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.