07 June 2018

Evangelicals, Finances and Social Norms


Listening to Christian Financial Programmes one usually hears something to the effect that you should drive your vehicles into the ground. Don't trade in a vehicle until you have to and avoid the car loan at all costs. Even among the often rather affluent Evangelical world few are able to buy cars outright. Most people end up having to finance.
Debt is certainly something we as Christians should try to avoid. With modern capitalism this is becoming increasingly difficult. Our society and its financial model are built around debt, credit and interest. These financial instruments have changed the very nature of 'demand' and it affects all of us whether we like it or not.


I live in a financially depressed area and a few years ago I would frequently hear Christians complain about the irresponsibility of home purchasers during the wake of the 2007/2008 financial crisis and recession. It wasn't capitalism or Wall Street that were to blame but foolish people buying homes they couldn't afford.
Spoken like true provincials or if I want to be unkind... hicks.
We live in an area where $100,000 will buy you a very nice lower-middle class or high-end working class home. $200,000 will buy you a very nice upper middle class (or better) house. By way of comparison my area's $200,000 homes would go for $700,000 or much more in many urban areas.
Many people around here live in houses that range from $50-90,000 and these too are mostly nice homes. Previous generations would have reckoned them almost high-end as many were improved in the 1970's, 80's and 1990's.
The houses here are old by modern US standards and unappealing to a generation that has bought into the values and ethos of the many immoral and frankly obscene 'improvement' shows on channels like HGTV. In California something built in the 1980's is dated and old. Here that's considered to be newer. My house was built in the 1870's. You can still buy old fixer-upper houses around here for $20-30,000. And when I say fixer-upper, in some cases they are quite habitable, just a little rough around the edges.
Why is this the case? We live in a somewhat isolated part of Northern Appalachia. It takes a good hour to access an interstate. I could leave early in the morning and be in Manhattan or Washington DC by lunch time but buying shoes, plumbing supplies or visiting a doctor can be a challenge and often involves a drive of an hour or more. They say 90% of Americans live within fifteen miles of a Wal-Mart. We're definitely part of the 10% that doesn't, which is fine with me since we don't shop at Wal-Mart anyway. The traffic situation is great, almost non-existent. I worry more about deer than other drivers but I also put over 30,000 miles a year on my vehicle.
The job situation is dismal. The only people who have significant money are retirees who sell their expensive homes in Pittsburgh or Cleveland and re-locate here, usually in spruced up cabins or ranch-style homes... or people with government jobs and the handful of medical and legal professionals in the area. In the hamlet where I live, it's the state employees and a couple of retired folks that have all the money. Everyone else struggles to get by and some fare rather poorly. People drive to nearby towns to work warehouse jobs or at small factories. There are jobs in the oil, gas and timber industries. Some pay well enough, some don't. There's a lot of home health-care work geared toward caring for the aging population and the dollar stores are doing well and have really expanded into the area.
This is a different world than the city. I know of friends and acquaintances who struggle to find homes under $300,000 in their area. Sometimes $150,000 will buy you something that is not habitable. I know of one friend who looked at a house in that price range outside Philadelphia and you could see the sky from inside. Here, $150,000 will without exception or qualification buy you a very nice house.
Now they (in the city) could find something cheaper than $300,000 that is habitable but they would have to live in areas that not only are undesirable but they would deem them unsafe.  
Other considerations come into play of course. Schools for many are a large component in how they select where to live. I may not agree with their choices and compromises that force them to live in places where homes are three and four hundred thousand dollars or more and yet they're not doing anything out of the ordinary. Again it may not accord with what I would argue are Christian/Pilgrim values but that's another topic. The people I'm referring to aren't over-the-top social climbers or people trying to reach for the sky. They're not people that are trying to live way beyond their means and are irresponsibly taking loans out that they cannot afford. These are middling folk working regular jobs and from their perspective they're trying to find decent houses in safe neighbourhoods with reasonably competent schools.
