Letter from America

When I came to America I expected to leave behind me the need to understand class distinctions.

In a sense that has been true. In England your accent immediately places you within a fabric of class distinctions (unless you are blessed to have been born with or cultivated that nondescript nowhere-in-particular accent beloved of TV hosts). Here my accent does not 'place' me, other than being from England (or occasionally Australia).

But apart from that sense in which class no longer effects the world in which I move, class is still a very present factor. Class in America seems to be every bit as divisive and virulent and all-prevalent as in England. It's just that the definitions are different, and perhaps more complex.

Geography and parents

In England your class depends to a large extent on who your parents were or where you were born. In America there are lots of inter-locking factors that affect class. One of the major factors is education. Someone who is more educated than you here in America is, in a sense different from in England, in a separate class. Another factor is race.

Back to the Pilgrims?

Another factor is the age of your family heritage, whether you can trace your roots to the Pilgrims, or how far back your family goes to the old country. Another factor is wealth. Richer people are in a different class in America, where in England being rich doesn't necessarily move you up the class rank.
These four factors - education, race, family, wealth - work together to create a complex web of class distinctions. There are additional factors as well that weigh in to different degrees in different situations.

Accent

Accent, for instance, particularly whether someone has a southern or northern accent, 'places' them in much the same way, though with a different message, as it does in England. People with southern accents often feel unfairly stigmatised as being less intelligent because of their accent. Southerners tend to look on Northerners as being brash and unfriendly.

Protection?

All this to say that class seems a perennial function of society. We erect barriers between one another in order to have a pecking order of who is better, or perhaps also to protect each other from each other, or perhaps just to be able to hang out with people like us and not have the bother of being confronted with someone with a very different set of attitudes and class assumptions. For whatever reason, class seems to be there. The vision of a 'classless society', attractive as it is, seems to be essentially delusory.

The church

Unless, that is, one is a Christian. For in Christ, the Apostle Paul tells us 'there is no Jew, nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female'. He takes on the three distinguishing factors of class in his day - race, slavery and gender - and says that they are non-existent in Christ. Note he does not say that we have to work to make them go away he says that they have gone away, that it is a present state of being for the Christian: 'there is no Jew nor Gentile etc'. Paul's point seems to be that this is the existential reality for Christians - and it's our job not to create it but to enjoy it, to proclaim it, to make it more ours as it is already ours.

Now, unfortunately, churches do not always reflect this. But whether we are upper class, or lower class, or middle class, or somewhere-in-between class, it certainly is wonderful to know that if we are a Christian it makes no difference.

Josh Moody

© Evangelicals Now - June 2001
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