Archive for January 2008
In my previous post, I discussed the nature of the medium of evangelical “mega-ministries” in para-church organizations. Battle-Cry was the focal point of that discussion. While that focused largely on the form of the ministry, or the medium, here I want to turn to the content of that medium. This is the spectacle of exclusive claims to truth or the spectacle of sectarianism.
As H. Richard Niebuhr argues in The Social Sources of Denominationalism the origins of sectarian belief are first socially constructed and are not a direct function of doctrinal commitments. Sectarianism is often found in poorer and more destitute social constructs where there is simply more space for magical incantations of the Spirit due to perhaps overly sensitive awareness of the limits of humankind. Because the struggle of the flesh is such a palpable lived reality, the glory of the Spirit is the object of hope and of one’s satisfaction. The direct revelation of the very presence of God is sought along with manifestations of the Spirit in the midst of human suffering. The limited and hostile conditions of one’s reality are thus conduits to the eternal.
However, as immigrant, minority, and proletariat social constructions of reality simmer on the back burner of a society, what was once marginal becomes normative. The suffering of previous generations is replaced with the control of that group to call the shots over what constitutes the normative social and cultural frameworks of the larger social network. Methodists and Catholics are two examples that he cites that began as counter-cultural and minority segments of the religious population to two of the largest and most norm structuring religious bodies in the United States. Magic from the former generations is replaced with education in order to inculcate future generations into the cultural production of the now normative based religious and social constructs. The sect, as it were, separated and segmented from the normative culture becomes the norm producing church. Revelation in what was once counter-cultural becomes regulated by the strictures of doctrine and law as people organize into more regulative socio-cultural structures of living.
Because of the nature of the sect as counter to what is normative, it does not meet the demands of a regulative socio-cultural structure, but rather rebels against aspects of it in the least, and the entire organization as a whole. The sect deregulates and disrupts what is regulative thereby forging its identity in something different. The difference comes in many forms such as a return to the primitive forms of a church denomination before it became a regulative structure. We can see this kind of activity occur in the Great Awakenings where the experience of God moved outside of the urban environments of the church into the tent unfettered by doctrine and law – as was the case with Methodism. Another form is a cleansing of a group’s contact with God through a re-stating of doctrinal norms of the church in order to purify was has become the regulative law of humankind. This would replace it with the true revelation and inspiration of God more or less directly. The emergence of the Holiness movement and American Pentecostalism finds its origins here. Thus the emergence of a sectarian movement is a moving away from in order to re-identify with God more or less directly by mitigating the regulative influence of church-related socio-cultural structures.
By thereby laying claim to this more direct contact with God and a closer relationship to God, the sectarian organization lays stricter claims to what constitutes true belief versus false belief. It recapitulates the problem of idolatry in the Hebrew Scriptures which is repeatedly and arguably the central aspect of the history Israel that drives the narratives. Holiness is primarily a separation from what is normative and profane in order to have a more direct contact with God. And at the heart of this action in relation to a normative socio-cultural religious structure is the definition of that now reconstituted organization as sectarian. There are thus more exclusive claims to what receiving the revelation of God means, stronger criteria for maintaining a relationship with God that allows for this continual receptivity, and a continual pronouncement of how one must conduct one’s self in order to maintain this difference with the regulative and normative socio-cultural environment of not only the churches from which the sectarian group separated, but by default the prevalent culture of even those outside of the bounds of any church whatsoever which is where the profane is found in contrast to the sacred reality of God.
This is the part where this sectarian kind of behavior takes on a totally different and hyper-real state when combined with the media of the Spectacle. Battle Cry, The Christian Broadcast Network (CBN), Oral Roberts, Benny Hinn, Creflo Dollar, Kenneth Copeland, TBS, and various other media saturated forms of evangelicalism use the very tools of the spectacle as the media for a message that is decidedly sectarian and seeks a counter-culture identity through exclusive claims to Truth – that is, to a more direct and unfettered means to receive the revelation of God. Niebuhr’s argument that sectarian behavior has its social genesis among the poor and marginal has been inverted through these complex media structures and images of wealth and prosperity in order to serve a message that contains all of the language of a sectarian orientation to religious norms. It is a disruptive message with a very regulative media form that has its sources in modern capitalism and the distribution of wealth.
Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism “the media is the message” suits this situation well. For McLuhan the media not only shaped the message that one receives. The content of media and the structure of media both work in a dialectic equilibrium where one cannot exist without the other. The media essentially form this vast ecosystem in which there is a constant balance and fluidity not unlike the relationship between predator and prey. Without predators, the prey animals will destroy aspects of the ecosystem and without prey, the predators cannot exist. The question is what this kind of relationship between the Gospel and media does to the message of the Gospel itself.
What I will turn to is the notion of flattening. When the ideas of capitalism and the counter-cultural presence of the Kingdom of God as a source that disrupts as it restructures culture and social relationships begin to compete, as is the case between the proletariat social sources of modern evangelicalism and bourgeoisie capitalism from Niebuhr’s perspective, one can give way to the other, or an new equilibrium will emerge that reconstitutes both in a new configuration. The media of capitalism and the exclusive claims of evangelical sectarianism have performed this action and have reconstituted the message of exclusivism not as a movement that is disruptive to what is normative, but functions as a sub-set of what is normative. Perhaps the best example of this is voluntary membership to any social gathering of people such as a country club or a fraternity. One makes a capital contribution on order to maintain the social network. The media of evangelicalism makes purchases not only in literal capital, but in social capital as well. Hence the distinction between the sacred and profane collapses in the very use of the symbolic systems of capitalism and consumer spectacle to deliver these messages.
I think a narrative may illustrate this point. My wife and I attended a wedding a few years ago. It was at a charismatic church that had its roots in the Holiness movement clearly proclaimed. The understanding of scripture as infallible was clear. The nature of sin and the process of redemption were clearly outlined. There was no dancing, rock music, women had to wear skirts, etc. These were all in order to create an alternative space. But at this wedding of no dancing or music something strange occurred and we sat by ourselves observing oddities. Mullets had been out of style for a time (yes they were in vogue at one time lest you forget Sonny Crockett and Kirk Cameron to name a couple), but many men had them anyway. Baggy pants in suits ala MC Hammer were also way out of style, yet this was a common thing too. And there were other stylistic oddities in this community that was intentionally separate from the normative structures of religion. The kicker came in the form of the only dance at the wedding – the youth group did a choreographed routine to a rap song by Christian pseudo-hip-hop performer Carmen. My wife and I deliberated after this. What we concluded, as had been our experience in numerous other sectarian/evangelical occasions and churches, is that in order to be counter-cultural, those in the church were actually creating a strange mimetic environment that invoked the style of the previous era or decade. It is as if the current style was anathema because it was normative, but something of the recent past was acceptable. It was a spectacle, but a spectacle of something that Clinton and Stacy on What Not to Wear would likely toss in the trash.
This is not an issue of the use of this or that media to communicate a message per se. But it is an issue of how messages are encoded via the use of certain media functions and a contradiction between the content of the message itself and the mode of producing the message. The use of this or that cultural method or symbolic exchange has important effects for which one ought to account and assess. Lest one assume this is a new phenomenon, one need only observe the medieval ritual exchange between feudal kings and lords and the function and organization of the Church and the inculcation of royalty in the pecking order between God, the pope, kings, clerics and everyone else. The symbolic battle between God and the king clearly had important symbolic shaping forces that were regulative of the nature of the Gospel and how that message trickled down to the peasant through the local cleric. It was this politicized trickle down effect that inspired the Reformation itself and Luther’s commitment to “the priesthood of all believers”. The political organization of the church has a vital regulative effect on the message to such an integrated degree that the message itself becomes something different in the way that it is constituted. The media of the medieval socio-cultural structures and polity that delivered the Gospel shaped the very essence of the Gospel itself.
So what can we say of how the sectarian claims of evangelicalism regarding the nature and access of salvation that is a function of the degree to which one is directly receptive of the revelation of God? The flattening out of the economy of signs between the Gospel on the one hand and the regulative nature of the media of Spectacle inverts the relationship and paradoxically forces even exclusive claims to revelation and how one accesses it as a means to salvation to become indistinguishable from other sources of Spectacle such as style, fashion, and consumerism. These become symbolic of exclusivity and so, disrupt the claim to exclusivity itself. There thus exists a symbiosis between the sect on the one hand and the Spectacle on the other where the message can no longer divorce itself from its inherited economy of signs as the message has become constitutive of the media and vice-versa. So would Joel Osteen blow up his church in order to build quality housing for homeless families if that is what it took to be truly counter cultural? This question is a segue to Part 3 of this series: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.
