A postexcess moment? To what end?

I've always admired David Brooks' writing in the op-ed section of the New York Times. He is an irenic conservative, unwilling to let ideology or the passions-of-the-political-moment drive his column writing.

One thing that allows Brooks is the leeway to take on interesting and creative topics that he sees as important aspects of contemporary American culture.

Brooks' recent column, "The Gospel of Wealth," is a good example of that characteristic in his cultural analysis.

Reflecting on the out-of-control materialism of late-20th century American society, Brooks takes up the subject of David Platt - the pastor of the Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham, Alabama, who seeks to steer his megachurch away from the typical megachurch ethos of most megachurches.

That ethos is (to paint with perhaps overly-broad brushstrokes) the prosperity gospel. And it arises out of an understanding of the confluence of the Christian faith with American democratic capitalist prosperity.

A disclaimer: I've not read the recent book by Platt to which David Brooks refers in his column, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream. But the summary he gives of it is one that I think is right on and that needs to be taken more seriously by more Christians in contemporary culture - namely, that the excesses of a consumerist culture stand in direct opposition from the kind of life we are called to lead in faithful discipleship to Jesus Christ.

Reading Brooks' column brought to my mind some other reading I've been doing lately: that of the desert fathers who established monasticism in the fourth century A.D. in the barren wastelands of the Egyptian desert. The culture from which those first monks were drawn was that of the powerful Roman Empire, and in particular, the wealthy and cosmopolitan city of Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile River. Presented with any number of idols which could occupy their earthly lives - wealth, power, erotic pursuits, and even learning - these early monks saw such things for what they really were. And instead of allowing themselves to be numbed by worldly excess, they gave away all they had and pursued a holy life away from the temptations that could drag them away from Christ.

Despite my earlier appreciative comments about Brooks, it does seem that he's probably using David Platt in a way Platt wouldn't intend himself. Note in the column that Brooks is really interested in Americans seeing, in this "postexcess moment" in the wake of the Great Recession, a path to the kind of (small "r") republican virtue that would find national identity in something other than materialistic consumption.

But is that what Platt is getting at? Someone who has read him would have to tell me. My guess is that the end toward which Platt writes and preaches is that life with God that we know as salvation. Brooks, on the other hand, seems to just want a more virtuous American society. That Brooks does not seem to recognize the way he distorts Platt by the end of the column is ironic, given that he invokes Platt's work in the first place to point out that the Church and America are not one in the same.