An Other Kingdom. John McKnight

relationships are no longer required. That we are best ordered by commercializing all we can. That what we needed from neighbors can be obtained anywhere. The tools for livelihood have been stolen and replaced by the machines of contract. In this a culture is lost, superseded by the new reality. The major early step toward the modern cultural reality was “enclosure,” the privatizing of the common land. Now we offshore in the name of globalization and outsource in the name of market efficiency. Every human endeavor is monetized. We now work for a living. In the move to industrialization, and the move to the cities, we left our local culture behind. The family became dependent on adult earnings outside a local culture, and we became laborers, wage earners. When we human beings are called laborer, wage earner, bread winner, it impacts our souls. Until industrialization came along, the concept of labor did not exist. Being paid based on the number of hours worked was inconceivable. When a person’s effort was converted to wage earner, a person became an object. An object of cost and efficiency, an asset.

      We moved away from the neighbor as a source of culture, memory, sense of place, and livelihood. We made subsistence living a problem to be solved. The casualty was the loss of a sense of the commons. What is at stake in the renewal of neighborliness is the restoration of the commons. The free market consumer ideology has produced a social disorder; people are no longer embedded in a culture that serves the common wealth, the common good.

      Where we are headed in this book is to further the belief that to seek neighborliness and the common good means a shift in narrative. It is about reframing how we take our communal identity. Here we are proposing to identify what has been considered sacred language and use it as an opening into the experience of community and the commons. We are trying to lay out a faith narrative without the negative traces of sectarianism:

      Faith as the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

– Hebrews 11.1

      This alternative narrative is not about the church, or religion, or certain values; these are at the center of the dominant current narrative, in which they become an argument. This faith narrative is about language and its transformative power.

      The sacred language includes the words of covenant, vow, liturgy, re-performance, silence, mystery, and fallibility. This language and the experience it provokes become an alternative to the current dominant ideology from which we take our identity as a western culture, which is from the free market consumer society’s affection for contract, scarcity, entertainment, newness, certainty, perfection, privatization, and the primacy of individual rights and interests.

THE LANDSCAPE OF THE MARKET WORLD

      As a quick view of the landscape of the market and consumer world, we begin with a brief history of the free market consumer ideology:

ENCLOSURE

      Enclosure is a place to start to deconstruct the free market narrative. Before the enclosure movement began, there were, in the British Isles and elsewhere, extensive public lands. Lands on which local residents could create a life and a livelihood. Common land on which to fish, farm, hunt, and be housed. Enclosure, actively begun in the sixteenth century and reinforced by James I, fenced in the public lands and made them private. There were protests and battles over the years, but after a couple of hundred years, virtually all the public lands went into private ownership. The landless working class became “labor” to service the machine, and the land went to feeding sheep. More profitable than feeding people.

      The end result was a culture ordered by private interests. Commerce became married to king. What was produced was a culture that abandoned subsistence living and the values of local economy; it became a market devoted to scale, speed, and cost. A market that sanctified buying and selling. A culture where place, history, and tradition became irrelevant. A market culture based on contracts and void of covenantal relationships.

COVENANTAL VERSUS CONTRACTUAL ORDER

      The language of covenant speaks to a market built on neighborliness, kinship, and common ownership. These are the cornerstones of the neighborly economy. An other kingdom. A covenantal relationship is based on a vow. It requires an act of imagination about neighborliness. You cannot point to covenant. You can only point to specific performances of covenant. Generosity, for example, is a specific performance of covenant. We are most familiar with the marriage vow. This is in our terms an act of neighborliness in which we choose to expend ourselves in care for someone who has no claim except personal needs and being in relationship. It is an act of fidelity that we could easily have avoided. We do not have to make that vow. Yet we felt summoned in some way to do it.

      The modern consumer market economy is based on contract rather than covenant. A contractual relationship is based on a specific exchange of interests. It has a date and a dollar sign and a specific balanced exchange. For example, if you say I promise to give you $10.00, that’s not a contract because nothing is specified in return. A contract is also time limited, it has a date. If I give you $10.00 and you promise to return it to me, it still is not a contract until you specify when you will pay it back. A covenant, by contrast, is free of specifics, free of date, and free of something in return.

      When the public good is replaced with concern for private rights, we substitute a contract for what was covenant. When this happens we become ordered for scarcity instead of abundance. Time is contracted and we become concerned about speed. Certainty replaces mystery. Perfection substitutes for fallibility. Individual rights trump the common good, the common wealth.

      A covenant is not without its risks. It demands reciprocity over time and violating it has its consequences: for example, loss of trust and consequent isolation. Covenant is a different way of ordering social relationships. It leads to a more intimate, a more interdependent way of being. Contracts are more based on agreement between autonomous individuals.