The border between fame and celebrity is as undetectable as it is ill-defined, and not all detect or define it the same way. A wit has defined a celebrity as someone who is famous for being famous, and Katelyn Beaty’s new book follows along this path by quoting from Daniel Boorstin, who long ago said a “celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.” Think the Kardashians.
Beaty’s book is called Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits are Hurting the Church, and the title is fading grey on the title page. Nice touch. On the cover there is a fading glitz of gold in the lettering. Nicer touch.
Laura and I were honored to be interviewed by Katelyn so we have both looked forward to this book. Before beginning let me say this book is a testimony to the importance of journalists. First, because Katelyn worked for CT and has written for many news sources and, second, her footnotes are lacked up with one journalist story after another. If anyone wonders if the journalists are doing their work, look into her footnotes.
Her definition of celebrity echoes an essay by Andy Crouch about false intimacy. Beaty says celebrity is “social power without proximity.” I will have to sit on this for awhile to see if it rings loud enough to carry to the back of the sanctuary. But she’s onto something vital: there’s a thinness of not being really known, constantly chased by adoring persons who think they know the person and want to know more, in celebrity.
Famous people, on the other hand, are known for their accomplishments. Evangelical Christian culture, thus, has its famous people – like Billy Graham and Beth Moore. No one questions either their accomplishments or their fame. A famous person, she observes in her sketches, is:
Well known
With a differential of power
Accomplished
Ambitious to make a difference
The product, ideally, of virtue
Did not seek fame
Think about fame the least
Evangelicals have aped culture in its celebrity culture, celebrities who are produced by “visual appeal, slick marketing, and personal branding.” Celebrity then is a product formed intentionally on the basis of the tools that make someone into a celebrity. Branding is at work in celebrity-dom, branding that apes what happens with the genuinely famous.
She draws out two major themes:
First, a celebrity feeds on mass media, and we know that social media curates a person’s image so that the self is a projection and not the genuine self. Here’s a potent line: celebrity “doesn’t require doing anything of particular importance, talent, or virtue.” The quest for celebrity is driven by the desire to be known. Celebrities are recognized by their intentional obsession over their platform and their reputation, and comparison and competition drive the engines at times. They think being seen with, or on the platform of, someone famous or a celebrity will give them the glory they pursue.
As I was reading Beaty’s chapter I wrote in the margin of a page: a celebrity is recognized by a noticeable “self perception of wanting to be watched,” which means lots of pictures of themselves tossed onto social media. They think being seen is the thing.
Second, celebrity turns icons into idols. Celebrities (intentionally, I would say) embody “enduring worldly myths” because they know “we want to be like them.” Virtuous persons become icons; celebrity making turns the virtuous icon into an empty idol, something more than they are, something pretentious, something like God, something that feeds into worship. Admiration become an intoxication and addiction. Am I being seen?, is one of the celebrity’s preoccupations. Instead of simply doing the work and not being seen, the celebrity wants to be seen (as) doing the work.
The American church, and this is a theme for Beaty’s book and an important one, “has overall mimicked celebrity culture rather than challenged it.” I’d say some have and some haven’t.
Again, join us as we read this book here at Tov Unleashed.
C. Wright Mills, in The Power Elite, identifies several elite groups such as the economic elite and political elite. One group he identifies is celebrities. He said the key asset of a celebrity is celebrity status. So that status has to be maintained. A person known for doing good just needs to keep doing good. (tov).
Thanks, for this, Scott. Here’s a quote from Tim Keller’s, The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness: Empty, painful, busy and, therefore, fragile. Let me give you a perfect example of this. I am not trying to lift her up as being worse than other people at all. She actually shows a tremendous amount of self-awareness and I have a lot of admiration for her. But, if you want a perfect example of what I am talking about, here is an excerpt from an interview with Madonna in Vogue Magazine some time ago where she is talking about her career. This is what she says: ‘My drive in life comes from a fear of being mediocre. That is always pushing me. I push past one spell of it and discover myself as a special human being but then I feel I am still mediocre and uninteresting unless I do something else. Because even though I have become somebody, I still have to prove that I am somebody. My struggle has never ended and I guess it never will.’