https://www.bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/celebrities-for-jesus/406890/
Celebrities
for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms and Profits are Hurting the Church
I
will come back to the reasons for this proposal after I have touched upon the
newspeg of Beaty’s book by way of two quotes. The first is from Richard Ostling’s
piece at Get Religion published on September 8, 2022:
...
The bottom line, here: This
bite-hand-that-feeds angle alone offers a strong story theme that journalists
could draw from this book. By her account, the business is rife with inferior
products from big names, underpaid and unacknowledged ghost writers, plagiarism
and gambits to goose sales numbers that border on fraud. What do industry
leaders say in response?
Otherwise, Beaty offers a
notably perceptive analysis of celebrityhood, including the all-too-frequent
spiritual damage, psychological twists and moral rot it inflicts on the
celebrities themselves. Naturally, she surveys some of the resulting
money-grubbing, power plays and sexual scandals.
...
The
second quote is a longer extract Freddie deBoer published at his Substack on
August 29, 2022:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/what-purpose-do-i-serve-in-your-life
…
A
consequence of multiplicity horror is the deep desire to be
made in some sense easily and consistently comprehensible to others in a way
that provides comfort to yourself. This is what I call the
intelligibility urge. When confronted with the innumerable personas that
populate the internet, we’re faced with several different kinds of terror. The
first is that we might be just one more face among all of them. The second is
that they might perceive us in a way different than we perceive ourselves. And
so the intelligibility urge is the desire to be easily digestible to others, to
have clear boundaries and associations that enable others to clock us quickly
and assign us to a tribe. Dogmom. Wine aficionado. ACAB. Funkopop enthusiast.
Hufflepuff. Proudboy. 6’2. Hopeless romantic. Pronouns in bio. Whatever the
current trappings of “irony” are. All of these things, what gets stuffed into
Instagram bios and online dating profiles and all manner of other places, are
the consequence of intelligibility urge - the fear of being misapprehended or,
worse, not apprehended at all in light of multiplicity horror. When I agitate
against viewing a disability or diagnosis as an identity, for example, it
provokes deeply emotional responses. My reasons for opposing diagnosis-as-identity
are pretty plain and are either correct or incorrect. But the basic desire to
identify in this way is easy to understand: if I just am my
obsessive-compulsive disorder, then at least I am not nothing.
But the urge to self-categorize comes alongside the urge
to categorize others. If I’m to juggle all of these myriad personalities, I
need to classify them too. The difference is that it’s just as good, or better,
if there’s something limiting and pejorative in the categories I devise. The
#girlboss. The litbro. The male feminist. The basic bitch. The himbo. The
pickme girl. The helicopter parent. The thisbro, the thatbro, everybody, some
kind of bro. Everyone must be a type, and this
is the categorization imperative. Again, too many people, too many
relationships, too many minds, too many souls out there. Who could keep track
of them without some kind of useful acrostic to decompose them all into their
most obvious and sortable features? Of course, despite the fact that we want to
be intelligible to others, to ensure that we exist, we also rankle under other
people’s categories. This is why so much of internet discourse amounts to the
claim that one’s combination of factors and influences is unique and uncategorizable,
while everyone else is merely a type of bro. (Even women.) I think if you study
a lot of online fights (Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, anywhere), you’ll find that
very many of them are at least in part a matter of squabbling about
categorization, people taking turns trying to force the other into a group
identity.
…
We
live in a cultural milieu where taxonomies of judgment abound and there is a
perceived necessity to know with whom and with what we’re aligned. Celebrity provides opportunities for
self-alignment and definition via consumption in an era in which personal
attachment by means of more traditional geographic and filial associations seem
more tenuous than they may have been in the past. It’s axiomatic that teenagers
define themselves in the United States by consumption patterns as signifiers of
social, economic, intellectual, political and cultural status so the axiom goes.
Beaty does not suggest it is actually a good thing that Christian teenagers
identify themselves by what they do or do not consume but that this was the
case for her growing up and it is normative in American evangelicalism and
elsewhere.
Rather
than having industries and cultural norms that mitigate celebrity Christian
popular level media in books, music and film amplify celebrity or seek to
leverage celebrity for evangelism. Beaty’s case can be read as a polemic
against conversions in favor of discipleship, or at least that is how I read
her case.
