This column launches a new feature in Sojourners. Each month we will ask a guest columnist to write about his or her personal perspectives, opinions, and pilgrimage.
Teacher’s conferences are usually low-key, congenial affairs, but the last one I attended in Edmonton, Alberta quickly developed the tension of an overheated political rally. All it took was a single sentence on the chalkboard, suggesting that teachers should “help children see that, in global terms, their North American lifestyle isn’t necessarily normal.”
The chalk was scarcely off the board before teachers all over the room were visibly agitated and bristling with defenses of the status quo.
During the break, someone told me that the hostility had come from the American teachers who had recently moved to Calgary, a town the oil industry has swollen by 40,000 new residents from the United States. Somehow the newcomers in the group felt the statement was just another example of the rampant anti-Americanism they’d found in Canada; to me it looked like little more than an attack on elitism and gluttony wherever they were found.
That experience pulled together a number of threads in my thinking about all the discussions we’ve had about responsible Christian living, human development, and the biblical call to a renewed lifestyle. Over the past decade many of us have come to accept concepts like “less is more” or, more recently, “the conserver society” as the only right-headed concepts for ordering our personal lifestyles. Unfortunately, Canadian Christians are discovering that these excellent principles are being twisted to allow some to make money off the good intentions of unsuspecting others.
One small example: Canadian consumers are using their taxes for television and newspaper ads designed to educate them about conserving electricity--turn off the lights and the television, don’t turn on the stove or other large appliances between 4:00 and 7:00 pm, etc. However, consumers are also being asked to pay more for their power so that new power plants can be built to ship more electricity at attractive prices to consumers in the States. That amounts to a self-imposed tax on Canadians to help their hydro companies keep American consumers happy.
Unfortunately, power generating plants have always meant that whole communities had to be drastically altered, sometimes even destroyed, to make room for them. In the past, the effect of such projects has been most devastating on native peoples whose civil rights have been cavalierly dismissed.
Canadian Christians are finding that everywhere they turn there’s a Catch-22 just like the campaign to save electricity. To conserve energy only plays into the hands of those who will trample on the native people’s rights in order to supply all the power they can to paying customers in the States, most of whom have no interest in using Canadian resources responsibly. Yet to consume at the usual North American rate doesn’t seem right, either.
Many of us see no alternative than to push the government to honor the civil rights of native peoples, to adopt a responsible energy and resources policy, and to protect the small manufacturing sector of the economy from dependence on foreign economic and trade policies. Small, personal steps toward simplicity are not enough. Those of us who take them are only freeing up Canadian resources--wrested from native peoples at considerable cost to southern Canadian consumers--to oil the consumption machine in the United States. We have no choice but to act politically.
In the past, when Christians and cobelligerents have resisted and the government has responded as the resisters suggested it should, a great outcry arose from those who stood to gain the most from our country’s dependence and passivity--manufacturers, business people, speculators, the U.S.D.A., consumer groups, and a variety of elected officials. We were selfish, they said, to hoard those resources; we were fixing prices when we tried to prevent surplus farm products from being dumped into our relatively tiny market. In many instances, the outcry was only the noise before the harsh retaliation.
Oddly enough, the outcry has also come from Christians who thought we should show love by giving them whatever they wanted on their terms.
That attitude was lurking among the teachers I met in Edmonton. For them, responsible Christian living meant simply a little more restraint than the richest and most ostentatious among us were showing. It was an apolitical and personal matter and certainly had nothing to do with political struggles between nations. For these people, lifestyle questions resolved themselves into a simple choice between super-consumption and mega-consumption.
It is not that such people are calloused or totally indifferent. What’s more, their problem is only partly ignorance. At the heart of their resistance lies a doctrine of the simpler lifestyle that can be defined in purely personal, family, or small community terms. Those who think politically by nature can go to it, if they like, but for the rest, it’s a matter of doing our little bit and helping others in our Christian community cope with the stresses of “downward mobility,” or whatever we choose to call it.
When I lived in the United States, I tolerated that position because I chalked it up to some people’s inability to cope with anything beyond their personal problems. Now, however, I see it as a comfortable excuse for irresponsibility to Christians in other countries, where the struggle to live biblically is being turned to profit with the most incredible ease.
We know Canada has often welcomed the corporations most adept at using our good intentions for their gain. We also know Canada is dealing unjustly with smaller nations and with the native peoples and immigrants who live among us. Some of us agitate and urge our policy makers to allow us to step off the backs of suffering peoples throughout the world. But every time we try to step off, we find ourselves pulled back on by our far stronger sibling, with whom we have a love-hate relationship of epic proportions.
To Canadian Christians who struggle for public justice in every area, it’s clear that we need a little help from our friends to the south. Unless public justice--in international as well as domestic affairs--becomes the earmark of American policy and the heartcry of the American people, Christians else where will find it increasingly difficult to do justice in their own policies.
Bonnie Greene was the editor of Vanguard magazine, published in Toronto when this article appeared.
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