully, for those who sell it. It wins them a semblance of control and certainty over their life, and it shores up the boundaries of who is a part of the in-group and who is not. It also wins elections, tipping the balance of power to the one who already has it but who is capitalizing on the fear of losing it.

Jesus knows what it’s like to move through the world knowing full well that some of our neighbors hate our other neighbors. Jesus knew this, and yet he still asked us to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves. I recognize I write this from a position of privilege—the power differential between me and a woman from Syria experiencing forced migration is enormous—and Jesus was aware of this too. We can uproot the seeds of hateful eradication within our own hearts while still holding power accountable and still demanding true righteousness, which is justice for the oppressed. We can commit to rid ourselves of dehumanizing others and call out every friend, family member, and neighbor who uses language or rhetoric designed to instill fear or hatred in another.

There’s a greater evil within us than without: the evil of believing and acting on our fear of other people. The notion that if we eradicate the right people, people made in the image of God, we will be secure.

This is what we should fear: what our own desperate desire for safety might end up doing to those who are beloved in the eyes of God, whom we so carelessly call snakes and sharks.

and I would feel as though I had taken back the tiniest bit of control over my life.

Biss interacts with the story of Achilles, whose mother wanted to protect him and keep him safe from the gods. She dipped him in the River Styx when he was a baby, dangling upside down in her hand. But of course, where she clutched at his ankle became the one part of his body that would now be exposed to weakness, so that in a way her attempt to save him contributed to his demise.

And yet vaccines are the perfect example of the dire consequences that can occur when people of privilege choose to idolize the safety of their child over the safety of another. It is an example of how those who are the most well-educated can sometimes forget their responsibility to others. Vaccines work and operate successfully based on the logic underneath what is commonly referred to as the “herd immunity.” When enough healthy people are inoculated against a disease, they can surround and protect the most vulnerable members (who perhaps can’t risk the vaccine) from the encroaching sickness. The healthy take a small risk in order to protect those who need it the most, but what happens when the healthy opt out? When people who are otherwise healthy claim they cannot stomach the risks? When people of privilege choose to value their own safety over the common good, it is the most vulnerable in the community who will suffer, as they always do.

Her life, her eyes, her work would be to live in the tension of those two places: always relinquishing her child, always holding him as close as she could for as long as possible. Mary, with her sad eyes, became my friend that day.

Poverty or sickness or suffering, Jesus constantly pointed out, was not a sign of the absence of God’s love or even a sign of sin. It was a sign of a broken world filled with people who exploited each other and created unjust systems that left a few wealthy and safe and well while the rest of society struggled to survive.

Look at the beatitudes, that most glorious list of people that the American Dream would have us believe are to be pitied or perhaps are even on the wrong track with God: the poor, the sick, the sad, the meek, the oppressed. But Jesus says they are blessed—can I trust him when he says that?

We cannot protect ourselves or our families, and this was never the point. But when we open ourselves up to the terror of love (because the underside of love is always grief) we will be joining in this endeavor with God, the one who is always being split wide open by joy and lament, children everywhere every day delighting God with their smiles and songs and creativity, breaking God’s heart with their cruelty and selfishness, harrowing God’s eyes with their sickness and accidents and catastrophes.

My mother knows. She knows how to keep on loving even after her world has ended, like so many mothers before her, including the mother of God.

Or was it thinly veiled anxiety about losing power?

You can’t love somebody if you are determined to be afraid of them. Perhaps that’s why the Bible is full of the messengers of God telling everyone to “fear not.” It is our human impulse to fear. And it is our human impulse to baptize it under religious language.

I learned from people who said they wanted to love “the unreached.” But oftentimes there was a current of supremacy and even fear lacing these discussions.

was starting to realize that many people believed we should focus on Muslim ministry not because they were valuable people made in the image of God but because they posed the biggest threat. The question remained unanswered: the biggest threat to what, exactly?

our morality has slipped to the point where we do not care that people will suffer and die due to our own desire for safety. In fact, according to polls put out by Pew Research, White evangelicals were the least likely group to identify a moral need to resettle refugees (with only 25 percent saying we should).

if the tables were turned—if we had been born on the other side of the world, into a different family, religion, race, economic situation—what would we want? People in positions of safety and privilege must learn to grapple with how they use what they’ve been given: as a welcome mat or as a shield?