WHERE IS THE CHRISTIAN SIMPLICITY MOVEMENT?

“The Buddhists say that desire is the source of all suffering. It is also the source of all shopping.” —Vicki Robin, Your Money or Your Life (2018)

Millions of North Americans are reckoning with their stuff. Marie Kondo has brought her life-changing magic to the popular Netflix show Tidying Up; “The Minimalists” reached the Top 10 of health podcasts on iTunes; former evangelical pastor Joshua Becker (Becoming Minimalist) uses his kind-but-firm approach and earnest ministerial gaze across multiple platforms to help thousands discard their clutter. Mr. Money Mustache and a phalanx of blogger/podcasters from the FIRE movement interrogate the assumptions behind the American Dream, beginning with consumption. Swedish Death Cleaning is a thing. 

The coronavirus has intensified our conversations around money, stuff, work, and time, as millions of Americans are newly unemployed or furloughed, millions more are homebound, and all of us are facing the largest global economic downturn since the Great Depression. Whether or not we recognize the role that radical inequality, instigated by racial prejudice and a preferential option for corporate interests over people, has played in the pandemic, we are all reckoning with its devastating effects in lost lives, lost incomes, and lost opportunities.  This new world of grounded planes and a surplus of oil, empty roads, clear skies, and quieter neighborhoods also highlights the impact that our materialism has had on the planet. For environmental reasons, financial reasons, mental health reasons, personal development reasons, and, increasingly, social justice reasons, people are questioning their consumption and turning away from the unbridled materialism that is our American birthright.

So, why aren’t they doing it for religious reasons? Why haven’t more Christians jumped on the less-is-more bandwagon as Christians? I’ve long since misplaced my “WWJD?” bracelet from the early 90s, but giving away excess possessions by the trunk-load is something we know Jesus would do, since he explicitly instructed his followers to do it. 

Jesus taught extensively on the spiritual dangers of excess wealth, urging his disciples to store up their treasure in heaven rather than on earth, and to sell their possessions and give the money to the poor. He even said that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God. He lived what he taught, owning no property, remaining unmarried, and working as an itinerant rabbi and healer, dependent on the hospitality of his friends and followers. For Jesus, the ultimate test of a person’s faithfulness was neither the correctness of their intellectual belief, nor their devotion to religious ceremonies or practices, but their readiness to give of themselves to those in need: to give food and water to the hungry and thirsty, to welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, care for the sick, and visit the prisoner (Matthew 25:31–46). This is not some addendum to the Christian life, but the core of Jesus’ teaching—sharing what we have with the vulnerable is the very essence of what it means to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

Christians in traditions that use a lectionary hear these scriptures read aloud regularly in church. This is Jesus at his least cryptic. And yet, over the years in both conservative and liberal congregations, I’ve heard a number of sermons that attempt to “parable-ize” Jesus’ straightforward teaching on overconsumption, essentially arguing that when he said to give away your stuff to the poor, he didn’t really mean it – or, he didn’t mean for us to do it.

Across the centuries, however, a counterculture of believers has taken Jesus at his word. On the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2, the newly baptized “had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.”  Simplicity of life continued with the desert fathers and mothers of the fourth and fifth centuries; the early monastics and the rise of religious orders; St. Francis and the wandering friars of the thirteenth century; the Beguines in the high middle ages (a movement of lay women living cooperatively and working among the poor); the Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life on the cusp of the Reformation; the Anabaptists (from whom the Mennonites and the Amish descend); the thrifty, plain Puritans, Quakers, and Shakers; all the way to the Catholic Worker movement in the twentieth century and the small group of ecumenical New Monastics in our own day. 

And yet despite the teachings of Jesus and this great cloud of frugal witnesses, the Church today—Catholic and Protestant, liberal and conservative—is largely silent on the temptations of materialism and the sin of wasteful overconsumption. And many churches have bought in to Simplicity of Life’s arch-nemesis, the Prosperity Gospel.

Though branches of the Church, including the Episcopal Church, emphasize personal generosity to those in need, environmentalism, and the pursuit of social justice, these are largely seen as separate endeavors. Traditionally, however, these three aims were united under the umbrella of Simplicity of Life, as St. Francis, and now his namesake Pope Francis, have reminded us. 

