Luxury Beliefism

Rob Henderson, author of "Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class"

When John and Charles Wesley led what came to be known as the Methodist Revival in Great Britain it meant salvation for hundreds of thousands of people. But there were social implications too. All the people who, having been saved and having resolved to be holy, gave up drinking and gambling and worked “as unto the Lord,” so that they left behind their generational dysfunctions and poverty, made the British Empire strong at precisely the time when France was sinking into a violent and destructive revolution. 
The Wesleys preached grace, but they also preached practical holiness and they did it without embarrassment or apology. They were confident that holy behavior pleased God and was a blessing to the individual and the individual’s community. So they told people what to do with their money, how much to sleep, how to educate their children, how to treat their animals, how to treat their employees and a host of other things. 
This past Sunday when I leaned into Wesley’s sermon “On the Use of Money,” I confess to being a little uncomfortable with telling you all what to do, even though it is what I myself do and even though my personal experience has validated that direction at every turn. 
Author and psychologist Rob Henderson, has written extensively on what he calls “luxury beliefs.” He has observed how elites in our culture often signal their virtue by promoting on the cultural level beliefs that they reject in their private experience. He observes, for instance, how many of the loudest voices calling for “body positivity” belong to people who evidently have gym memberships. He calls them “luxury” beliefs because they can hold and espouse these beliefs at little cost to themselves, or at a cost their privilege and advantages make it easy for them to afford. People with lots of resources and privileged social networks can afford a level of intoxication that would result in job loss, bankruptcy, and family dissolution in the case of a poor person. 
But these luxury beliefs, like most luxury purchases, are bought on credit. And the bill is coming due. It always comes due. 
Vermont is wealthy and it still has stockpiles of cultural heritage to draw down. But it can not afford indefinitely the luxury beliefs it holds. Children being sacrificed on the altar of gender identity, a generation of Vermonters being lost to the abuse of alcohol, marijuana, and other drugs, sexual promiscuity and broken marriages . . . Vermont can’t afford this much longer. 
The time is right for a Wesleyan message, for a people who insist on grace, but who also have a confident and robust message about what “shalom” looks like and what it requires. Vermont needs practical holiness and it needs to hear that message from holy people who love Vermont and Jesus. 

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