To do that in today's economy you have to purchase homes in that price range. You can move to a smaller city and find something less expensive, maybe in the high 100K range but you have to weigh that versus the number of job possibilities and most likely a cut in salary. That cut may pay for itself in the price of housing. It all depends on each person's situation.  I know one family that was thrilled to live in Erie Pennsylvania, a quaint Rust Belt city of roughly 100,000 people on the lakeshore and they did very well. But when jobs were cut, in their case a professional position, they were forced to re-locate to the Southeastern part of the state where the bulk of the population and the jobs are to be found. And of course, houses cost a lot more.
My point in all this is to say that unless you're going to really re-think your whole mindset about money, work and social status you are going to be forced to go into debt to purchase things like a house and a car. Not very many people are going to have the income that allows them to rent and save up $200,000 to pay cash for a house. And even fewer are willing to reject the system wholesale and abandon any middle class aspirations.
This questioning, this challenging of the system doesn't happen on Christian financial programmes because the hosts are wealthy and most of the shows are geared toward the upper middle class bracket. Most of the people who call in have overextended themselves and in many cases have tremendous financial resources if they just shed some of the extras. Many of the callers got a little too out of control, purchasing houses that were $100K more than they could afford and they have too many toys. Actual working class people who call in are often given lame advice. Increase your income, take another job or drive that car till it falls apart.
And yet even for those of us who would challenge the system and refuse to live a certain way, avoiding (we hope) worldly values and materialist traps, eschewing certain system-invested jobs which profit on exploitation and the like... even then you still have to survive.
For years I tried the drive it until it falls apart mentality. But you know what? It doesn't work unless you're of a certain economic class.
I realised this years ago but it hit me again recently when I encountered a situation involving some people I know.
In this case I'm referring to some rather well-to-do folks who are quite intelligent, likable and socially respectable people. They retired to this economically depressed area and are able to have a rather grandiose home at a fraction of the cost of living on the Eastern Seaboard where they were previously located. They enjoy the rural setting and love to host family and friends. They're certainly set up for it. As retired folks they live a very full and busy life. They travel, they work relentlessly on maintaining their multiple homes including the one I'm familiar with and they admirably volunteer in numerous local organisations. They are known by all and I don't believe I've ever heard anyone speak negatively of them.
As a Christian I do not believe they are 'good' people. Far from it. In fact they are at their very core heavily invested in the imperial system and have profited very nicely from it. While on a personal level they are kind and giving they are also blind to the fact that they have cashed in on exploitation and even bloodshed. In conversing with them I have realised they are blind to the plight of the poor and all outside their own very insulated world and economic class. It affects their thinking and reasoning. They are baffled by the people that live around them in this area. They believe the poverty is due to sloth and in some cases that's true. But for the most part they neither understand the economy of the area nor how most of the people around them think, let alone the realities of their daily life.
I recall one time while working for another well-to-do lady. She couldn't grasp the real day-to-day meaning of low wage incomes until I spelled it out and said that a person making minimum wage was bringing in about $60 a day, that is assuming they could get a full time job. Their gross would be just under $300 a week. She grew silent and admitted she couldn't live off that. No kidding. Almost no one can in the US economy. For this lady, she spends almost that much buying some knick-knacks, lunch and shoes on a Tuesday afternoon outing.  
As do many people of their class the couple I'm referring to has a nice late model SUV as a family car, a slightly older work truck which is in the garage most of the time... we are in the country after all.... and a sports car kept for summer fun. Additionally the mister drives (vehicle #4) a now older mid-range vehicle and here's the point in all this.... with over 300,000 miles on it.
I remember being surprised because it's a little beat up on the front end. The plastic bumper has some cracks in it but if you stand back ten feet it looks relatively fine. I was surprised because everything these people own is kept tip-top and keeping it that way is a full time job in itself. These are not lazy people. They're out there in the early hours of the morning working on the house and yard. They maintain everything and clean relentlessly.
