Samuel D. James's post on America’s Lost
Boys is both a moving and depressing read, and his call for the
church to rise to the challenge of addressing the problem is on-target. Yet the
call to seriousness is one thing. How it can be done is quite another.
As James implies, the problem is much deeper than video
game- and porn-addicted young men. These addictions are simply symptoms, albeit
very obvious ones, of the moral and cultural bankruptcy of our present age.
Thus, unless we address the deeper issues—the elephant in the room—we will get
nowhere. And herein lies the problem. To borrow a question from the art critic
Sven Birkerts, what do you do when the elephant in the room is the room itself?
Neither video games nor porn nor idleness are the problem. The problem is that
entertainment is not simply a part of our world. It is arguably the dominant
essence of our world.
To use philosophical jargon, entertainment is now
ontology. We live in Xanadu, within the confines of a stately pleasure-dome of
our own making. We have an economy that is significantly dependent upon the
production and consumption of entertainment, a society where men who play
children’s playground games are lionized and paid more than the President, and
a world where technology is not simply a tool but one of the structuring
principles of our very existence and our ways of life, right down to the most
mundane details. Ours is an era in which teleology has been collapsed into a
perpetually present singularity and the ideal type is increasingly the sempiternal
orgiast.
Thus, to say that the church needs to break with
entertainment and offer meaning is true. But how we do this is very far from
obvious. Indeed, it is even hard to conceptualize what the possibility of such
a break might look like in practice, for this is no cosmetic change which is
being proposed. Churches cannot accomplish it by, say, simply abolishing praise
bands and reinstating Renaissance polyphony and classical liturgy. These might
themselves be the entertainment of the high-brow aesthete. Nor can preachers
simply ditch the jokes and focus stern-faced upon the cross. It is, after all,
possible to enjoy good oratory for the mere fact that it is good oratory,
regardless of content.
Further, if entertainment is the very essence of our
social existence today, then we are in a sense not faced with addressing
meaninglessness. It is just not that simple. I suspect the lost boys do see
their lives as having meaning—the meaning of the moment, the meaning of a
solitary orgasm, the meaning given by myriad solipsistic fantasies. The church
is not combating meaninglessness so much as offering an alternative meaning in
a competitive marketplace. And the idioms of plausibility in that marketplace
are themselves part of the problem.
How can the church assert the truth of the gospel—an
exclusive truth which makes demands in the present because of promises which
will be fulfilled only in the future—in a world predicated on consumer options,
entertainment, and instant gratification? Just a brief glance at the
advertising for the most numerically successful and conservative evangelical
conferences indicates the importance of the aesthetics of this present age in
marketing, even for a serious, exclusive faith. Can we use such methods and
still claim that something crucial has not already been conceded at the outset?
To answer, “Well, if we don’t do this, if we don't have the slick, attractive
marketing, the cool branding, and the celebrities of the evangelical
subculture, then nobody will come”—something I have heard many times—makes
perfect sense. But the fact that it makes perfect sense—that, yes, we know that
such an approach is culturally wise and necessary—is what is so significant,
for it indicates that we are all now trapped inside the stately pleasure dome.
There is a linguistic problem, too. It might be
oversimplifying the picture (though not by much) to say that Europe secularized
itself by abandoning the Christian idiom, America by co-opting the same. That
makes the task here incalculably difficult because the very words we should use
to communicate a serious message and to confront the world around us—holiness,
sin, grace, repentance, faith, forgiveness—have been transformed, so that they
now mean trivial things that have no real connection to orthodox Christianity.
They, too, have become part of the linguistic currency of the pleasure-dome.
We clearly need a
reformation as dramatic, if not more dramatic, than that of the sixteenth
century. How that reformation can be accomplished and what forms it must take
are far from obvious at this moment in time. But it has to start with a
wholesale critique of the anti-culture of immediacy in which we live. And that
must include acknowledgement that we are ourselves—individually and
corporately—deeply embedded in the very essence of this present age.
Carl R. Trueman is Paul Woolley
Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary.
