Reports of Our Spiritual Death Greatly Exaggerated

Ray Keating, a columnist for Long Island’s Newsday, provides a service by exposing Dan Goetz’s book “Death by Suburb” for the vacuous cheap shot that it is; we’d like to pile on. Goetz, a Christian writer whose subtitle is “How to Keep the Suburbs from Killing Your Soul,” describes the spirit-wasting effects of consumerism, materialism, superficiality and the general feeling that one is trapped. Keating objects that none of these phenomena are restricted to the suburbs, quoting from St. Paul and other Biblical writers to show that envy and greed “predated the suburbs.” Here’s another problem: isn’t Christianity—and particularly Goetz’s brand of spiritually authentic evangelicalism—growing most steroidally in the suburban megachurches? One almost suspects Goetz was thinking of all those Christian suburban buyers when he came up with his title.