“Celebrity … is a worldly form of power and evaluation of human worth,” Beaty asserts. “It is not a spiritually neutral tool that can be picked up and put down, even for godly projects. The moment celebrity is adopted and adapted for otherwise noble purposes—sharing the good news and inviting others into rich kingdom life—it changes the project. And it changes us.” Matthew Crawford’s concept of cultural jigs is helpful here. These are structures of ideas and incentives that form desires and behavior. They operate without much thought or active participation, which means they are incipient and dangerous. The cultural jig that inclines one toward celebrity gave us Kim Kardashian. It also gave us Carl Lentz, the fallen pastor from Hillsong New York who in addition to having committed adultery has been accused of all manner of spiritual abuse.
Similarly, the jig that formed him has formed hundreds of imitators in churches across the country—men and women (though mostly men) who might not have the same malevolent inclinations as Lentz but have come to believe that embodying an influencer image is the best way to reach their neighbors for Jesus. If that’s the case, their error isn’t narcissistic self-indulgence; it’s a failure to think and judge.
This is why Beaty’s book is so necessary and why her tone of familial affection is so helpful. By not taking an outsider’s stance or shouting, “Burn it all down!” she makes bridge building possible and presents herself as a concerned guide that might help wrongheaded leaders to “think what we are doing” (to borrow Hannah Arendt’s phrase).
The Weirdness of Evangelical Culture
The book concludes with a few directional ideas for leaders who want to avoid celebrity culture’s errors or bring reform. One of evangelicalism’s mistakes from the very beginning was grandiosity, and it strikes me as dangerously tempting to address at this moment even more of it—demanding the church “burn down” or “gouge out” the trappings of celebrity and entertainment in ways that both indulge a grandiose spirit (“We’re the new reformation!”) and lack realism. They remind me of parents shouting at their children to eat their broccoli; they might get them to do it, but they won’t get them to love it.
Beaty, however, emphasizes spiritual formation and spiritual friendship, pursuits that can’t turn the ship overnight, but that’s precisely the point. Change is likely to be small, slow, and local. Mustard seeds, not spectacles.
I found myself laughing at many points while reading the book. Beaty was developing her project in parallel with my own Mars Hill, and without ever talking about it or comparing notes, we ended up covering many of the same historical inflection points and problems. As I reflected on Beaty’s book, I found very little to disagree with, but several ideas that I think need deeper consideration for the sake of the church.
One is the phenomenology of celebrity. Evangelical culture is weird in part because American culture is weird, and success in almost any work in the public sphere will result in some degree of celebrity. Tim Keller, founder of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, is an interesting case study. He was influential for a long time inside a small circle of Presbyterians and church planters, but in the mid-2000s, a post-9/11 attentiveness to New York City, a church-planting boom, and a neo-Calvinist movement expanded that circle to a global platform. Today he’s one of evangelicalism’s most well-known figures.