The rise of the Bon Jovi myth

Twitter, my favorite social networking site, recently became the conduit for a fake story that Jon Bon Jovi had died.

Bon Jovi responded to the false reports by posting a photo of him with a sign that read, “Heaven looks a lot like New Jersey.”

I’m not sure how he got Heaven and Hell mixed up, but that’s not the point.

Think about how many fake things have shaped and influenced our world. Devious tweeters have also posted fake death announcements for Mick Jagger, Will Smith, Bill Cosby, and Justin Bieber. Colin Powell became the vehicle for a fake story about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. “The Girls Next Door” and “Kendra” on the E! channel became vehicles for Kendra Wilkinson’s fake boobs.

I follow various news organizations on Twitter – thus creating a personalized news feed – but the thing that bothers me about the social networking site is how quickly it can deliver false information. A few people decide to “re-tweet,” and before our national debt can jump another billion, everyone on the planet knows the news.

Imagine this scenario: Someone tweets the false news of Bon Jovi’s death, and just after that, terrorists hit power grids across the United States.

For hours, days, weeks, perhaps even months, everyone believes Bon Jovi is dead.

The nation, already in severe withdraws from television and Internet, trudges through the additional burden of knowing Bon Jovi would never sing “Livin’ on a Prayer” around a post-electricity campfire.

This mass deception further dispirits the struggling millions who don’t know how to cook over an open flame – no freezers plus no microwaves equals no meals. Livin’ on a prayer, indeed.

So while most Americans believe that Bon Jovi is dead, the man himself begins appear to groups of people and proclaim he really is alive, never died, and the death announcement was just a hoax on Twitter.

This only complicates matters.

Some claim to have seen the ghost of Bon Jovi. Others claim he has become a zombie. Still others claim that he has risen from the dead, adding that it kind of makes sense because Bon Jovi concerts were religious experiences.

But at least without Twitter, these rumors take longer to move around.

Then again, that makes the rumors into taller tales.

As the months pass, news of Bon Jovi spreads. Now some are saying he touched a darkened television set in Sayreville, N.J., and the tube illuminated with re-runs of VH1’s “Pop Up Video.”

Others now say he levitated above a crowd under a New York City bridge and proclaimed, “You live for the fight when that’s all that you’ve got.”

Many copied down those words on their tablets – paper tablets that required pencils.

But some copied down, “You live for the night,” not “fight,” so divisions form among Bon Jovi’s followers. Most people feel obligated to choose a side, so one’s beliefs about Bon Jovi become the central matter of identity in the U.S.

The "night" side and the "fight" side come up with various rituals and institutions to memorialize their founder and instill proper beliefs in their youngsters (how are those youngsters going to rebel? Become religious fundamentalists?).

Entrepreneurs invent hand-tooled leather bracelets that read, "WWBJD?" All the kids wear them.

So even in the post-electricity apocalypse, Twitter creates a new myth, a new religion, and Bon Jovi’s name lives on in a blaze of glory.

-Colin Foote Burch
(This column originally appeared at WeeklySurge.com and was re-posted here in July 2014.)

God, Hugh Laurie, and 'House, MD'

A new article has me thinking more about the religious content of my favorite show on television: House, MD on Fox, starring Hugh Laurie as Dr. Gregory House.

I don't like to record it because I don't like to wait for it. My world stops for the start of a new episode.

My affection is against the rules.

I am a theist -- frustrated, searching, liturgically minded, often-doubting, usually more philosophical than theological, yet ultimately a Christian of some sort.

Laurie and his TV character House are both strident, stringent atheists. The actor and the character ridicule all stripes of believers with ease and regularity.

Oddly enough, series creator and executive producer David Shore has twin brothers who are Orthodox rabbis, according to an article in the Spring 2008 edition of Religion in the News (which just arrived in my mailbox today, in late July).

The brother of rabbis creating and guiding a show about an atheist? Maybe that's why I find the religious content of House, MD to be remarkably well-informed and true to the state of religious thought in our time. (I'm not totally ignorant of the subject, either -- hey, I won a Medal of Distinction in the Battleground God game at The Philosopher's Magazine Web site!)

"To ignore issues of faith is to ignore a pretty fundamental part of all people's lives when they're in the hospital, facing death," Shore said in an NPR interview last year. "I'm not saying all people find God, but they certainly do ask those questions."

