This is a re-post of a former essay. Let's just say I liked it when I wrote it the first time, and I still do. It forced me to articulate new thoughts, which is exactly why I love to write.  So, here it goes to the top of the rotation. 

If you follow ConversantLife somewhat regularly, you’ll notice a trend lately toward anti-consumerism (including some of my own posts). It seems the right thing to be—a lover of God and humanity more than a lover of things, a Christ follower who chooses abstracts like love and peace over crass commercial objects. I’ve been feeling the vibe myself. Christians, you know, can be very anti-establishment when it suits us.

All the talk of philanthropy and anti-consumerism has gotten me thinking. I’m sure lots of other people have thought about these things longer than I have. I’ll bet I could find a hundred books debating the virtues and vices of capitalism. I am not a student of economics, so pardon any embarrassing gaps in my understanding, but here’s a simple layman’s exploration.

I am struggling with the link between greed and capitalism. What would happen if all the corporate moneygrubbers converted this year and everyone became a philanthropist? Truth is, most of the things that I enjoy in my home were made by companies whose founders, at some point, were hungry for a profit. What man finds meaning and pleasure in manufacturing toilet paper or aluminum siding, for example, just for the joy of it? So, if God wants all of us to share, conserve, reduce, and give away, what would become of America? Someone else’s greed has enabled me the freedom to live humbly or to live extravagantly. Thus is the thorny way of capitalism.

Now this leads me other things that give me a headache. What if every family in America was sincerely convicted to withhold its money from the Big Box retail conglomerates and give it away to noble foreign causes? No doubt, the Targets and Best Buys and Wal-Marts would collapse, leaving many manufacturers to fire their employees. Ah, but there’s the catch, for if man’s heart were pure around the world, then noble capitalists wouldn’t need to pay out to war torn countries in the first place. Nor would I give away my old clothes to the homeless, for under God’s principles, the complex conditions leading to homelessness wouldn’t exist.

And what if all the abortion clinics suddenly adopted God’s view of the sanctity of life? If we would reverse every abortion in American this year, imagine the economic impact all those children (many of them in situations of poverty and dysfunction) would have on our culture? But there we go again, for if we were really doing things God’s way, then many of those desperate children wouldn’t have been desperate in the first place (nor even conceived in an unhallowed place, for that matter) . . . and so goes our endless rewind. Every charitable act is predicated on the sin that required it. If that doesn’t blow your mind, read that sentence again.

And now, my head throbbing tonight, I realize that sin seems to be part of the American Dream, and I’m having trouble with that. I’m a product of this centuries-old year national experiment, finding value and comfort in a world with good roads and clean water and entertainment and a sturdy paycheck and light bulbs that go on and off on command. Profit and innovation and greed and curiosity and convenience and narcissism and sin get so mixed up together that I can’t figure out how to get to the beginning of the string. So when I say a sweet prayer with my kids at night that goes something like “Thank you, God, for blessing us with a warm house and food to eat,” it’s starting to feel positively weird. Should I not pray instead, “Thank you, God, that American self-absorption and corporate greed paved the way to our comfort”?

The more I unravel this ball of yarn, the more confused I become. The what-ifs are keeping me awake, and I keep going back and back and back to the beginning of the problem, trying to figure out God’s purposes. And you know where I end up?

The Garden of Eden.

That’s the only place where all the bohemian dreams and political hopes can hope to thrive, and I’m afraid we already missed that train. I understand a little better why hippies wanted to shut out all the capitalist noise, and why human beings dream up utopian societies. We’re all trying to get back to the Garden of Eden, if you ask me.

Perhaps capitalism is the best we’ve got in a fallen world. You may complain that nothing on the ideological menu looks very good to you, including democracy and its free enterprise system, but the alternatives--such as dictatatorship, poverty, injustice, and civil war--will give you food poisoning. The same system that allows us to squash the little guy and over-consume also allows us to love our fellow man. Sin might be part of the human equation, but with Jesus’ help, I’m doing my darndest to make it not so.

It’s complicated and I’m sure somebody’s got a book title they can recommend. But I’m an essayist, and it’s my job to get in and get out for the sake of time and space. In a phrase, original sin always gets us into trouble and God’s grace always gets us out. Tonight, that’s good enough for me.