Advertithing?

You are what you consume. Put another way, consumerism is a religious impulse and like religion, it seeks to shape our vision for life.

According to ad executive Douglas Atkin, in an interview with PBS, there is a deep connection between the type of allegiance shown to brands and the type of allegiance shown to cults.

I believe that there is a very, very close relationship between cults and the best cult brands in the sense that people join and stay with cults for the exact same reasons as people join and stay with brands. The reason why is pretty obvious if you think about it: The desire to belong to something, to make meaning out of something, is universal.

Atkin’s belief in this connection led him to study cults in order to make him better at his job as a brand manager. Atkin here reveals the deep power of advertising and consumerism to shape our identity and vision for life.

As our society becomes more consumerist, so are the ways that we make meaning and create identity. We might originally, years and years ago, have created a sense of identity through nationhood or through belonging to a particular church. Nowadays, it can be made through what brand you’re particularly committed to.

This is an astonishing admission from someone in the industry – advertising aims to give meaning to our lives. This is, in fact, what a brand manager does according to Atkin:

Their job now is to create and maintain a whole meaning system for people through which they get identity and understanding of the world.

If we have ever needed a warning to be careful what we watch, here it is.

Next time you see an advertisement (which will probably be in the next 5 minutes) ask yourself, “What vision of life is this trying to create in me?” “What is this saying about what it means to be human?” “How is this trying to make me feel about my own life?”

It is difficult to avoid advertising, we are surrounded by it constantly. But we need to learn to be critical of it, identify what vision of life it is seeking to give us and compare it to the vision of God’s kingdom given to us in the Bible. I’d hazard to guess, the two rarely match up.

The PBS interview with David Atkin comes from a fascinating documentary on the advertising industry that you can watch online here, it’s worth seeing.

Science and Religion

Who knew the Vatican had its own astronomers?  I certainly didn’t. It turns out, however, that it does – priests studying space through the aptly named “pope scope”. The Walrus recently interviewed one of these Vatican astronomers, Guy Consolmagno, and asked him about the relationship between science and religion – it turns out its quite healthy. For Consolmagno, there is no tension; in fact, his religious beliefs are what drive him to do good science:

“Seeing the universe as God’s creation means that getting to play in the universe – which is really what a scientist does — is a way of playing with the Creator. It’s a religious act. And it’s a very joyous act.”

Read the full article here.

Richard Dawkins and Alister McGrath

Below is an interesting discussion between atheist Richard Dawkins and theologian Alister McGrath on the existence of God and the reasonableness of religious faith generally. It was filmed for a 2006 TV Documentary called The Root of all Evil?, presented by Richard Dawkins, but was cut from the final edit. The footage is uncut and therefore at times awkward (actually, this awkwardness does add some needed light relief), but it represents a good survey of the issues of the current atheism/Christianity debate.

Photoshop of Horrors

We live in a photoshopped world. According to Jeannine Stein, staff-writer for the L.A. Times,  “it’s quite possible that the vast majority of images seen in the public arena have been altered.” Stein argues:

Photoshop, the go-to graphics editing program that got a foothold in the 1990s, has become so ubiquitous that most of us gaze at faces, bodies and landscapes, not even registering that wrinkles have been diminished, legs lengthened and the sky honed to a dream-like shade of blue.

Stein is responding to the recent accidental release of a pre-photoshopped image of “reality”-tv star Kim Kardashian. The photo was taken for the April edition of Complex magazine and was accidentally placed on their website before being taken down a few hours later, replaced  by the “real” photo.

The editing isn’t dramatic, but it is significant (for a more dramatic example see the Dove commercial below). Such manipulation shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, but Kardashian’s misfortune is a good reminder that we live  today in what Daniel Boorstin has called a “thicket of unreality,” which he argues “stands between us and the facts of life” (The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, 25th edition, Atheneum: New York, 1987, p. 3).

Today we expect more than the world can offer. We are surrounded constantly by images promising a world that cannot possibly exist; a world without flaw, without cellulite, without death or hunger, without facial moles, without tiredness, without aging, without depression, without boredom. This world, created by technical manipulation, passes itself off as the real world, the standard by which we judge our own lives, a standard we can’t possibly live up to. This is what the “thicket of unreality” does to us: it deceives and disappoints. A recent Scottish study on the relationship expectations of those who watch Romantic Comedies suggests the point (see here).