So why the beat up vehicle with 300,000 plus miles? They certainly have the money to buy not just a new vehicle (with cash) but probably dozens of them.
The husband is bit of a penny pincher and I'm guessing the wife drives him to spend a lot of money to maintain their standards. The vehicle is his and being in a poorer area he wants to drive something that isn't ostentatious. I've seen this with some of the other wealthy men in the area. They will sometimes drive old beat up pick-up trucks and though they're millionaires, from the vehicle and the way they dress you would never guess it. It's not that they're non-materialistic. Not at all. They've got the expensive car in the garage and the $60K kitchen and they hit the golf courses in Florida and the Bahamas but when they're out and about locally they want to be able to drive up to the local store and drink bad coffee out of styrofoam cups with the rest of the boys.
The wife is half-annoyed by the older vehicle and it's become something of a semi-serious joke. In truth I think she wishes he would just buy something new or at least newer. It came out one day when he was having it serviced and it was clear she found it all absurd.
A financial advisor would say he's smart. He's getting the maximum out of the vehicle and of course the lack of ostentation (which isn't really the case) is also virtuous.
I used to drive around in vehicles with over 200,000 miles but now once they pass that point I monitor them carefully and when the time is right I get rid of them and.... all but weeping I take out a car loan and buy another newer but used vehicle. With car loans you're forced to buy something 'newer' unless you go to a used lot with in-house financing. There are some of those around. You pay maybe $2500 down and then you have 36mos. of payments. Of course the $2500 recoups the dealer's costs and the rest is profit. They can't lose and thus aren't afraid to deal with the poor and those with bad or no credit. Often the vehicles are older and might not make it 3 years without repairs. A lot of the poorer folks around here can't attain conventional financing and they resort to these lots because they can use their tax return money to drive the car off the lot and then make the payments. All loans are a bad deal but given that these cars are often more than a little used, this can be an especially bad deal.
I usually go to a conventional lot, buy something a few years old hopefully with lower mileage and then aggressively pay it off early. That's been my model for some years, a model I adopted once I broke with the Evangelical financial advisor mentality. Why?
It's very simple. The wealthy man with the 300K mile car can afford to drive that vehicle. I cannot.
He can afford to break down and be stranded. He can afford an extra towing bill if need be. He can afford to lose the time and if need be just run out and quickly solve his vehicle situation. For him, the 300K vehicle is an experiment in fun. It's not serious. It's a frivolity not a necessity. It's a quirk, not a principle. It does not match the rest of his life or the ethos he lives by. It's his expression of faux austerity, something I often encounter in the wealthy people I work for.
For me to drive that vehicle would be reckless. I've done that sort of thing and I know others around here that do it because they have to. But I learned that driving a volatile older vehicle with high mileage ends up being more expensive than a car payment. Over several months I observed that each month I was losing a day of work related to vehicular issues and dropping around $200-$300 each time. Every month it was ball joints, a tie rod, a bearing, an alternator, belts, sensors, more comprehensive brake repairs and electrical problems. These costs coupled with lost income more than compensated for a car payment. And that's assuming just one incident for the month. While I hate the debt I don't have piles of money, let alone endless time. I have some time, in some cases more than other people, but not the time available to someone retired. I make my own schedule and can take off work whenever I want to but if I don't work I don't make any money. It's that simple. And so being compelled to take off work while having to write checks for repairs became a burdensome a source of grief and frustration. For others that work conventional shift-work they don't have any time flexibility and some will struggle even getting the vehicle into a garage let alone paying for it.
The advice given by Evangelical financial advisors is for middle and upper class people who have security.* They have the money and resources to reckon with and bounce back from incidents. For them a break-down is a set-back or inconvenience. For the poor a break-down can be catastrophic. People with money can take risks that poor people cannot take. The rich will always insist that you have to take risks to get ahead. True, but in many cases the risks they take are of less consequence than the risks taken every day by the poor... every time they step foot out the door.
