c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) As the housing market implodes and financial institutions struggle, a difficult but necessary societal conversation lies ahead.

Here’s an analogy. Let’s say a town suddenly ran out of booze. To social drinkers, this would be an inconvenience. To non-drinkers, no big deal. To active alcoholics, however, it would be a disaster, inciting panic about finding the next drink. To their families, perhaps bitter glee or hope for recovery and sanity.

America’s vast housing market hasn’t suddenly gone dry, but it’s closer than most can remember.

Foreclosures are mounting _ and not just in subprime-loan neighborhoods. Even in affluent circles, many find themselves “upside down” on their mortgages. Normal cycles of upgrading and downsizing are stalled. Meanwhile, rising gas prices make far-flung suburbs and rural areas less viable.

Banks face staggering losses on lending practices now revealed as unwise. Financial firms that treated mortgages as a speculative commodity are tanking. Builders are defaulting on construction loans. Workers find job mobility stifled. Even credit-worthy customers find mortgages hard to obtain.

The pain is real, of course. But from an ethical standpoint, is the sudden turn of home ownership from dream to nightmare such a bad thing? This is the conversation we need to have.

For 60 years, Americans have bought the dream offered by clever postwar developers that sweet abodes surrounded by picket fences were America’s prize for the winning. That dream led to the paving of farmland, suburban sprawl, and long commutes on congested highways.

It turned homes into isolated fortresses, reinforced racial separation, and eventually produced an inside world where children got soft and an outside world of anonymity and paralyzing dependency on foreign oil.

Few religious leaders are neutral bystanders. We moved to the suburbs, too, poured our own truckloads of asphalt, and paid clergy with home equity.

So entranced were we by gleaming suburbs ripe for harvest that we forgot the Bible’s unmistakable call for sharing _ as opposed to owning _ and Jesus’ clear teachings against storing up wealth. Biblical notions like canceling debts, leaving fields unharvested, and holding property in common were dismissed as Marxist fantasy.

We led the cheers when ambitious professionals demonstrated their human worth by acquiring property, remained silent when residents put property values ahead of people, and waited patiently to make grant requests while the super-rich reveled in income disparities that rivaled the end of the Roman Empire.

Now we have a pastoral crisis on our hands, but even more, we have an ethical collapse that we must address.

When property wages war on people, we must take a stand. When property proves to be exactly the snare and delusion that the Bible anticipated, we need to point a better direction. When people lose the dream that has shaped their lives, we need to proclaim a better dream.

It won’t be a bad thing when people occupy smaller homes and are less isolated by grass and pride. It won’t be a bad thing when we live closer to our jobs, walk more and drive less, and get to know our neighbors.

This will be a wrenching conversation to have. Many egos are tied up in ownership and size, and our sense of well-being depends on avoiding others, not having to accept them. Income disparities are deemed a token of success.

But if we embrace the biblical concept of repentance, we could come out of this housing collapse a stronger, more ethically grounded people.

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project, http://www.churchwellness.com. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)

KRE/LF END EHRICH650 words

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