How do we hold onto a sense of reality living in a photoshopped world? How do we guard against despair with our ordinary lives and ordinary bodies when bombarded with false images of perfect lives and perfect bodies? How do we escape the tyranny of false expectations?

To be honest, I don’t entirely know. Except to resist. At some point we need to refuse to be shaped by the false stories the world often tells us about ourselves. We need to become critical viewers of our cultural stories. This is hard but urgent work.

But I suspect resistance isn’t enough. We also need to commit to living within a different story, the story the Bible tells us about the world in which we live. We need to let this story shape our expectations and hopes. Luckily (if that is the right word?), I have found this to be a more compelling story than the flat materialism of our photoshopped world, a story that frees and does not enslave.

To read Steins full article, click here.

In defence of reading

David Ulin, book editor of Los Angeles Times, has a problem, he is struggling to read. He has not lost the desire to read (which would have been a terrible admission for a book editor), but the ability to focus. Ulin blames the hectic modern life:

Such a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted. Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time.

Here we have my reading problem in a nutshell, for books insist we take the opposite position, that we immerse, slow down.

Ulin’s article is an elegant apologetic for the lost art of reading and a warning to a culture obsessed with gaining information rather than wisdom. Time to reflect is essential to the process of self-knowing Ulin argues.

For without time we lose a sense of narrative, that most essential connection to who we are. We live in time; we understand ourselves in relation to it, but in our culture, time collapses into an ever-present now. How do we pause when we must know everything instantly? How do we ruminate when we are constantly expected to respond? How do we immerse in something (an idea, an emotion, a decision) when we are no longer willing to give ourselves the space to reflect?

And so we must learn to read again.

This is where real reading comes in — because it demands that space, because by drawing us back from the present, it restores time to us in a fundamental way.

To read the full article click here.

“News of my death has been greatly exaggerated” (so says The Present Moment)

It turns out, the present is not dead. According to a New York Times article, recently socialites in Manhattan rediscovered the present when they hosted a series of small parties which were explicitly “off the record”, which meant “no tweeting, no blogging, no photos”. The idea, according to one of the party’s hosts, was “to let invitees talk fearlessly in the present.” He goes on:

We are fighting against this whole idea that everything people do has to be constantly chronicled…People think that every thought they have, every experience – it if is not captured it is lost.

And they are bravely fighting the idea that everything needs to be chronicled, by chronicling this fight in The New York Times.

The rediscovery of the present moment has led to further rediscoveries of things once thought lost, like conversation. One of the hosts exclaims:

When it’s off the record, you actually listen to the conversation, not just wait for your turn to speak.

That a leading newspaper ran an article about a party in which people actually had a conversation tells us something striking about the world in which we live. No longer merely reflective of our social lives, Twitter and Facebook are beginning to shape them. The present moment is constantly being packaged into clever little tweets and status updates, or recorded as endless and instantly uploaded photos. That is, the present moment is chronicled rather than experienced; it is shaped for consumption by others, rather than those actually present. We are in danger of retreating from genuine human relating.

I am probably going too far here. I suspect most people don’t experience things this way. Still, I think it is a warning worth making. Social-networking sites, in some form or another, seem to be here to stay. The danger is, we will become better at relating through technology than in the flesh; better at clever one-liners than genuine conversation, like characters in a sitcom. This is, after all, the safe option. Relating in real time involves risk, the possibility of hurt, disappointment, misunderstanding, boredom. But it also carries with it the possibilty of intimacy, of being genuinely known, cared for, understood, loved. That is, relating in real time actually involves relating, something that Facebook and Twitter, if misused, can get in the way of. By making us all “public” figures, these technologies threaten to make us as well-known as celebrites, that is, not really at all.

Michael Jackson: The Man in the Mirror

I have not wanted to write anything about Michael Jackson’s death. I have wanted to avoid pouncing on his life as some sort of cautionary tale. But perhaps Michael Jackson needs to be faced, to be spoken about – he was, after-all, a major cultural figure.

As I have reflected on his life and death, I have come to see that Jackson can be understood as embodying in himself certain fascinations of our culture taken to their extreme limit. (For those who like made-up latinisms, Michael Jackson is himself an argument ad absurdum ad hominem).

