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

by D.L. Mayfield

I think about my own two children, how they beg to visit the apartments of our Muslim neighbors. They love visiting because they know they will be adored. Our Muslim friends think that children are a blessing from God and treat them accordingly. They do not have multiple children in some nefarious plot to take over the world. Their religion and relationship to God influence these decisions—who are they to deny these good gifts God gives—similar to Catholic theology. For years my neighbors have stuffed my children full of cookies and candy bars, have shown up to our birthday parties with gaudy electronic cars, have pestered me mercilessly to have six more children. Their love and joy in children and family relationships is palpable and often countercultural to my American peers.

I want them to focus not so much on going out into the world and making disciples, but flipping the narrative on its head: to joyfully welcome the world as it shifts and moves ever forward, bringing into our cities and neighborhoods and homes the chance to be discipled together as a community, as a global family, into the ways of Jesus.

I am generally skeptical of those who call themselves prophets. But I do believe more of us ought to reclaim the role of someone who critiques the powers of the world and sits in the anguish of the broken world. Someone who refuses to capitulate to despair and instead sees hope in a new vision for the world couched in the goodness of a God who restores.

Dorothy Day

Professor Norton once told a group of us gathered for a conference that one of the words for prophet in Hebrew is nabi, which means “someone who causes things to bubble up.” This definition strikes me as profoundly important. Not the loudest voice in the room, not the one screaming about problems or coming up with quick and easy solutions that cost people little and change nothing about power. Instead, a prophet is someone who helps ensure that the truth comes to light, that what is hidden in the depths of our hearts and in our social, political, economic, and theological systems comes to the surface for us to actually deal with.

In the poets and the prophets of old I see the same desire: we cannot rest until the whole world is right. And in the meantime we will alternately fast and feast, we will be faithful to the festivals and the laments. I am okay with being sad much of the time. And yet I also recognize that a hallmark of empire is how it prefers that people operate in a constant state of despair. Depressed people are easier to control. People lose their will to fight. The imagination to believe another world is possible falls through their fingers like sand.

In the work of paying attention I can sometimes be overwhelmed by injustice. It is so systemic, so pervasive, and I have largely benefited from it. There is no easy resolution to this, and grief and lament and truth-telling are necessary components for how to move forward in a world that would prefer us to accept the status quo.

I can’t make myself wake up happy, as much as I have tried. Nor do I see it as a value worth pursuing. But despair, or sadness, doesn’t help anyone. In fact, it can be another form of self-absorption, the flip side of a savior complex—the failure complex. This is why it’s important to reclaim the discipline of lament. Lament in the Bible is not just an airing of grievances, pointing out what is sad and horrible in the world while the people in power insist all is well (although that is a part of it). It is a sign of radical hope in a God who is listening. It is peopl...

I’m fascinated by the ethical tangles involved in taking vacations or indulgence or treating myself. On my ten-year anniversary I was forced to ask myself some hard questions: Is going to Disneyland my form of self-care? Is it something I “earned” by my hard work, by making money, by being overwhelmed with the world? Is it a place to celebrate, to enjoy time with my husband, to engage in nostalgia and let my inner child (who is only slightly less judgmental than my actual self) run free? Perhaps it’s all of that, and something more. I’ve learned that we don’t always understand our minds or the ways they work, but our desires can point to deeper longings.

Father Boyle is not a fan of self-care; he, like many others, sees burnout coming from a position of the savior complex. When we engage in helping or serving people from a position of hierarchy, where we take on the tasks best left for God, we can become overwhelmed. But kinship—being intimately connected with another person—changes the equation.

self-care is not about numbing us from the realities of the world. Instead, it’s about learning how to be resilient in the face of this glorious mess of fractured kinship we inherited from each other.

Celebrating, even in the midst of injustice and pain, is a time-honored tradition of reimagining a new world by living into joy in the here and now with those who have been exiled as our guides. In the end we don’t just want to dismantle the walls, the systems, the hierarchies, the exploitation in the world. We want to build something new, something centered on a kingdom that doesn’t roll in with tanks but comes as a gigantic party: the wedding feast to end all feasts.

who pays for our myths?

White was on top, followed by people from Asia and Latin America, and people from Africa were relegated to the bottom and designated Black.

Power is never as good or as clean or as simple as we think. The pioneer myth says that the one who wins, the one who survives gets all the glory and riches. At some point followers of Christ who live with such an ideology have to choose whether they believe it or if they might be willing to entertain the idea that they’ve been asked to lay down their rights and enter into a space that is neither barren nor empty nor pristine—the world, beautifully inhabited, full of people already here—and learn to live in it as neighbors instead of conquerors.

I try to be aware of who is afraid and where that fear is coming from: Are they afraid of their power being taken away, or do they fear for their safety?

In her case the truth was a question: if this isn’t really about Black men raping White women, then what is it about? It was about strategic, vigilante terrorism aimed at suppressing an entire race, carried out in public without any consequences.

Theologian James Cone writes that in the lynching era, 1880–1940, “White Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women in a manner with obvious echoes to Roman crucifixion of Jesus.”

But the Christians perpetrating this violence didn’t notice the similarity between the cross of the Lord they worshiped and the crosses they created out of lynching trees. For decades, Western theologians were unable to see Jesus in the bodies that swayed from those trees, the victims who were killed to satisfy the fear of the masses. This omission, this obvious and terrifying lack of understanding haunts me. I myself did not and could not see the connections between people experiencing racial terror in my own country and the Suffering Servant I claimed to follow. I couldn’t see it, that is, until exiles in the landscape of the American Dream pointed it out to me.

Beguines, thirteenth-century female Christian mystics who started their own religious order after being denied access to worship God anywhere else. They were holy fools who were committed to paying attention in a society obsessed with hierarchy and economy. Writer Jesse van Eerdman says that these women were like newborn puppies with their eyes licked open by God.1 What a glorious thought: God is the one who opens us up to the blurry world with maternal devotion and a desire to see us truly, fully alive. These women looked very hard at the hand God had given them—a world full of suffering and crusades and wars, a world where, as single or widowed women, they were not valued in their society—and they found a good king and a good kingdom, one defined by love and service; God was present everywhere they looked. I

But as I cultivate my eyes to see the bad, I also work toward that discipline of delight, of paying attention to the scent of shalom when I experience