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The Myth of the American Dream

Posted on by Jeremy Daggett

D. L. Mayfield kills it. Her book is prophetic.

What do I mean by “prophetic”? First, a quick overview of the entire story of the Hebrew Bible.

God called a family and then a tribe to be different than the rest of the world, so that God could bless the world through this tribe. God freed a whole nation of enslaved people so that they could be a different sort of presence in the world, a sort of priesthood whose purpose was to bring the experience of the divine to every family on the earth.

Fast forward a few centuries and this people became an empire. They abused their power in order to enslave others to build a temple to the God who liberates enslaved peoples—all under a religious façade. In the following centuries a group of people rose up from within this nation and articulated the first clear vision of social justice in human history. They called oppressive kings to account. They said you can’t worship the God who liberates while you are actively oppressing others. Their goal was to get this nation back on track with the original mission: be a different kind of tribe in the world so that the world can know what God is like. This was the prophetic imagination, calling power to account for the sake of wellbeing.

Back to the book: Mayfield’s voice in this book is prophetic in challenging the faux-religious mythology that surrounds the founding of the United States of America. She challenges the current narrative of US exceptionalism that is only exceptional for some.

Her empathy shines through her bristling critique. She’s not just interested in deconstructing the myth. Her life and relationships are hinging on being able to reconstruct, to build something new. She’s asking Christians to love their neighbors, especially the global neighbors who have sought refuge within the US.

Those who have grown up in Christian evangelical circles in the US will identity with Mayfield’s story. She is deeply uncomfortable with the state of Christianity in the US, especially the last four years. This discomfort moves her to action. Those who see this particular expression of US Christianity from the outside will come away with more history behind the hypocrisy.

From the introduction:

The myth of the American Dream not only baptizes the actions and desires of the privileged but also places the blame of inequality on those who are already disadvantaged, instead of turning the focus on changing the unjust systems.

In this book I will consider the narratives lying beneath the surface of so many easy answers that both American culture and American evangelicalism have given to the problem of suffering in an unequal and unjust world. I will attempt to show what it has been like to learn to practice the discipline of lament and how I am being changed by my relationship to people who are exiles from the American Dream—those who have no way to win or who have been excluded from the very beginning. I will share how I have tried, and failed and keep trying to live in opposition to what I’ve been told (even by the church) is best for me. The more I try to follow Jesus, the more I realize that if the gospel isn’t good news for the poor, the imprisoned, the brokenhearted, and the oppressed, then it isn’t good news for me either (6-7).

The book is divided into four parts: affluence, autonomy, safety, and power. I’ll share a favorite passage from each.

On the White Savior Complex (in part 1, affluence):

The people in my neighborhood who have experienced forced migration don’t need a hug from a strange woman. What they need are good neighbors. They need people to live next door to them, to send their kids to school with theirs, to vote for policies that protect instead of harm them. They need people whose lives are intricately bound up with their flourishing (18).

From part 2, autonomy:

Someone’s kids have to attend the worst school in your city. In your mind whose kids should that be? I think our answers to that question reveal a great deal about how deeply the American value of autonomy has been lodged in our hearts. We will fight to ensure that our kids get the best, and we try to forget about everyone else—unless perhaps, every once in a while, there’s an opportunity for charity, to give back, or to “love on” that fits our needs and maintains the status quo of the hierarchy (and makes us feel better, to boot) (77).

Mayfield tells the story of the school her kids go to. She wanted to show how she intended to help the school out. And the busy principal pointed out that there were a lot of good things happening at the school. There were already a lot of good families there, and her family was welcome to be a part of it.

The book is filled with stories that are challenging and encouraging. Mayfield is raw and honest about her attitude, privilege, and preconceived notions. She asks questions that are thought-provoking and step on your toes. But you welcome her to step on your toes because you know she’s had her toes stepped on too.

