Let us begin by describing the nature of the consumer kingdom. We live within a dominant cultural narrative best described as the Free Market Consumer Ideology. This is a totalizing narrative, which provides the water within which most of our ideas and actions swim. The time is right to change the water and thereby the kingdom that it nourishes.

The Free Market Consumer Ideology is an economic narrative in which:

Free means that there should be few constraints on individuals and institutions. It signifies the elevation of individual rights. The freedom to do business and to privatize the common assets such as government, air, water and the land, as it suits us. This appropriated language of economic freedom is welded to the idea of democracy.

Market means that how we conduct commerce is a first priority. It is not just a place of buying and selling, it is a world view. An invisible hand, perhaps an instrument of God. It is touted as the essential element of democracy. If it must be protected by military action at home and abroad, which it does, then so be it.

Consumer means that our capacity to purchase is the measure of our well-being and our identity. That what is essential to life—such as raising children, our health, our safety, our care—can be outsourced and purchased. It also means that whatever we have is not enough.

Ideology means that our beliefs about Free, about Market, and about Consumer are True. Beyond question. Expressions of our real nature.

These are much more than a set of beliefs about an economy. These consumer market concepts shape and commodify the social order. They define our culture. This narrative is the lens through which we raise our children, tell the news, create our livelihood, label who is in and out, distribute empire, and define how we live. It identifies what really matters in the end and establishes the nature of our social relationships. It is the final word—the bottom line, to use its own terminology.

This book is an invitation to imagine social relationships ordered differently. Social relationships ordered around an alternative narrative that is founded on the ideas of neighborliness and covenant. A social order not based on the conception of consumption and contract.

Neighborliness means that our well-being and what really matters is close at hand and can be locally constructed or produced. In this modern time, neighborliness is considered quaint and nostalgic. To make neighborliness the center of our social order requires an act of imagination. It is counter-cultural. It is also a form of social interaction that is built on a covenant that serves the common good.

In order to imagine a mode of social interaction that serves the commons, we must become aware of the way social relationships are dominantly ordered among us now. It is difficult to see what we are swimming in. It is hard to imagine there is an alternative to what we consider to be true and inevitable.

Understanding the current social order is important because the cultural narrative is decisive. It has the power of context. It decides who has access to social power and social goods, and how people who are not deciders relate to the ones who do decide. The consumer and market authority we live within violates neighborly relations by stratifying social power according to money and its attendants—privilege, competition, self-interest, entitlement, surplus. The dominant modes of current social relationships fend off neighborliness at all costs, and at great cost.

The market ideology says that neighborly 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.

THE NEIGHBORLY COVENANT

Our task is to imagine a culture ordered differently. Imagine the human benefit of an alternative to the market ideology that defines our culture. We call this the Neighborly Covenant because it enlivens and humanizes the social order.

The Neighborly Covenant is an alternative to a market ideology that has reached its limits, no matter how high the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbs. The map we have really isn’t working. It is visibly flawed. We see in every political campaign a rhetoric designed solely for marketing the candidate, not for meaning. We force all politicians into promising what they can’t deliver. It becomes a concentrated version of the consumer ideology. Citizen as consumer, candidate as supplier. And so we campaign and vote on marketing slogans: liberal, conservative, values, democracy, end poverty, maintain standard of living, jobs, education, marriage this, guns that. These catchphrases are just code words, like advertising, that exploit people’s needs and anxiety for the sake of candidate market share, namely winning their votes. This language is another subversion of the common good and the longing for public servants. We think the wish for an alternative culture will be fulfilled in the ballot box.

What we are proposing is language for alternative ways to a covenantal culture. The free market consumer ideology has defined the dominant codes, that particular way of talking about our culture. This is what has led us to stalemate. Our work is to create another set of code words—ones that are active beyond election years and have different substance in defining our communal identity. This is the departure. But first we want to be even clearer about what we are departing from.