I'll never forget the episode (can't remember the title or season) in which Dr. Robert Chase, played by Jesse Spencer, spends time talking with a nun who has (what else?) an undiagnosed illness. We learn that Dr. Chase had once been a seminary student, and the way his lingering knowledge of the Christian faith -- and his apparent desire but inability to believe -- are brought to the surface rings true. Kudos to both the acting and the writing.

Here's an example of the program's religious content, from Christine McCarthy McMorris's article "Playing Godless" in Religion in the News:

In "House vs. God" (Season 2), a teenaged faith healer is brought to the hospital, where House sets up a scoreboard for both him and God to win points. Although he discovers that the young healer has contracted a sexually transmitted disease that he is hiding from his father, exposure to the boy's virus seems to (miraculously) shrink the tumor of a cancer patient at the hospital. Although House remains unconvinced ("I fear for the human race. A teenager claims to be the voice of God, and people with advanced degrees are listening,"), by the end of the program the score is even.

But some people have to latch onto the most simplistic, surface-level interpretations, rather than identifying the messiness of life and faith and doubt, and rather than understanding that television programs, like many creative works, are at their best when they jump into ambiguities and uncertainties, following William Shakespeare's genius as explained by John Keats: "I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." Uninspired by such an approach would be The Parents Television Council, the leadership of which called Fox "the most anti-religious network" and accused House, MD of "consistently mocking religion and people of faith."

Indeed, Dr. House's ridicule of religious people has included not only Christians, but also Mormons and Orthodox Jews. But the program's story lines don't actually allow a cut-and-dried verdict on complex topics. Maybe that's why I find it so rewarding to watch.

--Colin Foote Burch, member, Society of Professional Journalists, and affiliate member, Religion Newswriters Association

Lutherans promote cremation

Pentecostalism and the evaluation of personal experience

In the current edition of Books & Culture, Arlene M. Sanchez Walsh reflects on an afternoon tour she took of Angelus Temple, where the late Pentecostal hero Aimee Semple McPherson ministered. Sanchez, herself a licensed minister in the Pentecostal denomination called International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, writes that "the Pentecostal cult of personality tells us more about who Pentecostals are than it does about the leaders they hold in such high esteem."

The personality cults abound in Pentecostal and charismatic versions of Christianity. Right now, in Lakeland, Fla., some of my friends and family members are visiting an "outpouring" that is being presided-over by one of the latest personalities to gather a cult following: Todd Bentley, who can be seen on numerous YouTube videos leading crowds into near-hysterical frenzies.

The problem, these days, in our mass culture, is that charismatic personalities (using charismatic in the broadest sense of the term) and intense experiences are considered indications of reality or truth or God's presence. No one seems to think that senses and perceptions could be manipulated -- wittingly or unwittingly -- by a leader or by a crowd, in politics as well as religion.

"When a leader has the quality of charisma, he is able to arouse an extraordinary level of trust and devotion from his followers," wrote Wendy Duncan in her book I Can't Hear God Anymore: Life in a Dallas Cult. "The charismatic leader attracts people to his ideas and causes them to desire to be in his presence."

What follows that initial devotion, though, is a movement from one personality to the next, from one "move of God" to the next, from one "outpouring" to the next, from one "revival" to the next. Len Oakes, in his book Prophetic Charisma: The Psychology of Revolutionary Religious Personalities (Syracuse University Press, 1997), wrote, "The followers surrender not to the person of the leader but to the power manifest in him, and they will desert him if his power fails. The followers attain freedom from routine and the commonplace by surrendering to the leader and -- through him -- to their own emotional depths."

Following Oakes, it seems to me, based on my own 20 growing-up years in neo-Pentecostal/charismatic churches, that the promise of a new personality, as well as the alleged new move of God that comes with him, is never delivered and eventually fades away, so one is always eagerly looking for that next fix, whether it is a fix that will finally bring healing or guidance, or a fix that will bring a new experience of "emotional depths."