Christian simplicity encompasses our time, our money, our food, and our stuff. Jesus taught extensively on all these topics, and viewed them as deeply interwoven with our relationship with God. Simplicity of life involves a radical reconsideration of these four: time (vocation and purpose, our daily work, Sabbath rest, leisure, attention, and “screen time”); money (our spending, saving, giving, indebtedness, and investments and lending); food (our dietary choices, farming practices and connection to the land, fasting and feasting); and stuff (our material possessions and clothing, our housing and transportation, and our sustainable or exploitive use of the earth’s resources). 

Simplicity isn’t easy. Perhaps, in our own day of smartphones, Amazon, easy credit, and on-demand everything, it has never been more challenging. And yet, books about simplifying, decluttering, minimalizing, letting go, and tidying up are flying off the shelves. There is a deep hunger for tools and resources to help the overwhelmed, overspent, and overworked get off the hedonic treadmill of consumption and start living more with less. This is a spiritual hunger, a longing for meaning, purpose, community, and love beyond acquisition and accumulation. And the Church is not responding to it.

In my own halting, faltering steps towards greater simplicity, or at least away from undisciplined overconsumption, I wonder: What if the Church actually had something to say about this? What if Christian congregations, and not just Marie Kondo and Mr. Money Mustache, had something to offer these simplicity-seekers, too?

Jesus said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28–30).

Simplicity of life is the day-to-day experience of wearing Jesus’ easy yoke. To put it on in the first place does involve taking a lot of other things off. We must first lay down what is weighing us down—perhaps we’ve forgotten that. Are there enough Christians out there, ready to reclaim simplicity of life for the twenty-first century, that the weight of the Church’s load will begin to shift? Can we start tossing off some of the unnecessary baggage and ballast that is keeping us from shouldering our true mission as Christ’s body on earth? Or will we remain hearers of the word only instead of doers of it, as the letter of James says? 

Many of our ancestors in faith who powerfully claimed Jesus’ easy yoke broke off from mainstream society and the ordinary parish church. They lived communally in non-traditional family groups, either in remote, rural areas or else as witnesses in the midst of cities, in solidarity with the poor. Earlier expressions of Christian simplicity provide few models, though, for what the Buddhists call “householders,” ordinary people with spouses and children and regular jobs, working and living in the world. A gift of our digital age is the ability to create virtual community across great distances. Christians today who choose to reclaim simplicity of life have perhaps the best shot ever of creating a movement of like-minded people spread out across all branches of the Church, not separated off from traditional congregations but fully part of them, while receiving support and encouragement from others across the globe who have undertaken the same radical reassessment of time, money, food, and stuff in light of the Gospel. 

For those who long for greater simplicity in their life and faith, I suggest four books as starting points. 

Quaker theologian Richard Foster’s Freedom of Simplicity (1981, revised edition 2005) is an engaging biblical, historical, and theological exploration of simplicity in the Christian life (though the original edition made me weep at the points where he mentions how distracting the radio, the newspaper, and the ringing landline telephone are to spiritual progress). 

Dorothy Janzen Longacre’s Living More with Less (in both her original posthumously published 1980 edition and the revised and edited thirtieth anniversary edition of 2010) deserves to be much better-known. A returned Mennonite missionary, Longacre developed what she called the Five Life Principles to help Christians live gospel-oriented lives in the midst of North American excess:

Do Justice

Learn from the World Community

Nurture People

Cherish the Natural Order

Nonconform Freely

Longacre invited her missionary friends and Mennonites from across the country to share their experiences with the Five Life Principles, and the revised edition also includes contemporary voices in a collection of thought-provoking snapshots of ordinary people choosing simplicity each day. These principles are even more vital and necessary now, as the climate crisis reaches the point of no return. 

Mark and Lisa Scandrette’s Free: Spending Your Money and Time on What Matters Most (2013) is a practical handbook for Christian individuals or small groups wishing to live more intentionally around life purpose, spending, time, relationships, gratitude, and generosity. 

Finally, the revised edition of the classic Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez (2018), while written from a secular standpoint, can be a helpful shock to the system for people of faith willing to question their own long-held assumptions about money, stuff, work, and time, and to put their relationship with money under a microscope to  assess whether their spending, saving, giving, and investing is aligned with their sense of purpose and vocation. 

An anonymous desert father of the fifth century said, “Just as grass does not grow at all on a well-traveled road, even if you sow seed on the road, because the ground is trampled down, so it is with us: Live quietly, apart from things, and you will see plants growing that you had no knowledge of because they were within you and you were trampling them down.”

What would happen in our own lives and in our churches if we stopped trampling down the seeds of simplicity, and let them take root? What surprising plants might grow up among us, enriching and renewing our faith and transforming our world, with fruit that will last?