Being poor isn't any fun and yet the New Testament comes to mind. Riches will choke faith, the cares of this world are a danger to us. No one wants to live on the ragged edge and I'm not sure that we always need to do that and yet riches are source of confidence and security.... something I'm not sure we're supposed to have apart from God. If we're to set aside concerns for the mundane, if these are things the Gentiles seek then that should affect how we think. Shouldn't it? It certainly will affect how we interpret passages that tell fathers to provide for their own. Provision must be something very different than middle class norms.
I reached a point in which I realised I couldn't afford to drive vehicles to the edge of the cliff like that. It was (ironically) financially irresponsible. Since the Evangelicals love to twist the Biblical language of stewardship I will momentarily indulge them. Debt is bad but not forbidden. What's worse, wasting money on an old vehicle, killing myself to maintain a nebulous principle of 'no debt' or taking on a reasonable loan in order to better budget my money and drive something reliable? As a father I also consider the times when my wife might drive the vehicle without me and additionally I have older teenagers now driving. Do I want them to drive an old beater or something reliable and safe? Someone could say that's seeking another type of security in the nicer vehicle the loan affords, and they would be right. When I say reliable and safe I don't mean purchasing a late model Volvo. I simply mean something with less than 200,000 miles on it. Additionally when you have a car with that many miles on it, there are so many quirks and difficulties about the vehicle that sometimes it's hard for someone else to drive. My primary vehicle currently has 177,000 miles on it. God willing I should have it paid off by January and hopefully I can squeeze another year out of it. We'll see. The thing is for my wife or son to drive it I about to have to give them a tutorial. This button sticks. Don't use this. Ignore that. Yes I know those warning lights are on. Make sure you do this. Some readers will know exactly what I'm talking about.
I'm not saying I'm happy with the solution but I am saying the Evangelical financial model is neither Scriptural nor practical and is instead oriented toward a social and lifestyle model that isn't Christian to begin with.
The world is broken and our modern society continues to challenge us and it makes things more difficult than ever. It is at times exasperating. We have to wrestle with financial and economic scenarios that are without historical precedent and there's a lot of bad information out there.
Recently I have encountered Evangelical feminists echo their secular academic counterparts and argue that stay-at-home wives and mothers are a recent phenomenon, a result of middle class affluence. Previous to this only the aristocratic women didn't work. Working class women have always worked.
This is true in one sense but in another sense it's entirely deceptive... and thus to be expected from Evangelicals and their deliberate programme of acculturation. True, lower class women did work but largely in an agrarian capacity or in the context of the cottage industry economy. Married women worked alongside their husbands. They worked the fields, manufactured things in the home or helped run a shop or keep an inn. Some of the older women might engage in something like midwifery. There were exceptions of course. All such discussions must rest in generalisations.
The Industrial Revolution changed everything and continues to re-shape the family in terms of its nature and very definition. The Evangelical world takes many of these changes as a given and even a lot of the 'family oriented' ministry rests on the assumptions of the model, assumptions I don't believe we should make and/or embrace. There's been very little critical thinking at this point. For all the talk of 'worldview' the only real criticism of the transformative changes brought from the Industrial Revolution has tended to come from Anabaptist leaning circles and certain strains of Theonomy, the latter of which has only sown further confusion and has muddied the waters by introducing a variety of false theological and historical meta-narratives.
A modern stay-at-home wife/mother who sits around eating Bon-Bon's and watching soap operas is hardly the model any Christian would wish to advocate and yet, the fact that lower and many middle class women worked until the period of post-war affluence is to mix apples and oranges. These were not career women of the feminist variety who in seeking self-fulfillment kissed their husbands and children goodbye at 7am and were gone for the day.... let alone coming home to the apron-clad husband making dinner and running the sweeper. This (even in my slightly exaggerated form) is a false analogy.
