Consuming Belief

"When an Inuit elder is asked to draw a picture of the coastline, he will close his eyes and listen to the sound of the waves on the shore. Such stories seem vaguely ludicrous. Who could be that attuned to the land? More to the point, who'd want to be? Where's the purpose in denying yourself civilized amenities when you don't have to?

Once you start asking yourself questions like this you are of course in real trouble. The moment you fail to understand why the natural world might have any relevance in the day-to-day lives of human beings, you become, to quote my old Physics teacher, 'a lost ball in the high weeds.'"

-- Kalle Lasn, editor of Adbusters, in Culture Jam p. 7.

Nietzsche said words to the effect (and I'd be grateful if anyone could find the quote [found Oct 2005]) that it was amazing that anyone managed to believe in God anymore in a culture dominated by the Protestant work ethic. Between all the chores, the social engagements, the social ladder climbing and the long hours at work, there simply wasn't time for belief, for prayer or any kind of spirituality or even for reflection. Of course, the super-sized ra-ra of the modern ad-soaked wealthy white empire makes Nietzsche's times look like some distant utopia.[1]

Lasn, author of Culture Jam, treats our culture as toxic; not just to the environment, but to the human mind and spirit:

"When you cut off arterial blood to an organ, the organ dies. When you cut the flow of nature into people's lives, their spirit dies. It's as simple as that."

-- Kalle Lasn, same book, p. 6.

Lasn sums up the toxin as Cool®: the manufactured, branded and very temporary sense of belonging in a culture now engineered to reject humans but accept customers. Humans are treated like natural 'raw' materials and like nature itself we have to be pre-processed to remove anything the machine deems unnecessary, abnormal or undesirable. Cool® is the acid used in this treatment process to burn us back to homogeneous units.

The byproduct of this toxin is cynicism. We make witty remarks about how hollow and false and manufactured popular culture is and we occasionally try to break free, but we never do. We're like alcoholics forced to live in a pub the size of the Western empire.[2]

And so in this sense it is actually more natural and honest to be an atheist in this culture than to be religious. How can one be a 'believer' when everything around you is manufactured? How can you believe in Truth when everything you're immersed in is made up ... and you know it?

Some would suggest that religion is the drug:

"Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

—Karl Marx, father of socialism/communism, from Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right

It is usually a surprise to people that, at the same time as he said "religion is the opium of the people", Marx said "Religion is ... the heart in a heartless world". Marx wasn't saying religion was a delusion or a manipulating addiction like Cool® - remember the 'War on Drugs' was yet to be started in his time. Instead Marx thought of religion as a pain reliever necessary both to tolerate life under oppression and to maintain the stability of the system. Marx' advocated the abolition of religion not to "free minds" but to destabilize the system by making life intolerable within the system for the poor. Obviously many have questioned the morality and compassion of causing pain in order to motivate reform or revolution.

Like Marx, Nietzsche too liked the idea of Christianity. He would have liked to have been able to believe in Christianity, but he thought he (and all 'Enlightened' people) couldn't believe, much as they might want to, so he set about trying to construct an alternative. Like many today, Nietzsche identified Christianity itself with Western culture (it at some point having (ill-advisedly) been baptized "Christian") and he judged the shallow sentimentality of that culture too empty to sustain life.

It remains a moot point, then, whether the atheist is right to lose hope in a faith that teaches that it holds the keys to fulfillment amid a world full of illusionary happiness or on the other hand whether the Christian is right to reject hopelessness as the byproduct of a broken world and accept faith in the hope of redemption.

What ought to be galling for Christians is that the heart of this empire of anti-life and anti-hope claims to be the most Christian place in the world. Of course, that perception comes filtered through an Anglo-centric media who obviously haven't heard of Africa or Latin America or the entire Eastern Orthodox Church. Then there's the greed-is-good crowd of Christians at the heart of the empire who are apparently not aware that the Christ they lay claim to said:

"Blessed are you who are poor...But woe to you who are rich..."

-- Luke 6:20 & 24, aka The Beatitudes

But what most concerns me about 'The Evangelicals' (read: vocal American Evangelicals with a media niche) is not their involvement in politics, nor their lack thereof, but their priorities. Compare:

• David Friedrich Strauss (mid-1800's): a German theologian, radically reinterpreted the Gospels by removing any mention of miracles or the supernatural and finds a "historical" Jesus who was just a religious revolutionary (and who looked remarkably like Strauss himself). 'The Evangelicals' were swiftly roused to wage a generational 'Battle for the Mind' that is still in full swing 150 years later.


• Levi Strauss (c. same time): invented the blue jeans that would become "the consummate American icon", the very stamp of Cool® and a high fashion item that in some cases would sell out at $3715 USD each. 'The Evangelicals' appear - like everyone else - to have just started working even harder to earn the money to give to their children to buy in to the fashion/belonging treadmill.[3]

The massive resources devoted to defending the purity of church theology seem obscene placed next to the paltry efforts to actually encourage grassroots christians to practice that theology in its fullness and outside of Sundays.

Kalle Lasn sums up the rich, white West well, Christians included, when he writes:

"Over a twenty-year period, Elvis Presley evolved from the avatar of American cool to the embodiment of American excess. Almost entirely confined to bed in his last months, Elvis devoured pills and fried-banana-and-peanut-butter sandwiches, suppressing the pain of being Elvis and seemingly trying to lose himself inside his own girth. He was found, appropriately, dead on the throne [ie. toilet]...
There is no better metaphor for the old American dream. With a few exceptions, we are all Elvis now. We have learned what it means to live full-on, to fly and fornicate like an American, and now we refuse to let that lifestyle go. So we keep consuming. Our bodies, minds, families, communities, the environment - all are consumed."

-- Kalle Lasn, same book, p. 63.

It seems to me that we Christians, who say so much about conversion and transformation, are now collectively in need of our own re-conversion: a decisive break with the zeitgeist - the ruling culture - in which we say "The King® is dead, long live the king!" and allow the Elvis in us to die and a king worthy of hope and faith to take his place.

---

[1] Thomas Merton, a Christian mystic, reminds christians that the Good News of christianity was not announced in the accepted setting of the busy, crowded inn but "in silence, loneliness and darkness, to shepherds 'living in the fields'". More than that, this was not (just) an oversight by inattentive humanity. Christians are committed to believing that it was a deliberate choice by God Himself that the birth of Jesus came off less like a regal celebration than a broken and freakish embarrassment (Phi 2:5-8). That there was no room in the inn for the baby Jesus was fitting because there was and is no room in 'normal' everyday life for God.

[2] On the comparison between consumerism and drug addiction:

"My experience with drugs began in high school in the 70s. As teenagers are wont to do, I experimented with a couple of tokes at the pond across from the high school during lunch break. At the time, it didn't do a thing for me but make me cough. Within a year, I was getting high on a regular basis; and I mean high in the sense that I could feel the basic energy of the universe carousing through the sofa cushions I was too stoned to move off of while Bob Dylan, sounding like the God of the Old Testament, whined about being "Tangled Up In Blue". It sounds impressive and enlightening, doesn't it? I'm afraid it wears off after a while though and whatever neural pathways I had pioneered through became well-worn and unexciting expressways. What had first seemed to make me feel alive and alert made me numb and slow in a couple of years. I really wasn't enjoying it anymore; I was simply doing it so I didn't have to feel things as sharply."

-- popular blogger kuro5hin, reflecting on shock-jock Rush Limbaugh's public confession that he is addicted to painkillers.

[3] It's hard to find anyone asking relevant questions about evangelical/christian lifestyle but this survey by the PBS broadcaster skirts around the issue.

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