Questioning the American Dream: New Monastic Attempts to Restructure the U.S. Economy

Abstract

New Monasticism, a growing sect of the Emerging Church movement, is a new envisioning of Christianity in which adherents are called to address socioeconomic inequality through social justice programs. During the summer of 2013, participant observation and interviews were conducted with two New Monastic intentional communities in Kansas City, Missouri, to better understand how the call to "restructure the economy towards justice" is acted out by New Monastics through their social justice programming. This thesis analyzes New Monasticism through a lived religion framework and argues that its beliefs about welfare, work ethic, and capitalism present a combination of "traditional" evangelical social policy beliefs and more critical, liberal imaginings of socioeconomic justice. I suggest that New Monasticism as a social movement is illustrative, more broadly, of the ways that "lived" religions seek to impact the local economies they inhabit, and secular society as a whole.