Now how modern Christian stay-at-home wives are to use their time is a valid concern. In the past running a household was a full time job and then some. Today, it may or may not be. Modern appliances have changed the nature of the domestic day. This can be for the good or not depending on how these things are used. All technology is ultimately moral, something few have reckoned with.
Obviously if the kids are being sent out the door on the school bus, then the wife may struggle to fill her day a bit. Of course in the context of suburbia such women used to be heavily involved in their local community, the school board, school events, women's clubs... things that kept neighbourhoods and social spaces 'nice' and fostered social life... things greatly lacking today.
But for many Biblically minded Christians the wife is home out of conviction rooted in New Testament teaching. On a practical level if she is homeschooling this alone coupled with housework will certainly occupy the day. Many rural families will try their hand at small scale agriculture and perhaps livestock. Others will have family businesses in which the wife plays a role even though she's home all day. There are calls to field, research to do, paperwork, bills etc... I know 'boredom' is not a problem my wife wrestles with.
I will not fall into legalism on this point though the burden is on those who would make the case for the Christian career woman. Lydia of Thyatira and Proverbs 31 simply do not make the case that they would wish. My point is this, acculturated Evangelical values tend to seek peace with the world and crave respectability. Evangelicals are (generally speaking) hostile to counter-cultural impulses and thus it is no surprise that they seek to vindicate their models... rather worldly models from the standpoint of genuine Christian thought. This plays out in their attitudes toward money, which itself plays no small part in the push for Evangelical women to work outside the home. Driving an old beat up vehicle as a rich man is cute, having to drive one out of necessity is shameful... or so their thinking goes. It's fully in-step with the world.
The borrower is indeed slave to the lender. It is better not to borrow if possible. Maybe we should think a little more critically about our society and its economic system? But instead of that happening, the model is not only assumed but justified, celebrated and even incorporated into Kingdom theology. I don't believe Revelation 13 and the Mark of the Beast apply to some future tribulational period. I believe it's something that characterises the entire Church Age. That said, those that do think that way view it in terms of a dystopian totalitarian setting in which the state controls all aspect of financial activity.
Blind to the realities of the Western system and the state-finance relationship it would never occur to them that something like a credit score can largely serve the same sort of function. Many of these folks will condemn debt and yet happily invest in the markets... all rooted in credit, debt and the financing of it. Debt is wrong they insist but they have difficulty in making their money off of it... in enslaving and exploiting others.
Clearly even the Sons of the Prophets fell into debt. This does not sanction borrowing money but life is less than predictable. While the deceased man in 2 Kings 4 lamentably left his family in a dire state of debt he nevertheless feared the Lord. Elisha did not contradict this claim and he did not condemn the woman for the debt. As expressed earlier, life is complicated and has only grown more so since the Industrial and now Technological Revolution.
Dare I say it, the system itself is sinful. More than ever, the words 'Render... unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's', come to mind. The world of finance, and the concerns and cares of the coin belong to this age. Do what you have to do. Do it responsibly as a Christian and with the New Testament Pilgrim-Faith ethic guiding what you do but don't ever confuse what is Caesar's with what is God's.
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*Some at this point will say, pay your vehicle off and save the car payments and you should have enough to buy a new vehicle. In a rural area like this we put tremendous miles on our car and I pay them off early, not just because I want to but because I'm scared of the vehicle not lasting the term of the loan. I'm often pushing 200,000 miles while the loan is still outstanding.  My loan-free time is usually less than a year so we're not talking a lot of money. Others might be able to do this more effectively but will three or four thousand dollars buy you a decent vehicle?
Again it all depends on your situation. If your commute is short, and you live in a town where garages and transportation options are abundant maybe you need not worry. A $4,000 car might last you several years. Of course living in town you will pay more for your house. Housing is cheap where I live but there are trade-offs. Around here we need vehicles that will make 60+ mile round-trip commutes and then of course there's additional drives... groceries, church etc...