Immortal Combat: rallying for "Christian causes"
Let's examine celebrity worship, and its broad relationship to exploitation. Celebrity is definitely one of our society's idols. It gets totally convoluted with Christianity. So does consumerism and marketing. I know that AMC's suspension of Phil Roberson is a hot-button topic. I will tread lightly –because I believe he is a true brother and one who fights the good fight as well as he understands it. Recently, a certain segment, called the “Moral Majority”, of evangelicals were in a righteously indignant uproar that a celebrity they watched with some sense of identification and affection had been silenced by his employer, an entertainment conglomeration, AKA AMC. People completely convoluted the role of celebrity with role of prophet. They seemed to believe because a celebrity could actually, in part, be famous for professing Christianity, he somehow represented “us”within the broader culture. Very few stopped to consider the possibility that the reverse was true, that (until the infamous GQ interview) the entertainment conglomerations were actually exploiting Phil Roberson's faith-views as good entertainment. Phil Roberson was inadvertently an ambassador from celebrity and entertainment culture to American Evangelicalism. The flow of influence was from celebrity status to the religious community, not the other way around. As the employer and “source” of remuneration, AMC had the potential to be one of two masters or authorities. The two gods in question in this scenario are God and Mammon. Ultimately, even though he doesn't speak for me on Biblical matters (I take issue with his blatant patriarchy and ethnocentric ignorance to name a couple. I can discuss that later. Expect it.), I find blessed assurance that Phil chose to serve God (albeit the God of his understanding). He stuck by his convictions about God and the Bible. He chose God over Mammon.
The systems at play were systems of this world. The extent those systems collided with Jesus' kingdom is up for examination. Unfortunately, American Evangelicalism has become so infiltrated by consumer culture that how we engage spiritual battles gets wrought with rules of engagement borrowed from marketing and consumption and entertainment. Sometimes, evangelicals employ the tools of mammon in trying to fight spiritual battles. If we continue to employ the wrong tools, is it any wonder we often feel defeated by the promulgators of those tools?
People's reactions to AMC's market-maneuver of benching Phil Roberson due to his statements were rather blinded by the culture of consumption and celebrity. The reactions emerged from a consumer mindset. What was at play was “branding.” The contractual basis of Roberson's relationship to AMC was to sell entertainment to Americans, many of whom identify as conservative. The fact that he is a Bible-believing, praying, patriarch who didn't say anything too inflammatory was part of his mass-market-appeal. It's the stuff of good-entertainment. And it's what made Phil Roberson and the Duck Dynasty line so attractively consumable. What happened during the GQ interview is that the product/ambassador of celebrity culture failed to adequately maintain the desired representation of the “brand”, ie Duck Dynasty. The relationship was never to sell Christianity to the culture or change it. It was about making money in a "consumer-Christian" culture. Entertainment/celebrity sellers aren't looking to change the culture, but to market and make money off of someone they deem marketable. When Roberson served his true Master, he became just a little less marketable. Evangelicals, oblivious to how marketing has pervaded their own mentality, wanted to “sell” the reverse situation and were outraged that Roberson's truth wasn't promoted. It is understandable that they wanted to sell Phil's message to the broader culture, because that is exactly how church institutions have been advancing the message, for several decades at least, ie through packaging and branding and marketing ministries to the world. But that is not how Jesus said the kingdom would advance. It doesn't advance by tokenizing people or through selling of images. It does advance when people stand by unpopular truths. (Again, I'm not endorsing his beliefs but his posture towards his understanding of the truth.)
Now, about sexual exploitation in general and sporting events? Oh boy!
Now, I'm not a sports fan – at all, so it wouldn't be fair for me to comment broadly on sporting events or athletes. I don't even follow the Christian ones or what they supposedly do to represent Jesus to a lost and dying world. It's just that an awful lot of what I just said about the AMC-Roberson debacle applies to sports. Often, pro-athletes are elevated to Hero status and become sought-after celebrities merely because they exhibit physical talent and perhaps a likeable personality.