The true ugliness of our culture’s fascination with visible appearance is physically represented in Michael Jackson’s surgery-scarred face. In seeking eternal beauty, Jackson instead found a strange, inhuman ugliness.

Our culture’s fascination with youth is taken to its extreme in Jackson’s perpetual childishness. He lived on a ranch (complete with amusement park) called Neverland, a modern day Peter Pan.

Our fascination with entertainment and celebrity is seen in our continual fascination with Jackson across the decades. This gifted entertainer was for many a god-like figure, as reports of fan-suicides in wake of his death suggest. During his 1996-1997 HIStory tour, Jackson erected nine ten metre high statues of himself across Europe, outdoing even Nebuchadnezzar’s arrogance. Even his memorial service was entertainment, a musical event held in a stadium, complete with tickets.

This is all perhaps too harsh. And in fact I feel conflicted about posting it: I have abstracted a human person to a symbol, a process which is the root of much sin.  But a man who erects statues of himself in a sense invites such abstraction, sets himself up as a symbol. And yet I don’t entirely blame Jackson. I believe it is our culture which is implicated in the figure Jackson became, because in many respects it was our culture that Jackson in the end embodied. The somewhat disturbing man looking back in Jackson’s mirror was, in the end, us. He was the uneasy face of our own fascinations.

Michael Jackson was a profoundly complicated figure. His gifts were incredible, but so too were his weaknesses. In this respect he was deeply human figure – he is like all of us.

A couple of nights ago my housemates and I sat around and discussed Jackson’s memorial service. We soon got onto his music, throwing out long-lists of our favourite songs. In many places across this world over the last few days this scene would have repeated itself, groups of people remembering a man and his music. For all I have said about Jackson, for all the undercurrent of unease his life evokes, this too should be said: his music brought many of us joy, and for a moment this week, brought many of us together.

Opening up the conversation

Below is a post written by a good friend of mine Charles Belcher sharing some thoughts raised by Lesslie Newbigin’s fantastic little book, Foolishness to the Greeks (Like anything by Newbigin, well worth a read!). Charles has been involved unofficially with Compass for a few years now and in order to widen the conversation carried on this blog (beyond my own musings!) I’ve decided to publish some of Charles’s posts. I won’t always agree with what he says, but I’m ok with that.

Enjoy! And as always, feel free to comment.

Lesslie Newbigin the missiologist, notes in his book Foolishness to the Greeks, how “having already lost the battle to control education and been badly beaten in its encounter with modern science, Christianity in its protestant form has largely accepted relegation to the private sector, where it can influence the choice of values by those who take this option.” In doing so he rightly comments that although it has “secured for itself a continuing place”, the “awesome and winsome claim of Jesus Christ to be alone the Lord of all the world, the light that alone shows the whole of reality as it really is, the life that alone endures for ever” has been effectively silenced. There is a false dichotomy that exists in the modern world; a dichotomy between the public and private spheres of life. For too long the public sphere has been the realm of rationalism. Any debate taking place in the public sphere (even if the lack of reason shown by some politicians at last years elections would seem to contradict this ) has only had rationalism as an authority for discussion. If the Gospel is true, and true not just to Christians but all of creation; and it has been made knowable because God has revealed truth to us in the person Jesus of Galilee, and now through his revelation found in scripture; then surely this truth is a valid foundation from which to debate from in the public sphere. The myth of neutrality needs to once and for all be extinguished from the minds of our western society. And we as Christians need to be confident to shine the light of the Gospel upon public debate and have faith in its validity as a source for truth. As Newbigin points out, “the point of view of the Christian revelation… is a valid way of coming to the truth because the created world is both rational and contingent – rational as the creation of God who is light and not darkness, and contingent because it is not an emanation of God but the creation of God endowed by its creator with a measure of autonomy.” For this to happen may I suggest that we need to immerse ourselves in the story which we claim is authoritative for life in the 21st century and to give it a voice, no, more than a voice, flesh and bones, in the culture within which we find ourselves. May this challenge us to rethink the ways in which the world is structured under the myth of neutrality or ideology of rationalism, and instead envision a world which does not ignore the truth of God’s existence, but lives as though it is reality. And may we who know this truth, live in a way that shines light on the structures and systems of darkness, as a witness to a new order that God himself is bringing into existence.

