The Great Religion of Suburbia

My wife and I are poised to move into a new house next month. This house is in a diverse suburban neighborhood with a homeowners association and a rather lengthy list of association regulations regarding one's home and the general appearance of the subdivision.

We are very excited about this move. But moving into this neighborhood has once again brought home for me the ways in which we tend to practice religion without even knowing it. In neighborhoods like ours all across America, a subtle religion has emerged that is nonetheless quite powerful. While there are many religions of suburbia, the endless quest to achieve what I like to call the most 'holy lawn' has increasingly become the religion of choice in our affluent and upper-middle income neighborhoods.

Now before you laugh or roll your eyes, think about it for a minute. Professional lawn service companies comprise a booming industry in this country, and it's not because their lawn care is cheap. The previous owners of the property we're moving into were paying upwards of $400 per month for lawn care and maintenance of a plot less than 1 acre in size, and this is not a particularly astronomical rate in our neck of the boonies. The fact that so many people invest this kind of money in lawn care says something about our devotion to a 'holy lawn' that is as free from impurity (weeds, dead spots, unmanicured shrubs, etc) as possible.

In addition, many of us know people who do not hire professional lawn services because they are determined to have the most beautiful lawn in the neighborhood by doing it themselves. We see commercials on television perpetuating the caricature of a man taking enormous pride in how his lawn looks as a result of using the product the commercial is trying to sell. I used to go to a church where one of the pastors often used the friendly rivalry he had with the guy across the street about the condition of their respective lawns as an avenue to make some point in his sermons (notice how I don't remember many of the sermon points, but I do remember his description of the yard rivalry). Many of us have family members and neighbors who are borderline obsessive about their lawns and are constantly trying to 'improve' them to make them more beautiful. Maybe we ourselves fall into this category.

But still, is it really fair to use the term 'religion' to describe this suburban phenomenon? Well, perhaps not. But on the other hand, there are no shortages of similarities between this phenomenon and the kinds of things we often tend to associate with organized religion. For example, it is often the case that people employ lawn care services because they don't personally have the time, energy, ability, knowledge, or interest to achieve a holy lawn through their own efforts. But why the quest for the holy lawn? True, most everyone enjoys a lush, healthy lawn with bright colors and manicured landscaping. But why do we crave it enough to spend what amounts to an additional car payment every month to achieve it? Or in the case of those who do it themselves, why do we crave it enough to devote significant portions of most of our weekends to loving the lawn? There are a number of reasons, I suspect, but one can be the neighborhood pressures that are both explicit and implicit.

Many homeowner associations have detailed regulations about maintaining a high level of aesthetic appearance for our yards. These regulations create a certain set of expectations, a certain high standard, that is expected of everyone who lives in the neighborhood. Like a local church, the makeup of the neighborhood is a voluntary association - people don't have to live there. And like most local churches, neighborhood associations, through the homeowner regulations, establish certain creeds of belief (in this case, about the expected appearance of the neighborhood) that establishes a standard of orthodoxy that everyone is expected to uphold.

What's more, the negative side also has similarities with the local church. For a local church, when its creeds, system of beliefs, and standards for righteous living are repeatedly or severely flaunted without repentance, church discipline can be the result. Church discipline is based on the idea that one person's unrepented sin impacts the purity of the entire fellowship and threatens the spiritual health of the whole congregation. The same is true in holy lawnism. Association regulations often outline something like a disciplinary procedure for those who fall far below the aesthetic standards outlined in the association's regulations (creedal standards). Like the role of church discipline in the local church, the reason for holy lawnism discipline is often based on the view that one household's flaunting of the standard impacts the whole neighborhood. Such a flaunting of the rules can result in a wider precipitous lowering of the standards throughout the neighborhood and can threaten property values all across the development. Like a local church, the aesthetic standards of a community, either expressly detailed in association regulations or informally established by the makeup of the community, are established for the theoretical benefit of the community at large. Even in 'nice' neighborhoods where there isn't a homeowners association or a set of regulation standards, those who don't maintain their yards become the focus of negative neighborhood gossiping and often become isolated within the neighborhood. In extreme cases, they are shunned and treated like pariahs by their neighbors. There doesn't need to be a formal disciplinary procedure in place in order for discipline to occur.

Now it's true that many people seem to live in their yards simply because they greatly enjoy working in the yard, in addition to enjoying the aesthetic fruits of their labor. Again, this is not so different from the way things are in the church. Many people are active in the church not just because they love the 'payoff' of the worship of Sunday morning, but because they rightly enjoy all the legwork that happens 7 days a week in order to make the Sunday morning experience possible.

What's different between organized religion and holy lawnism is that few people who are obsessed with the appearance of their lawns would say they are worshipping their lawn, while most church parishioners would unapologetically say they are worshipping God. My question is whether the former are being as honest as the latter given the similarities between the two, and how much money and labor they devote to their lawn.