On the illusion of safety and what true peace would look like (part 3, safety):

Aisha made it to safety, just barely. She had to flee her town when it was set on fire, when people targeted her city due to their ethnicity. She has one badly damaged book of photographs, pictures from her wedding where she should look gorgeous, radiant, full of possibility. But instead the photos are warped almost beyond recognition. Still, she shows it to me one day because it is all she has. The day she shows it to me is a day that Donald Trump is holding a press conference about the need to build a larger wall on the US-Mexican border. I think about walls as metaphors, how the problem isn’t the concrete or the steel being used to secure a border but the reasoning behind it. Everyone wants to be safe, both the people who voted for the wall and people like Aisha. Who should we listen to the most? Who is truly in danger?

I think of Aisha and her son. Her son, born in a new land, one where her mother cannot visit. And yet she gave him a name that means “peace” as an act of defiance. Do we really want safety? Or do we want true peace? As Aisha and countless prophets and poets in the Scriptures will tell us, there is no way to guarantee safety in the world. The only way to move forward is with righteousness—true justice and equality for all. Then, and only then, will we ever experience a measure of peace that will ripple forth into the next generations, reminding them that they once were the ones in need and could be again someday (122-123).

Finally, on power and empire and myth:

I see the tendrils of these viewpoints in my own mind. Today I can see fractures both big and local in the American evangelical church, and still I won’t believe in an ending. American evangelicalism will live on, it will weather the storm of attaching itself to the pursuit of power at the cost of loving their neighbors. It cannot end. This stubborn thought remains, and the quiet belief behind it is where the real power of empire lies: America, and more specifically White evangelical expressions of Christianity in America, cannot die because it is inherently blessed by God. This is ingrained in my brain, where this vicious myth has taken root and made itself true. This is how empire always works, by convincing us there is no other path forward except the one where we are always victorious. And this is how the narrative of empire is working, even now, in my own heart and soul and mind.

It isn’t that I am anti-American, not really. As James Baldwin said, “I love America more than any country in the world, and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Empires are complicated structures; no matter where we live on this earth, we live with some sort of relationship to empire—and we need to figure out how to live as disciples of Christ right where we are. As a middle-class White American female, the dominant culture of the United States has been pretty good for me, which is important to articulate. I am someone who benefits from the empire at work around me, which means I have a spiritual and moral responsibility to interrogate the narratives that surround me. I need to seek out those who have experienced exodus and exile, and I need to contemplate what life beyond or in spite of empire might look like: contemplating the end of how everything always has been and supposedly always will be. There is nothing in Scripture, nothing in Jesus, that says my proud and terrible and interesting country is particularly blessed, has some special favor, has some special reason for existence (145-146).

Thinking back, maybe most of the book is devoted to deconstruction. It’s hard to get through that when the mythology is so ingrained. But the epilogue, in particular, shares beautiful stories of something new:

All of these people find they are changing, shifting, as their worlds expand outward. It looks a lot like the joy of welcoming a new baby into the family—the gift of the unexpected, the birth of new possibilities.

There’s the librarian who sings the name of each child at the weekly story time, a silly little song that repeats the name of the child over and over again and makes the children all beam with happiness. He tells me he sings this song not just as a way to learn their names but as a way to combat the negativity they might hear in their own life. He tells me studies show that saying a child’s name in a positive tone eight times a day can help undo the damage of only hearing their name when they’re in trouble for something. I think about this, about a man in a small library’s multipurpose room, singing and clapping and saying each child’s name with love and joy, his own little ministry of naming (191).

Beautiful.

My one pushback to this book would be questioning Mayfield’s authenticity. It only came up once, when I asked myself: Can anyone really be so bound up in God’s vision for the marginalized that they can’t be content until that vision becomes a reality? Of course, I can’t answer that because I don’t know her.

I will say, from following her on Twitter for the past year (that’s the next best thing to actually knowing someone, right?), she lives and breathes Black Lives Matter, she’s always asking questions, she calls power to account (especially white Christian power), and she’s not afraid of tear gas.

That’s the type of person I’m willing to listen to.

I mentioned earlier that one of the marks of a good book is the reading list you come away with. Well, here’s my list after this one:

℗

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