Beaty
cites a number of high profile leadership crashes to illustrate her points
regarding the problems with Christian celebrity. Inevitably Mark Driscoll shows
up a number of times throughout the book. Bill Hybels makes an appearance or
two. Joshua Harris inevitably gets mentioned. Kanye West and Justin Bieber and
Bob Dylan get mentioned in a closing chapter on Christian efforts to leverage
celebrity conversions for the sake of evangelism. Ravi Zacharias also gets
mentioned.
Beaty
breaks down the temptations of celebrity into three broad categories: abusing
power, chasing platforms and creating personae. Mark Driscoll, unsurprisingly,
shows up in all three categories. What has been interesting about those
temptations is that when it comes to chasing platforms Mike Cosper had a
conversation with Tim Keller as part of The
Rise and Fall of Mars Hill in 2022 in which Keller
said that The Gospel Coalition didn’t have a platform and that if anyone gave a
platform it was Driscoll providing a platform to The Gospel Coalition and not
the other way around. For those who are committed to the idea that men like
Keller or Piper were the elder statesmen who “platformed” Mark Driscoll they
may not wish to believe Keller’s statement.
I am inclined to think it is accurate until someone can actually
disprove it. Even if we grant sources can be biased no one has made, as yet, a
cogent case that Keller is wrong or misunderstanding things in saying that Mark
Driscoll and Mars Hill Church provided a platform to The Gospel Coalition
rather than the other way around. This
statement, if anything, reinforces Katelyn Beaty’s point about chasing
platforms among celebrities—celebrities have enough parasocial relational power
and technological savvy they are capable of giving platforms to more traditional
denominational leaders who otherwise might have remained less well-known. Among
Mark Driscoll’s followers and supporters many of them heard of him before they
ever heard of John Piper or Tim Keller.
Beaty
discusses how in pursuing platforms many a celebrity preacher turns out to have
a lot of material ghostwritten for them that is passed off as their own work.
This happened most notoriously with Mark Driscoll in the plagiarism controversy
of late 2013 through early 2014. At
least one ghostwriter went on record, Jed Ostoich, which
I’ve discussed a little bit in the past.
I
have also, of course, argued that it is best to understand Mark Driscoll not as
a pastor or a shepherd but as a propagandist. Why? Beaty’s argument of
Christian celebrity, we should consider the constructed mediated reality known
as the Christian celebrity persona as the work of propaganda. What is
propaganda, you may ask? Now we get to Jacques Ellul. He defined propaganda as
the simultaneous use of all available forms of mass and broadcast media by an
institution, political party or movement to convey a cohesive message. He
regarded public education as pre-propaganda inasmuch as any state-sponsored
school system will necessarily be propagandizing the interests of the state.
For the purposes of a warning to fellow Christians and to churches Ellul had
something more specific to say:
PROPAGANDA:
THE FORMATION OF MEN'S ATTITUDES
Jacques Ellul
Translated from the French by Konrad Kellen
& Jean Lerner
Vintage Books Edition, February 1973
Copyright (c) 195 by Alfred A Knopf Inc.
ISBN 0-394-71874-7
page 230
... Propaganda is a total system that one must
accept or reject in its entirety.
If the
church accepts it, two important consequences follow. First of all,
Christianity disseminated by such means is not Christianity. [emphasis
added] We have already seen
the effect of propaganda on ideology. In fact, what happens as soon as the
church avails itself of propaganda is a reduction of Christianity to the level
of all other ideologies or secular religions.
This can be
seen happening throughout history. Every time a church tried to act through the
propaganda devices accepted by an epoch, the truth and authenticity of
Christianity were debased. This happened in the fourth, ninth, and seventeenth
centuries (of course, this does not mean that no more Christians were left as a
result).
In such
moments (when acting through propaganda), Christianity ceases to be an
overwhelming power and spiritual adventure and becomes institutionalized in all
its expressions and compromised in all its actions. It serves everybody as an
ideology with the greatest of ease, and tends to be a hoax. In such times there
appear innumerable sweetenings and adaptations, which denature Christianity by
adjusting it to the milieu.
Thus reduced to nothing more
than an ideology, Christianity will be treated as such by the propagandist.