Get ready to rock…
Down is a “super group” of sorts with members from both Pantera and Corrosion of Conformity among others. They are truly southern, wear it on their sleeves and take pride in their city of NOLA. What better sound to rise from the floods of Katrina than this song. It’s a tribute and a cry in anger all in one pounding track. It is what we feel on the inside when we see the footage of the Superdome in the moments and weeks following the great hurricane, and the pride we all felt when the football team that calls that place home whooped up on the Atalanta Falcons - even though we get a sense that even the Patriots team of today would not have been able to handle them that night. This is a song about a resurrection of an earthly kind. If you don’t like bleeding your rage a little bit, and if you don’t like something a little heavier, then stay away from this song. But you can’t not like it if you have a soul.
Be something that amounts to nothing the threat
A wrecking-ball plowing through our karma
We have no confident voice in our ears for tonight
Exist in memory only headline…
We have been through change
By the season of the storms
It’s irony
The cleansing
Accept eccentric faith
To need religion
To sit high among the elect
On march the saints…
There’s no such thing as a good time for bad luck
As minutes turn to distressed fragmented moments
Reading lips unable to hear the talk
Partake no tangible out in tomorrow…
We have seen the change
From the season of the storms
It’s irony
The cleansing
With all our lives at stake
From at rest to the present
Are sitting high among the elect
On march the saints…
March…
We have been through change
By the season of the storms
It’s irony
The cleansing
Accept eccentric faith
To need religion
To sit high among the elect
On march the saints…
Here is all you need to know about the State of the Union that Mr. Bush fumbled through for the last time (thank God almighty) tonight.
First the unadvised comment about the relationship between the Constitution and the Word of God. Now an apparent endorsement from Kenneth Copeland, er uh, God. Well maybe, it’s actually hard to tell. But whatever the case is, I would not want Copeland talking about me this way. I would much rather him tell me I am going to hell to confirm that I am doing something right. See the video here.
I know I sound like I am after Mike Huck “Hogan” abee a bit too much. It’s not that I dislike the guy in particular. It’s just that his entaglement of religion and politics has been so easy to talk about. It’s all such ill advised stuff from him.
Anyway, the ride is going to end very soon for him if this stuff keeps popping up.
Maybe Bill Cosby would have stayed away from the giggly, wiggly food product if had seen this little racist gem. Amazing how our past gets brushed under the carpet of tolerance until this stuff gets out on YouTube. Does Bill still eat Jello? Hmmmm… I do have to say that there has never, ever been room for it for me. I eat anything unless it is one or both of two conditions: it is rubbery (octopus, calamari) or gelatinous (umm Jello). So good for me.
In a much earlier post here, I discussed a pragmatic problem I had with the relationship of foreordination and foreknowledge in primarily the understanding of the doctrine of election as discussed in the Westminster Confession. The passage in question is as follows and can also be found here in context (and not one of my three):
3. By the decree of God, for the manifestation of his glory, some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life, and others fore-ordained to everlasting death.
4. These angels and men, thus predestinated and fore-ordained, are particularly and unchangeably designed; and their number is so certain and definite that it cannot be either increased or diminished (Westminster Confession of of Faith Ch. III).
This is then revised in a later edition of the Presbyterian Church (USA) Book of Confessions linked above, with the following (still not one of the three passages):
“held in harmony with the doctrine of [God's] love to all mankind . . . [and] with the doctrine that God desires not the death of any sinner, but has provided in Christ a salvation sufficient for all” (amendment to the Westminster Confession of Faith, 6.192).
Not only has the idea of God foreordaining some people to be in eternal damnation even before they have a chance to live been problematic for me, the notion that God’s foreknowledge is a function of determinism in the limits of human free will has been a problem as well. I think that these three quotes do a lot to answer the issue, and two of them are much older than the absolute decree in the Westminster Confession.