Consider again Oakes' phrase "freedom from routine and the commonplace." It is interesting that a common accusation against institutional churches is that their rituals and their orderliness smack of spiritual deadness. To be sure, as Jaroslav Pelikan said, "Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living." But what are the accusers of institutional churches seeking from the charismatic leader and the latest outpouring, the latest revival? Not truth. Instead, they seek experiences. The accusers of institutional churches never seem to consider that rituals and orderliness might be structured in such a way so that truth could be handed down to generation after generation.

But if a guy has been brought up with television and rock 'n' roll, how is he going to see the value in quietness and orderliness and the repetition of old texts unless he has the help of a little teaching or training? He wants sensation. Sensations dictate to him whether or not truth is being communicated. If the sensations come with Jesus' name attached, then they must be from God, never mind all affronts to historical doctrine and theology, never mind the atmosphere created by music and the mantra-like repetition of phrases.

Perhaps he should consider that church and worship are not about his personal experiences.

The fact that he does not consider such thoughts is evidence enough that Sanchez was right: "the Pentecostal cult of personality tells us more about who Pentecostals are than it does about the leaders they hold in such high esteem." All they want, as Oakes said, is "freedom from routine and the commonplace" and the resulting experience of "emotional depths."

-Colin Foote Burch

This church sign needs a caption; please provide one in the comments section

Seen just off an I-95 exit in Roanoke Rapids, N.C., June 23, 2008:

Keep your freedom: how spiritual seekers avoid traps

Almost all cult leaders and Christians who manipulate place a high emphasis on being "led by the Lord."... In the first century those who thought that personal revelation was an authority above Scriptures were called Gnostics.... We must ever guard ourselves against the words and pet phrases that hint of superior spirituality.... When we divide life into snug "spiritual" and "nonspiritual" compartments, we are thinking heretically and may blindly accept a cultic view of life.

-- Harold Bussell, in his book By Hook or By Crook: How Cults Lure Christians

Gonna make God talk

I found this on the Web site of a prophetic ministry. Check out the wild assumptions and general nuttiness within this promotional note for an upcoming conference.

There seems to be a remarkable new spiritual energy being released in our conferences. Everyone on our staff, as well as many who have been attending our conferences for years, seem to all think that our recent Harvest and Worship & Warfare Conferences were the best we've ever had. Overall, I think so too, but there was also a great spiritual momentum that I have honestly not felt anything like in over a decade. Already you can feel the spiritual energy building for our New Year's Conference in which we seek the Lord for prophetic words for the coming year. In the past, we have received some that were remarkable. These are obviously crucial times, and we are going to need to have increasingly clear and accurate guidance for them. There is also a great spiritual momentum building, and if you are planning to join us for this conference, please register and reserve your rooms at Heritage as soon as possible, as space is limited and we are expecting this conference to fill up quickly.

Problems with the above promo:

1. How frequently did Biblical prophets hold conferences so they could hear from the God? And, conversely, how frequently did God decide to talk to prophets at times the prophets had not previously scheduled? The suggestion is that we, or at least the right sages, can make God talk.

2. How does God's work depend on "spiritual momentum?" Does God need a running start to accomplish certain things? God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. No build-up required. No straining involved.

3. "Already you can feel the spiritual energy building for our New Year's Conference in which we seek the Lord for prophetic words for the coming year." First, see No. 2 above. Second, since when does God operate on the calendar year?

4. "There is also a great spiritual momentum building, and if you are planning to join us for this conference, please register and reserve your rooms…as soon as possible." The word "and" sticks out here. Being a conjunction, the word "and" tends to connect related ideas. Perhaps, then, one could conclude that the "spiritual momentum" announced in the first part of this compound sentence is intended to encourage the registrations and reservations requested in the second part. Following the above italicized excerpt, a link to the confence Web site notes that registration for the conference is $50 each for adults and children. The price is a gamble on the possibility that "some" of the prophecy this year will be "remarkable."

Like too many ministries that claim special supernatural giftings, this ministry depends on its followers accepting the assumption that critical thinking will hinder the work of God. Thus, the followers open themselves to nebulous beliefs merely because those beliefs are presented with conviction, spiritual language, and a kickin' sound system. Yet the mind, like the heart, was created for humans to use.

-Colin Foote Burch

Evangelicals don't know much about theology

Michael Lindsay, a sociologist at Rice University, recently told the 2007 Religion Newswriters Assocition Annual Conference about his study of evangelicals. Lindsay has interviewed evangelicals across the United States and written a book, Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite (Oxford, 2007).

