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.
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