Hitler and Suburbia

Yesterday I looked at a 1958 Chevrolet Four Door Impala. I know it is 2010 but I need a car and I thought why not. After all it is the automobile that got us into our current circumstances.

In 1948 a man by the name of Levitt, being a modest man, built the first suburb on Long Island, New York and named it after himself. Why did suburbs begin appearing in 1948? The answer in two words: “the automobile.”

Even though automobile technology had progressed a lot by the late 1930s the masses did not have enough money to buy cars. One of the promises that Hitler made to the Germans was that following the war there would be “ein wagen fur jeden volken,” (a volkswagen for everyone). But Hitler lost the war and it was Henry Ford who kept the promise.

Post WWII America was an ideal setting in which to launch a massive new automobile industry. Factories that had geared up for war production could switch to producing cars among other things. The depression was over and the masses had money to buy the stuff that the factories could produce. Plus the country is spacious; there is plenty of room for suburban sprawl. It was history’s perfect moment for the birthing of suburbia, and Mr. Levitt did just that.

We would argue that nothing has shaped modern American culture as much as suburbia. The suburbs are more a psyche than they are a location . There is pot of gold at the end of the suburban rainbow, it is called the American Dream.

Amazing isn’t it; ordinary people have only recently been able to live a long way away from where they work. I live 42 miles from my office and think nothing about it. And for the first time in human history life, for the ordinary person, has became divided between the weekend world and the weekday world. The weekday world is full of strangers, toil, tension, pressure and stress. It is difficult to connect what happens in churches to the weekday world. The weekend world is full of family, rest, relaxation, and church life. At least those are the perceptions of the good life in suburbia.

After talking about the suburban psyche in a church service we received the following note from a lady who was in the service that Sunday: “The suburbia I know is not clean and nice. It is full of friends going through messy divorces, wealthy families with no relationships between parents and children. High school students looking for love in all the wrong places. It is clean and affluent on the outside, not so nice on the inside.”

The lady is right; there is a huge gap between the suburbia of the American Dream and real suburbia. The one in the American Dream is safe, clean, peaceful, etc. The rosy description of the suburban American Dream does not actually exist, yet its illusion casts a powerful spell over suburban churches. The illusion creates a value system that we feel is the Godly thing to strive for. Safe, clean and peaceful is what people expect to find the suburban church. Safe, clean and peaceful may be the right adjectives for a social club; but it reads like a list of deadly sins for a church’s mandate to do mission.