[emphasis added] And in the modern world we can repeat in connection with this
particular ideology what we have already said on the subject of ideologies in
general. What
happens is that the church will be able to move the masses and convert
thousands of people to its ideology. But this ideology will no longer be
Christianity. It will be just another doctrine, though it will still contain
(sometimes, but not always) some of the original principles and the Christian
vocabulary. [emphasis added]
The other
consequence affects the church itself. When it uses propaganda, the church
succeeds, just as all other organizations. It reaches the masses, influences
collective opinions, leads sociological movements, and even makes many people
accept what seems to be Christianity. But in doing that the church becomes a
false church. it acquires power and influence that are of this world, and
through them integrates itself into this world.
An application of Ellul’s warning can come in two forms,
first by way of the role the mainline Protestant denominations represented
American interests in the Cold War and, second, by way of the emergence of the
religious right. Both forms can be construed as a synthesis of putatively
Christian dogmas with American civic religious concerns. That these two strands
of American Christianity/Christendom can be construed in blue-state and
red-state terms respectively changes nothing about the Americanist nature of
their functions as civic religions.
Now, we can turn to Ellul’s observations in The New Demons on the sacred as a
category that encompasses religion rather than religion encompassing the sacred
(if you wonder why he might have gone there his book Jesus and Marx outlined
his take on the dogmatic aspects of Marxism and Christian attempts to
assimilate Marxist dogmatics in the cause of what might colloquially be called
a social gospel):
The New Demons
Jacques Ellul
The Seabury Press
815 Second Avenue
New York, New York 10017
Original edition: Les Nouveaux Possedes
@ Librairie Artheme Fayard, 1973
The Seabury Press
English Translation by Seabury Press
1975
ISBN 0-8164-0266-3
page 48
... First of all, I would like to say
that in my view the sacred is not one of the categories of religion. Religion,
rather, is one possible rendition of the sacred. Surely it cannot be said that
"every religious concept (this term is broader than religion) .implies a
distinction between the sacred and the profane." That distinction itself
is a mark of the sacral concept of the world. A sacral society is one in which
everything, including whatever is not sacred, is judged from the standpoint of
the sacred. The profane is not the sacred, but it can exist only in a society
which orders everything with reference to the sacred. The fact that man treats
a given element as sacred does not mean that the rest is not sacred for the
world is a whole. What it means is that the rest is located with reference to
the ever present sacred.
pages 49-50
...
Inescapably, if man sets up a sacred,
there is some reason behind it. Yet I always find it hard to believe that, if
"primitive" man had a great capacity, a great intelligence as a
worker, a speaker, an artist, an organizer, he was afflicted with downright
stupidity the moment some other type of expression was involved, such as the
religious, the mythical, the sacred, the magical. Such a total break at that
point is very improbable. Therefore, I think the sacred must have had a meaning
just as real as the fabrication of the first tools.
page 51
...
To be specific: thanks to the sacred,
man possesses a certain number of points of reference. He knows where he is. It
saves his continually having to make exhausting decisions. He has stable
coordinates. Thanks to the sacred, he can be oriented in the world and know
where and how to act. He is not in a deadly weightlessness, nor a crazy
kaleidoscope. Everything in the world is not identical and indifferent. The
sacred designates for him a set of guides and discriminations, ready-made to
facilitate life in this universe. [emphasis added]
pages 52-53
Finally, the sacred has a third
function, that of integrating the individual into the group. The sacred cannot
exist except as collective. It has to be received and lived in common.
Conversely, the group has no solidarity unless everyone participates in the
same sacred. [emphasis added] I am not saying that it is a means of
solidifying the group, because that implies a conscious intention, something
never found in the institution of the sacred. But it is indeed a function. A
group never exists on the basis of clear intention. The form which constitutes
the group is the opposite to a contract. The latter can take place only after
there has been a sufficiently powerful motive for concluding a contract. If
such motives are purely voluntary, the contract, like the group, is very
fragile, for nothing is less enduring than the will.
pages 56-57
Finally, the sacred implies a
person who embodies it, for the sacred must be incarnate. This person is not of
the same order as sacred object, or a sacred idea. The person in question is
the one the group who concentrates in himself all the "virtues"
implied by the sacred. [emphasis added] He is the living
sacred in motion, actualized in the present. He is not in himself the point of
reference of the entire world order, but he is the point of reference for all
the people, show them how they should act, how they should appear, and how they
should behave toward the sacred.