While Lindsay's work has done a lot to bust media stereotypes of evangelicals, one thing he told the RNA conference is sadly not surprising: Evangelicals don't know much about theological teachings; they have very little formal theological education.

This recalls the famous statement by the evangelist Billy Sunday: "Theology? I didn't know I had any."

However, some of Lindsay's other findings are more flattering of evangelicals:

MYTH: Evangelicals derive their power mainly in the political field.
REALITY: Most identify themselves with culture and the arts (especially Hollywood), where they feel they can make a greater difference.

MYTH: Evangelicals are mainly in white suburban communities in between the U.S. coasts.
REALITY: One of the largest evangelical churches is a Hispanic congregation in Houston. Another, in New York, serves Ivy League professionals.

MYTH: Domestic issues like gay marriage and abortion are most important to evangelicals.
REALITY: Evangelical groups are more involved on the global front, with issues like HIV/AIDS and hunger.

Read more of RNA's summary of Lindsay's presentation at http://www.rna.org/action071102.php#evangelical.

Paglia on religion and the arts

In an article in the Spring/Summer 2007 edition of Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Camille Paglia wrote about the relationship between religion and the arts, and how respect for religion can revive the arts. What follows in an excerpt from Paglia’s article; thanks to the folks at Mars Hill Audio Journal for posting it on their Web site.

Paglia wrote:

For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center. Profaning the iconography of other people’s faiths is boring and adolescent. The New Age movement, to which I belong, was a distillation of the 1960s’ multicultural attraction to world religions, but it has failed thus far to produce important work in the visual arts. The search for spiritual meaning has been registering in popular culture instead through science fiction, as in George Lucas’ six-film Star Wars saga, with its evocative master myth of the “Force.” But technology for its own sake is never enough. It will always require supplementation through cultivation in the arts.

To fully appreciate world art, one must learn how to respond to religious expression in all its forms. Art began as religion in prehistory. It does not require belief to be moved by a sacred shrine, icon, or scripture. Hence art lovers, even when as citizens they stoutly defend democratic institutions against religious intrusion, should always speak with respect of religion. Conservatives, on the other hand, need to expand their parched and narrow view of culture. Every vibrant civilization welcomes and nurtures the arts.

Progressives must start recognizing the spiritual povery of contemporary secular humanism and reexamine the way that liberalism too often now automatically defines human aspiration and human happiness in reductively economic terms. If conservatives are serious about educational standards, they must support the teaching of art history in primary school — which means conservatives have to get over their phobia about the nude, which has been a symbol of Western art and Western individualism and freedom since the Greeks invented democracy. Without compromise, we are heading for a soulless future. But when set against the vast historical panorama, religion and art — whether in marriage or divorce — can reinvigorate American culture.

#

For something that looks a little like the marriage of religion and the arts, check out this interview with Nicora Gangi, along with images of two of her paintings, at http://www.liturgicalcredo.com/NicoraGangiJuneJuly2007.html .

China bans Buddhist Monks from Reincarnating in Tibet

I'm not making this up. It's from Newsweek.

By Matthew Philips
Newsweek
Aug. 20-27, 2007 issue - In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation." But beyond the irony lies China's true motive: to cut off the influence of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual and political leader, and to quell the region's Buddhist religious establishment more than 50 years after China invaded the small Himalayan country. By barring any Buddhist monk living outside China from seeking reincarnation, the law effectively gives Chinese authorities the power to choose the next Dalai Lama, whose soul, by tradition, is reborn as a new human to continue the work of relieving suffering....

See the rest of the story at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20227400/site/newsweek/

I'm really not making it up.

Could solution to Islamic extremism breed cynicism?

In an article headlined “Islam’s authority deficit,” the June 30 edition of The Economist opened with the following three paragraphs:

Governments worried by Islamist extremism ought to get the message: the only real answer lay in more Islam — deeper, sounder, more careful readings of the Muslim faith, from scholars who could use the weight of collective experience, accumulated over 14 centuries, to solve the dilemmas of life in the modern age.

