Rule Suburbia

My wife and I went camping about a week ago. We cooked all our food over a fire, slept on the implacably hard ground, felt the morning coolness, and walked to a small lake. It was a lovely weekend, but it was far from the escape I'd envisioned.

Americans (for the most part) don't understand the purpose of camping. The campground where we stayed was wooded and close to the beach....and resembled nothing so much as suburbia relocated to the outdoors.

Here was the opportunity to leave daily existence with its distractions and boredom behind, and instead these hundreds of campers decided to bring the distractions and boredom with them, to use while complaining about the mosquitoes and the dirt.

I'm not sure what that is, but it's not camping. No commitment to enjoying nature or a primitive existence here. Instead, RVs with televisions larger than my tent, smartphones constantly vomiting "personalized" ringtones shared by thousands of people, microwaved meals (again, courtesy of the RVs), screaming children, loud music, and generators powering TVs to which were attached Xboxes and Wiis.

Why even go camping?! Unless you embrace the experience, living out of doors, even temporarily, is miserable. You don't get to shower properly, you don't get a good night's sleep, your food is undercooked, and there's mud everywhere. All of which become genuine pleasures when you seek them as an alternative to the daily routine—and even more annoying and aggravating if you're trying to pursue your daily routine despite them.

The behavior I witnessed at the campground (ironically) is the result of certain strands of Christian thinking as much as typical American consumerism. The idea that God calls man to dominion over the created world has been so bent out of shape that many now take it to mean we have the right of all creation, that it belongs to us to do with as we will. This is neither a proper understanding of dominion, nor a proper understanding of the Church's role in relation to Jesus Christ.

But this idea has led in turn to a worse one: the idea that creation is in fact meant to serve us. While I don't for a second intend to imply that the opposite is true (we are not the servants of creation, either), or that we should worship nature or extend toward it more respect than God Himself has given it, I do mean to imply that man is still part of the created order, crown though he may be, and as such has no right to turn it to purposes beyond what God has designated for it.

As the great Jacques Ellul pointed out, cities were first formed as acts of rebellion against God. That's not to say Christians shouldn't live in cities; cities are as viable a dwelling for Christians as for anyone else, especially given that the New Jerusalem is itself a city. But cities, while they have their place, should not be allowed to encroach further than their own jurisdiction.

There are things nature tells us about ourselves and (more importantly) about God that we can never learn in an urban or metropolitan area. To take the city into nature, therefore, is to wilfully subject the wilderness to man's desire for comfort, his desire for control, even his desire for community that is not God-sanctioned. For how can God condone community that is predicated on mere numbers and presence, rather than on meaningful knowledge and relationships?

God is not nature, as the pantheists assert, nor is he present in nature the way panentheists suggest; but He is the Lord of nature just as he is the Lord of the city, the Lord of the Sabbath, the Lord of Heaven, and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The insensate drive to bring man's creation wherever man goes is not only arrogant, it's idolatrous.

I wouldn't imagine these ideas are conscious in most people, but I would suggest they are at least subconsciously present to one degree or another. I'm not going to stop camping as a result of this nonsense, though; but I am going to find a more secluded place to do it in.