Thus the sacred exists only when there
are the three elements combination. The rite of commitment implies a commitment
to the sacred value, and at the same time it implies a fixation on the
exemplary person as a model. The exemplary person is the most committed of all
through more exacting rites and in close relation to the sacred value. The sacred
value has no meaning unless people are marked to obey it and unless there is a
man to incarnate it. Under those conditions the sacred can truly be an order of
the world and not a metaphysical abstraction for dilettantes. [emphasis added]
page 58
Thus man constantly, and everywhere in
the same way, has tried establish an order, which implies something sacred. But
the latter has frequently been called in question. That is, a principle
organization, once it has been put into operation, can, at a given moment and
at the cost of much effort, be challenged and repudiated by someone, by a group
located outside that world order. Thus Georges Gurvitch claims that such was
the role magic with respect to religion. Historically in the West we have known
two attempts: Christianity, which called in question and desacralized the pagan
sacred, and the Reformation, which called in question and desacralized the
medieval sacred. In both cases there was an intent to desacralize radically.
From the standpoint the creator-God, who was at the same time a liberator,
Jesus Christ, Lord of history and an incarnation of the love of God, a sacral
world order was no longer necessary. The sacred has no place, reason for
existence in the biblical revelation. Primitive Christianity attacked the
sacred of nature and the sacred of power in Mediterranean world. The
Reformation attacked the sacred nature and of power which had been reinstated,
and it also attacked the sacred of the church.
What is absolutely decisive in this
double attack, which had been as profound as possible, is that, on the one
hand, the sacred was irresistibly reinstated (which would go to prove that it
is a human creation and an unavoidable necessity of such depth that it cannot
be uprooted and of such vitality that it cannot fail), and on the other
hand, what had been the instrument of desacralization became itself
sacred. [emphasis added] Thus Christianity for two hundred
years succeeded in destroying the pagan sacred of nature and the sacred of
power, in the name of Creation and of the Incarnation and the Lordship of Jesus
Christ. Yet, what was to become the sacred after that?-the church, the revealed
truth, the very thing that had been the instrument of desacralization. With
that as a beginning, the remainder was reinstated. The natural order of
Creation and the power of the emperor as the vicar of Christ became
sacred.
...
It
is at this point, with Ellul’s taxonomy of the sacred, that we can supplement
Katelyn Beaty’s working definition of celebrity being different from fame by
way of celebrity being social power without proximity. Contemporary celebrity
can convey two illusions in Beaty’s study. The first illusion is “authenticity”
and the second illusion is “intimacy”. Parasocial relationships between
celebrities and their respective fans have supplemented or possibly even
replaced both personal authenticity on the part of celebrities and intimacy in
both directions of the celebrity/fan dyadic web. If, and I admit it is an “if”
the values of authenticity and communicative intimacy are imitated in the
hyper-real domain of celebrity/fan dynamics then those values constitute the sacred
that celebrity personae invoke and cultivate. What may have constituted the
shepherd/congregant relationship in days past (or the present) is given a kind
of mass media substitute/surrogate. To put this more starkly, fans of Mark
Driscoll have a cultivated illusion that he speaks to them, knows them, and
cares about them and this is a concept cultivated by Mark Driscoll and his
family to the extent that other members of the Driscoll family participate as
public figures in the Driscoll brand. The fans believe they have an intimate
connection to him but as Dan Allender told Mike Cosper earlier this year, Mark
Driscoll has not actually let people close to him.
It
is not necessarily a lie on the part of Mark Driscoll that his fans believe they
are closer to him than they are, it is more probably the false implication or
surmise of intimacy and authenticity that fans project on to the object of
their affection, a point Beaty underlines late in her book. If we didn’t crave
the simulation of relational connection that celebrities currently strive to
provide we wouldn’t turn to the parasocial relationships that define celebrity
to begin with.
I
think the book is worth reading. I do think that Beaty’s thesis could be
extended to progressive as well as conservative evangelical and mainline
figures. I have, of course, argued that Nadia Bolz-Weber is Mark Driscoll 2.0
for progressives. When Driscoll had his 2014 demise media outlets were primed
to present the late Rachel Held Evans as an alternative. In that process it
seemed that mainstream Christian mass media and publishing collectively
concluded that the antidote to a right-wing Christian celebrity was simply
providing a counteracting blue-state Christian celebrity, not to question the
ethics and viability of the celebrity networks and star-making machines that
made these people famous for being famous rather than competent exegetes or
theologians to begin with.
