WHERE EVERYONE IS MIDDLE CLASS:

We're Rich: But why is it so hard to admit? (Andy Crouch, February, 2003, Christianity Today)

There are a handful of Americans who consider themselves rich. I have met a few of them, and they generally are neither spendthrift nor spoiled, especially if they are Christ-followers. They possess what a friend calls the one true advantage of wealth: the personal and irrefutable proof that wealth cannot make you happy. Consequently, they are both diffident and shrewd about their riches.

But most Americans I know think that someone else is wealthy. Most of my friends are in the top third of Americans by household income, but few of us speak of wealth. We are just getting by, with enough to pay for the car and the rent, prepare for retirement and our children's college, and enjoy a few cups of tea in faraway places. We talk about our money the same way that Harvard students talk about their grades—in terms guarded, vague, and self-deprecating all at once. "How did you do on your paper?" "Oh, not so well-terribly, really." (One would later find that student's name on the short list for a Fulbright.) We won't say how much we have or make, but it certainly isn't ever enough.

In my imagination, I found myself trying to explain to Mary why I wasn't really rich. Somehow I'd have to help her understand the costs of daycare (although she has two children), the paradoxical costs borne by a two-income home (her husband works in a city five hours away), the price of college (in Kenya, school fees begin in first grade), the price of housing (outside the slums, Nairobi real estate is not much less expensive than that of many American cities). Somehow I'd have to explain that an American passport and fluent English aren't all they're cracked up to be.

Then again, I could just admit what God and the whole world already know is true. We are—I am—wealthy. Simply rich. Why is that so hard for us to say? Such an admission would, of course, make us responsible for the stewardship of our riches. It would put an end to both complaining and complacency. And since the Christian life starts where self-pity and self-justification end, to admit we are rich might also lead us closer to the life that is really life.

It's too bad we've lost the language and the intellectual framework with which to discuss such things as aristocracy, because in a sense that's what Americans are: the world's aristocracy. The part of that where we're the filthiest stinkin' rich people who ever lived is kind of fun, but we're dealing less well with the obligations that such status imposes upon us. (Of those to whom much is given, much should be expected.) And, of course, the Europeans are handling even less well the knowledge that they've been replaced by us. Posted by Orrin Judd at February 21, 2003 7:17 AM