I am an activist, educator, consultant with respect to sex trafficking and other forms of exploitation. As a therapist, I work with people who have been and/or continue to be sexually exploited - often commercially. I serve on the local anti-trafficking task force and am part of a core team of individuals who are developing a justice-oriented ministry to address needs of the exploited at my church. I associate with quite a few survivor-leaders of domestic abuse and sex-trafficking. These are people who are working to address systemic injustice to the most marginalized and at-risk people. Prostitutes have always been “the least of these”and “unworthy” of notice. Praise God – they are now taking center stage with their testimonies! As one who works closely, even compulsively, with respect to "the cause" of counter-trafficking, you would think I would have been delighted to see so many friends coming out of the woodwork to reveal that the SuperBowl is (supposedly) “the single largest human trafficking event of the year” and posting all sorts of sensational statistics in that respect.
I was not.
Some were recently advancing a boycott of the Super Bowl because of it's false distinction as the biggest human trafficking event of the year and due to all of the sexual exploitation that happens in conjunction with it. There are a lot of reasons that people believe that sporting events are also human trafficking events, most of which has to do with increased policing, promotion and sensationalism of something that in fact happens all day every day all the year through. To be quite honest, awareness campaigns which piggy back on major sporting events have as much to do with marketing as does the influx of traffickers and victims to any given city surrounding the sporting event. I'm not denying it happens. I just question how the statistics are being publicized, and why. Sensation is a very good way to raise panic and fear-induced fund raising. It is not necessarily a very good strategy for promoting real transformative change.
The issue of sexual exploitation surrounding the Super Bowl is rather, again, about commodification and marketing, which has an indirect relationship to trafficking. The “High Places” in our culture is where we spend our money. And THAT, my friend, is a BIG DEAL! Huge budgets are spent creating the best of our cultures' adverts. The high priests of Mammon do their best to command our loyalty to their brand. Most of us, like moths drawn to flame, clamour for it! We love the half time show! The more debauched, the better. And what do those shows tell us of the dignity and worth of women and sexuality in general? They tell us that women's power is derived from turning our bodies into currency and products for consumption, that women like Beyonce are rich and adored and in control because of how sexy they are. In order to be powerful or beautiful or loved, girls and women must aspire to be like her. Now THIS issue has a whole lot to do with sex-trafficking. We know that girls who have been abused and sexually violated are already vulnerable to promises of being loved and adored and taken care of. They are not used to genuine caring and protection. They already know something of their own sexual desirability, to say nothing of being previously discarded or unseen, and they recognize sexual desirability as “empowering” for celebrity women. THEN they begin to collude with the forces that diminish themselves to an object of consumption. They fall for the promises of others who tell them they can be models, dancers, actresses – celebrities with fans of their own. In order to gain it, they only have to do such and such. AND Daddy will take care of them. So you see, it's not about the surge in population of “sex-workers” to any given city but the overall constant messages of celebrity and marketing.
I'm not advocating a boycott of the Super Bowl any more than I did a boycott of AMC. I will say that during the previous hubbub – I suggested a boycott of your television altogether.
Postscript: I am afraid I inadvertently invoked a tangential issue, constitutional rights, and diluted the focus off the original issue. My intent was to expand on the role of celebrity-sporting events in taking the focus off of God's kingdom and re-routing the focus to kingdoms of Earth. Celebrity worship rules our collective existential meaning and defines us so much we can no longer discern the difference. The condition of our collective being also reveals something of spiritual warfare in terms of how certain principalities can "pull rank" and confuse. Think of it like this: the three principalities of Mammon, Celebrity and State were fighting for top rank and right of dominion, but doing so as generals in the losing side. While each wants exclusive worship, they all conspire to undermine the Kingdom of God. People get confused when they subscribe to the idea that celebrity and wealth or even patriotism is a good representation of God. With respect to freedom of religion and freedom of speech, celebrities can say what they want with certain constitutional protections, and they truly have my backing in that respect. Marketers sell their brand, often through celebrity, and can censor or edit their brand to say what is most deemed marketable. They do it all the time, most often imperceptibly. (I find it ironic that his initials are PR. Think about that!) As I see it, the Phil Roberson issue was never a matter of free speech or state persecution. The governmental authorities never did respond to Phil Roberson through incarceration/torture/killing. Those things DO happen to believers in other places. People who claimed it was about state persecution were confused about which power authority or principality was at play, or they didn't recognize the forces which were infighting for our allegiance. The dominating "power" was Celebrity/Entertainment rather than official governing authorities.
Ephesians 6, 2 Corinthians 10