As
Beaty so no need to sugar coat the graft and cut-rate productions in Christian
book publishing I don’t see a need to sugar coat the problem that pop Christian
publishing defaults so readily to blue-state as well as red-state Americanist
civic religions that the ultimate distinction without a difference gets ignored
when the two respective sides of the same pop culture coin are treated as if
they are opposites when the entire mass media ecosystem literally makes bank on
both sides. What tends to happen for celebrities is they are granted clemency
the rank and file are not granted because “we” seem to “need” the celebrity to
retain his/her/their platform for the sake of the cause.
Ellul
had a uniformly negative take on the value of wielding mass media for the sake
of Christianity, arguing as I have quoted above that once Christians embrace
propagandistic methods and goals they have functionally abandoned the faith. What
Beaty’s book didn’t do that is probably covered by other writers is pointing
out the extent to which celebrity tends to be dynastic. John Lennon became
famous for writing songs, Julian Lennon is famous because his dad was famous.
Francis Schaeffer was famous for the books he wrote and Frank Schaeffer was
able to become famous leveraging against that legacy. There is a sense in which
celebrities in pop Christianity have a parasitic relationship on fame. Were it
not for Billy Graham would someone like Tullian Tchividjian have ever gotten a
foot in the door of any ministry of any kind?
Whatever
Ashley Chase writes in the future will have been dependent on her dad’s
celebrity and it is this element of Christian celebrity Beaty has not touched
that is, obviously, a concern of mine. Jerry Falwell had a kid and that kid
could be regarded not as a famous Christian so much as a celebrity. Something
similar could be said about R. C. Sproul Sr. and Jr. The delicate matter is
that someone like Mark Driscoll can talk about legacy as much as he wants but
grooming kids to join the family business (ministry) could seem like nepotism
when it is someone else putting their kids in a ministry position. If you haven’t gone and read Joyful Exiles
the point I’m making can’t have a sharper edge than this, that Bent Meyer was
dismissed in part because of an allegation of nepotism. The problem is, as I
see it, not as simple as hypocrisy because all of us fail to live up to and
live out our best ideals from time to time—the problem is that in the realm of
pop cultural Christian celebrity we can see that the double standards of
preserving and conserving celebrity reputations have real-world consequences,
consequences that Katelyn Beaty could only enumerate in part in so short a
book.
...Is there tension in teaching sexual purity before marriage while encouraging frequent and wonderful sex within marriage?M: No, and for us, we sinned, quite frankly. We were virgins when we met and were sleeping together as high-school boyfriend and girlfriend. Then Grace came back to Christ, and I came to Christ in college, so we had to stop sinning sexually. I'd say if we both could go back and rewrite history and change one thing, that would probably be the thing we would change. [emphasis added] But we did repent and met with our pastor. And then we did get married, between our junior and senior years of college
Real Marriage
Mark and Grace Driscoll
Copyright (c) 2012 by On Mission, LLC
Thomas Nelson
ISBN 978-1-4002-0383-3
ISBN 978-1-4041-8352-0 (IE)Page 7Neither Grace nor I was a virgin when we met, and before long we were dating and sleeping together, which continued even after she went off to college while I was finishing high school. [emphasis added]
page 9-10
To be honest, fornicating was fun. I liked fornicating. To stop fornicating was not fun. But eventually Grace and I stopped fornicating, got engaged, and were married between our junior and senior years of college.
I assumed that once we were married we would simply pick up where we left off sexually and make up for last time. After all, we were committed Christians with a relationship done God's way. But God's way was a total bummer. My previously free and fun girlfriend was suddenly my frigid and fearful wife. She did not undress in front of me, required the lights to be off on the rare occasions we were intimate, checked out during sex, and experienced a lot of physical discomfort because she was tense. [emphasis added]
...
Before long I was bitter against God and Grace. It seemed to me as if they had conspired to trap me. I had always been the "good guy" who turned down women for sex. In my twisted logic, since I had only slept with a couple of women I was in relationships with, I had been holy enough, and God owed me. I felt God had conned me by telling me to marry Grace, and allowed Grace to rule over me since she was controlling our sex life. [emphasis added] I loved Grace, but in the bedroom I did not enjoy her and wondered how many years I could white-knuckle fidelity. ... We desperately needed help but didn't know where to turn. Bitterness and condemnation worsened.
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