AUGUSTINE, ON THE PREDESTINATION OF THE SAINTS, 11.vi
Here is mercy and judgment,—mercy towards the election which has obtained the righteousness of God, but judgment to the rest which have been blinded. And yet the former, because they willed, believed; the latter, because they did not will believed not. Therefore mercy and judgment were manifested in the very wills themselves. Certainly such an election is of grace, not at all of merits. For he had before said, “So, therefore, even at this present time, the remnant has been saved by the election of grace. And if by grace, now it is no more of works; otherwise grace is no more grace.” Therefore the election obtained what it obtained gratuitously; there preceded none of those things which they might first give, and it should be given to them again. He saved them for nothing. But to the rest who were blinded, as is there plainly declared, it was done in recompense.”All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth.” But His ways are unsearchable. Therefore the mercy by which He freely delivers, and the truth by which He righteously judges, are equally unsearchable.
THE SECOND HELVETIC CONFESSION, CH. X
GOD HAS ELECTED US OUT OF GRACE. From eternity God has freely, and of his mere grace, without any respect to men, predestinated or elected the saints whom he wills to save in Christ, according to the saying of the apostle, “God chose us in him before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4). And again: “Who saved us and called an with a holy calling, not in virtue of our works but in virtue of his own purpose and the grace which he gave us in Christ Jesus ages ago, and now has manifested through the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus” (II Tim. 1:9 f.)…
WE ARE TO HAVE A GOOD HOPE FOR ALL. And although God knows who are his, and here and there mention is made of the small number of elect, yet we must hope well of all, and not rashly judge any man to be a reprobate. For Paul says to the Philippians, “I thank my God for you all” (now he speaks of the whole Church in Phillippi), “because of your fellowship in the Gospel, being persuaded that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. It is also right that I have this opinion of you all” (Phil. 1:3 ff.).
WHETHER FEW ARE ELECT. And when the Lord was asked whether there were few that should be saved, he does not answer and tell them that few or many should be saved or damned, but rather he exhorts every man to “strive to enter by the narrow door” (Luke 13:24): as if he should say, It is not for you curiously to inquire about these matters, but rather to endeavor that you may enter into heaven by the straight way.
KARL BARTH, CHURCH DOGMATICS, II.2, p.118
In relation to this passive election of Jesus Christ the great exponents of the traditional doctrine of predestination developed an insight which we must too take as our starting-point, because, rightly understood, it contains within itself everything else that must be noted and said in this connexion. The insight is this: that in the predestination of the man Jesus we see what predestination is always and everywhere - the acceptance and reception of man only by the free grace of God. Even in the man Jesus there is indeed no merit, no prior and self-sufficient goodness, which can precede His election to divine sonship. Neither prayer nor the life of faith can compel His election. It is by the work of the Word of God, by the Holy Spirit, that He is conceived and born without sin, that He is what He is, the Son of God; by grace alone. And as He became Christ, so we become Christians. As He became the object of our faith, so we become believers in Him. What we have to consider in the elected man Jesus is, then, the destiny of human nature, its exaltation to fellowship with God, and the manner of its participation in this exaltation by the free grace of God. But more, it is in this man that the exaltation is itself revealed and proclaimed. For with His decree concerning this man, God decreed too that this man should be the cause and the instrument of our exaltation.
Thought I would let you in on what’s doing on the Google bot and how some folks arrive here. I also needed a mundane and quick post to test the ping for my brand new Facebook profile feed to this blog. 
It looks like if you are posting on politics and somewhat obscure pop-culture items that folks find you. Of course, I have not played the “increase your traffic” game by making an obscene amount of links to other sites and blogs on my posts which invariably makes your Google rankings higher based on the algorithm that Google uses. Getting others to link to you is the best strategy for that. Moreover, folks linking to you is either a compliment or an insult depending on who and what the post about you is. Links from others to here have been quite complimentary which is always flattering and humbling on any level.
With this in mind, this will probably now be the post with the most Google hits ever for this particular directory on my server space. The missing percentage is due to searches performed that hit another blog directory on the server. So here are a few of the top search phrases that have brought people here:
| 228 different keyphrases | Search | Percent |
|---|---|---|
| huckabee science | 31 | 8.5 % |
| huckabee and science | 19 | 5.2 % |
| huckabee intelligent design | 13 | 3.5 % |
| computers internet blog | 12 | 3.3 % |
| huckabee on science | 7 | 1.9 % |
| nuni skit | 5 | 1.3 % |
| snl nuni | 5 | 1.3 % |
| nk cells count | 5 | 1.3 % |
| Other phrases | 256 | 70.7 % |
Julie Unplugged got me thinking about the trajectory of modern manifestations of evangelicalism and how we read the structure of meaning.
