In Chapter 6 (Against the Revolution: The Beginnings of Christians Social Doctrine), Meador begins to lay out his positive agenda. He sums up his critique of contemporary American culture by reviewing the four historical-social phenomena he had discussed in the previous chapters:
The invention of [W]hitenss began with the assumption that neighbors and land could be reduced to objects [my observations here and here] ... Similarly, industrialism preceded by breaking cultures and ways of living that allowed for stronger communal life and thicker forms of belonging ... The sexual revolution doubled down on all of this ... [by] pulling apart the sexual embrace and fruitful, faithful covenantal love [my observations here] ... [Reaching] a climax in the collapse of wonder and the triumph of institutions [my observations here] ...
Meador proceeds to describe his time at the L'Abri fellowship as offering a fundamental alternative to Whiteness. Meador characterizes the alternative as hospitality. Hospitality consists in making oneself available, "to offer yourself to others," however they come to cross one's path. Meador ties his vision of self-giving hospitality to the Christian virtue of love, and spends some pages summarizing how Martin Bucer, the Reformer of Strasbourg, sought to implement this virtue in the social order of his day. Bucer had a strong attachment to the practice of animal husbandry and farming generally, and excoriated fathers who "wish their children to become businessmen always with the idea that they would be become rich without working ... and with the idea that they will seek their own profit while exploiting and ruining others." An extraordinarily caustic view of the work of those engaged in the businesses of production and exchange, one that suggests that Bucer owed more to the Anabaptists of his day than I had realized. (Side-bar question: Do the Amish practice Whiteness?) Of course, the goal of living high while laboring little was and remains a temptation, one that is especially fostered in our media-saturated culture. Yet, for what it's worth, I don't know that any of my law students display this attitude. If anything, they seem resigned to grinding labor for decades to come.
In any event, Meador is fully aware that Bucer's valorization of the agrarian lifestyle is out of place in the contemporary Western world (and much of the rest of the urbanizing world, for that matter). Leaving behind his Virgil of Willie James Jennings, Meador finds his Beatrice for the constructive phase of his journey in James Davison Hunter. Hunter is known for his 2010 book, To Change the World, in which he coins the expression "faithful presence" to characterize how Christians should live in the current American context.
I won't summarize Meador's summary of Davison's book. Meador's take-aways, however, are brief enough to quote:
First, faithful presence "sees Christian communities as always having robust internal practices wed to an evangelistic energy that is always radiating outward." The reference to "practices" is significant. Throughout much of their history, American Evangelicals have given short shrift to a theology of practices--spiritual disciplines--wrongly associating such disciplines with an empty formalism. (Some tangential observations here). Meador doesn't provide the specifics of such practices in this chapter so I'll move to his distinctions--the attitudes/practices he eliminates from the ambit of faithful presence.
On the one hand, faithful presences rules out:
The reactionary posture of the culture warriors who are often simply warring against trends that are [only] a generation further down the modern drain than they themselves are. They consistently fail to put forward Christian alternatives to our world's vision of constant acceleration.
On the other hand,
Faithful presence does not mean a capitulation to modernism, contrary to the "relevant to" Christians, who present Christianity as a kind of additive to help tamp down modernity's worst excesses.
Finally,
Faithful presence means actual presence. We cannot withdraw from society to preserve the purity of our faith. ... We participate in the lives of our cities and states and nations. To be sure ... there may come a time when we are not welcome [b]ut there's a sharp difference between being cast out of a community one is willing to be a part of and choosing to withdraw preemptively.
I have no quarrel with any of what I have summarized here. At his level of generality, however, much room remains for widely different applications. Subsequent chapters may open the door for critique.
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