Is There a Solution to the Christian Celebrity Craze? Yes.
What Katelyn Beaty’s book offers as a counter to the celebrity syndrome among evangelicals in her book Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits are Hurting the Church, makes this book doubly effective and valuable. It’s easier, isn’t it, to expose and criticize than to expose and propose concrete, realistic, long-term resolutions. Her last chapter is the best chapter in the book because it’s wise and ordinary and commonplace Christian truth.
I have not commented on this yet so I will here. There was a review of this book at CT that failed because of it failed in description and failed to grasp the rhetorical power of this last chapter, which shows that celebrity-ism contradicts the way of Jesus. It could not have been made clearer.
Deadly true, this statement by Beaty: “We can’t program our way out of” this celebrity syndrome at work among evangelicals. There is no package deal, no weekend retreat, and no conference-to-attend. One has to dig deeper to find the problem and its solution.
She wraps her dual proposal for what can be done in two simple terms: Jesus and Friends.
I begin with friends, with whom she opens this chapter and who appear again later in the chapter.
She says she’s still a Christian, in spite of all this horrifying exposure of Christian celebrity filth, because of friends – those who witness to and embody Jesus in the ordinariness of a daily life that does not garner attention or seek a platform. Just plain old quotidian Christian faithfulness. (As we looked at Tuesday with the chapter by Jay Kim.)
One of her north stars in this book is Andy Crouch, and his theory of celebrity is “social power without proximity.” If so, proximity itself gets to resolving the temptations of celebrity. Friendship, in other terms. Plutarch advised emperors and rulers to surround themselves with friends, not flatterers. Friends speak frankly to friends while flatterers are all about flattery. Proximity permits someone to know the real you and speak to you honestly. This is not the same as accountability programs. It is about transparency with others we can trust, and who trust us, and who can speak into our lives.
Who’s your friend?
When Beaty says we can’t program ourselves out of this mess of attraction to celebrities on a platform, we need to turn to the Person of Jesus – and here she sketches a profile of Jesus as one who pursued obscurity and humility and solitude. One who knew what power was like because he knew what Caesar and Rome were all about. Those who know themselves know the temptations to power. Those who want fame and celebrity don’t. The way to avoid celebrity is to be more like Jesus and to spend more time with Jesus and more time looking at Jesus.
Henri Nouwen, to whom she appeals, sees in the temptations of Jesus the temptations:
to be relevant,
to be spectacular,
and to be powerful.
From Eugene Peterson she catches the ideas that doing good things in the wrong way distorts and destroys the good things. This penetrates and deconstructs the entire celebrity problem.
Jesus chose obscurity.
Andy Crouch observed to Katelyn Beaty that when Driscoll was paving his platform American evangelicals were reading Dallas Willard and Eugene Peterson, both of whom despised celebrity and platform. We chose to ignore them too much.
She proposes a new spiritual discipline:
“Obscurity may very well be the spiritual discipline the American church needs to practice the most in the coming century.”
And these lines speak up and speak out:
“In order to go up, we have to go low.”
“None of us need another fan.”
“None of this is new,” she observes.
She’s right because she’s right.
Pastor and seminary students and leaders, buy this book. If you are tempted to be a celebrity, you need it; if you aren’t, you need it even more.
I could not agree more. This book has been an invaluable "companion" volume to TOV.
I think the call to obscurity is even more true for those of us who are white males, but I recognize that's a longer conversation than can be had here.
Preaching through TOV, and using Beaty for additional texture/insight, has been incredibly helpful, for me at least. It reminds me of what I once wanted to be, and of why its good I am no longer on that path.
Celebrities for Jesus? It is an oxymoron if we begin from Jesus himself. Jesus had strong words for Peter who wanted to build temples for Jesus, Moses and Elijah. God's strong word to Peter was, "Shut up and LISTEN TO HIM." Listening to Jesus is always a good place to start.