What does it mean for a Christian to be “counter-cultural”? I have seen the image of the salmon struggling upstream, the teen doing the “unpopular” thing in order to preach the Good News of Jesus, etc. But what strikes me is this strange confluence of three things: military language, claims to exclusivity, and data that tells us these same claims are accompanied with a growing “moralistic therapeutic deism” pervasive in the religious beliefs of our youth. I want to look at these ideas in conjunction with another idea - that our children are reflective and reflexive of the religious patterns of behavior of their parents. What is special about this reflection is the notion of Spectacle that Guy DeBord presented in the late 1960’s.
The Spectacle of Militarism
There is a relatively new para-church spectacle that has gained a tremendous amount of momentum among youth and it continues a theme in evangelicalism which is that Christians are in a spiritual but quite literal battle against the powers of evil and Satan for the souls of mankind. This is not a very new idea and has been with Christianity since the Desert Fathers and Mothers and took on a new form in the voluntaristic individualism of the Great Awakenings in the Unites States. In the latter case, the battles against the powers and principalities found fertile soil in the Revolutionary sentiment of the country and the notion of individual rights and Creator endowed qualities of humanity that the nation serves to protect and maintain.
This is the image of Judas as portrayed in Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ the pragmatic liberator who strongly believes in the eschatological Messiah who will come with a sword to liberate Israel from the oppressive Roman rule through physical force. This Judas cares not about the plight of the soul, but the condition of his country. It seems that it is this kind of ideology that evangelical para-church organizations find their focus. Whether it is LaHaye and Jenkins’ Left Behind series, John Hagee diatribes and presentations of the Gospel with a real sword, there is a distinct combination with eschatological hope clothed in military metaphor to describe a battle for the soul that will end in a literal battle for the earth at some point with the presence of Jesus coming not unlike the vision of Kazantzakis’ Judas.
Battle Cry describes the crises to which the ministry is responding thus:
A stealthy enemy has infiltrated our country and is preying upon the hearts and minds of 33 million American teens. Corporations, media conglomerates, and purveyors of popular culture have spent billions to seduce and enslave our youth. So far, the enemy is winning. But there is plenty we can do. We need to take action. We need to answer the Battle Cry.
The site also offers teens the ability to create a “Battle Plan” which is essentially a Facebook like profile to network with other like minded Christians also forming such Battle Plans to participate in the fight to confront this crisis as mentioned above. But this is only the butter to the bread. Here are links to some “Featured Battle Plans” for your perusal. One goal is to create missionaries to win souls. But that seems to be window dressing for the true shaping instrument of the ministry - the lure if you will to gain supporters of this understanding of the Gospel and its import for the very survival of humanity.
The main focus of the ministry is massive rock-concert like conferences where thousands of teens can accept Christ, accept their role in the battle, and fight for the soul of “this generation”. That is what you see in the pictures above and you can see what one sounds and looks like below. It is a multi-sensory, multi-media, high-energy event with all of the popular cultural trappings of Millennial youth. It is new packaging for the same big tent revival message of “turning away from the world”. But rather than meeting in a tent on the outskirts of the normative culture, the message clearly uses all the cultural trappings that it preaches for kids to turn away from and does so in the postmodern cathedral - the sports arena.
It is this focal point of the ministry where the spectacle is engaged and the medium for the message acts as a conduit that shapes the message with a spectacle perhaps not unlike the grand cathedrals of old. One can imagine the Sistine Chapel, Chartres, Notre Dame, Koln, etc. viewed in the same way. They are today truly spectacular to any casual observer even one who does not believe in God. Yet they are empty structures where the spectacle remains, but the worship of God in the midst of that grand architectural medium has clearly abandoned ship.
So what is different today about ministries such as Promise Keepers, Battle Cry and this even stretches into TBS, CBN, and the clear connection in message and form between Schuler’s Crystal Cathedral and Joel Osteen? The difference is in the media of the spectacle not just informing the message construction of these ministries, but the form as well. The form and how this radically alters the message is what I will reflect on at the end. Next I will turn to the message that militarism wraps itself around and that is radical exclusivity to the “Truth” in what is for all intents and purposes a clearly sectarian worldview.