The Shack – a review – part 3

Are you my God?

For all its controversy, in the end, The Shack isn’t controversial enough. 

My deep suspicion as I read through Young’s book, is that if our culture was going to create a god it felt comfortable with, she/he would look a lot like the God of The Shack: God the gentle therapist, infinitely concerned with my psychological well-being; God the joking grandmother; God the infinitely gentle; God the hip-hop appreciator;  God like Santa Claus, overweight, jovial and the giver of good gifts; God the patient answerer of all my questions.

This God seems to be tailor-made for a culture which has replaced, in the striking thought of Christopher Lasch, desire for salvation with a desire for “mental health” (The Culture Of Narcissism, W.W. Norton & Co., 1979, 13).

I am not saying God is not like this. Part of the deeply shocking picture of God revealed in Jesus Christ (as I suggested in my last post) is that he is someone who can relate to our struggles and temptations (see, for example, Hebrew 4:15), someone you could drink a beer with (or at least wine! see John 2). But even after Christ, the biblical picture of God remains one of profound mystery and otherness. 

Yes, God is not “far above”, but he remains, in the beautiful words of Rowan Williams, “mysterious with the tragic and terrifying mysteriousness of experience and history” (The Wound of Knowledge, Cowley Publ., 1990, page 97).

Jesus doesn’t remove the mystery of God, he deepens it. 

The God of The Shack is mysterious only in a very limited sense, she doesn’t look like the God Mack was expecting to meet. Beyond that, however, there is very little mystery at all – God doesn’t, in the end, seem much bigger than us.

The danger of The Shack’s portrayal of God is that it is a god shaped in our own image – the god many of us would want to meet. But the God of the Bible is deeply troubling, he constantly refuses to be placed in our comforting boxes. He is a God, like C.S. Lewis’s Aslan, who is good, but wild. Those parts of scripture that shock us, the portrayals of God’s holiness, otherness, distance, mystery, wrath and sometimes silence are so important; they remind us that God is God, we don’t get to make him whoever we want him to be.  

The Shack is a moving but ultimately disastisfying book. It both challenges our understanding of God and yet doesn’t challenge it enough. It is worth reading, yes. But as with every other part of culture, Christian or not, it needs to be read in light of the whole of story of scripture, which is, in the end, our only faithful witness to who this strange God we worship is.

The Shack – Review – Part 2

If read well, The Shack is worth reading. As far as endorsements go, mine is perhaps less ringing than Eugene Peterson’s, but it goes beyond Mark Driscoll’s encouragement not to read The Shack at all.

So what do I mean?

Those most negative of The Shack draw out in fine detail its points of theological inadequacy, of which there certainly are some. But this type of reading, I feel, misses the point. The Shack is not a work of systematic theology, it is a novel – and when read as such I think it has much to offer. And ironically, this is precisely because its view of God  is so controversial.

“Our large African American mother who art in the kitchen baking, hallowed be thy name.”

Yes, it is a challenging picture. But we forget often that Jesus himself (as himself) offers a challenging picture of God. Jesus claimed that when you looked at him your saw his Father in heaven (see for example, John 12:44) . When you look at Jesus, you see God. In Jesus, all ‘natural’ understandings of what it means to be divine, to be God, need to be radically reworked to include a God who shaves, takes walks, weeps with anxiety, voluntarily serves others and dies a horrible death, executed along with criminals. In Jesus, comfortable pictures of an all-powerful, all-knowing and largely abstract God are disturbed.

This is not to baptize The Shack as great theology. Just because it is challenging does not mean it is right. There are in fact real dangers in its portrayal of the three persons of the Trinity as human people. But as I read The Shack and felt my discomfort in its very human picture of God, I began to see it as an opportunity to ask again whether I have allowed the radical revelation of who God is shown in Jesus (“Infinity dwindled to infancy”) fully challenge me? Or have I domesticated God?

I don’t read The Shack for my theology; but to read it well is to allow it to raise questions about why I believe what I believe about God, why I am uncomfortable with Young’s picture? And these questions drive me with fresh eyes to the Bible and force me to wrestle afresh with the revelation of God in Jesus.
Read well, The Shack is worth reading. Ironically, however, my final conclusion is that The Shack is not actually controversial enough. For this point, stay-tuned for my next post.