Such, broadly, was the argument laid out in London recently by Ali Gomaa, the grand mufti of Egypt, before a gathering of Islamic scholars and pundits. And his hosts took him seriously. The case for using scholarly Islam as a counterweight to the radical, hot-headed sort is familiar in the Middle East, but this time it won an unusually clear endorsement from a Western leader, Tony Blair.

In his parting thoughts (as prime minister, anyway) on Islam, Mr Blair lauded Jordan for its efforts to make the various legal schools of Islam respect each another and stop calling each other infidels. And just like Mr Gomaa, Mr Blair said how important it was to ensure that only qualified people could issue fatwas, or rulings on how to follow Islam in specific situations. Emboldened by his welcome, Mr Gomaaa offered to help Britain set up a post like his own: state-certified grand mufti.

I worry about Tony Blair’s role, not Ali Gomaa’s role, in the discussions and possibilities mentioned above.

Those possibilities are outstanding. My concern is that any perception of Western-influenced official Islam would breed cynicism among the more conservative elements in Islam as well as the extremists. Blair and Gomaa are wise men who realize something constructive must be attempted in our time. However, isn’t the nature of Islamic extremism, and even some especially conservative elements within the religion, to be suspicious of anything that might water-down the message? Will the attempt backfire?

-Colin Burch

Visit http://www.liturgicalcredo.com

Biological research v. ancient philosophy & religion

I recently read an article in The American Scholar online about the way literary theory has tried to kill-off the love of good stories.

The article, available at http://www.theamericanscholar.org/gettingitallwrong-boyd.html, spend most of its time making a biological and evolutionary argument against the assumptions of (what is alleged to be) the dominant literary-theory ideas in university English departments.

I loved the challenge against theory, and the way it was done, yet I struggled with the reductively biological view of humans that supported the challenge.

I emailed the link to a group of friends, and after some of them had a chance to read it, I offered them these thoughts:

I'm actually still holding out some hope for metaphysics to make a qualified comeback. The article's author gave reasons why we have customs -- so our species can keep its signals clear. Confucius would have said that the Tao was pre-existing and transcendent, and we are at our best (keeping our signals clearest) when we correspond to it via proper customs.

The Stoics were similar, with Logos (universal reason) in place of the Tao, and proper reasoning as the expression of the presence of Logos instead of customs. Before the Stoics, Socrates seemed to think we could dialectically get to something that was true and pre-existing (maybe similar to Logos), and sought to trim away the unclear signals (artifices) of the species, and died for it.

Jesus presented the Law and the Prophets as the transcendent standards, and then added a human-relationship element to them -- hate is murder; love; forgive -- and died for it. I'm unfamiliar with the Hindu and Buhddist teachings.

But the point being, in light of these ancients, it's hard for me, just being the thing that I am, to reduce the transcendent points of reference of these ancients to the outcomes of biological trial-and-error over a kijillion years. One book I read actually mapped the commonality in moral and ethical teachings across Norse, Babylonian, Confucian, Judaic, Greek, Christian, Egyptian, Roman, Hindu and Anglo-Saxon cultures -- a real skewer in the "local" of theory, huh?! To what do we assign this unity among diverse cultures?

Well, I readily acknowledge that the strictly biological view, which one might call reductive in light of the ancients, is exactly where the expertise is, where the cutting-edge thinking and research is happening, and it is very compelling. We just keep peeling away at the brain through scientific advances. People still read these ancients, yet research constantly recasts them, constantly fosters new questions. So I remain,
puzzled,
Colin Burch

Apocalypto now

Mel Gibson directed social and anthropological layers into his presentation of the Mayan city in Apocalypto, a film unlike anything I have seen before.

I won't give away much here; let me just tell you what Gibson has accomplished from the standpoint of his craft. Socio-economic classes and religious perspectives vary among the people in the scenes set in a Mayan city. The equivalents of present-day Pentecostals and Episcopalians, as well as the lower and middle and upper classes, and the public manipulators and the true believers, are all readily discernable, even with the subtitles on the screen and the busyness and grotesqueness of the city scenes. Volumes are communicated with subtle gestures between socially important characters during a scene in which a solar eclipse frightens many within the city. Some were thinking about angry gods; others clearly knew something of the solar system's calendar. A complicated society is made easy to grasp, while never simplistic.

With all this depth of vision throughout the film, it almost seems too normal to see action sequences that fall back on common conventions, even if those sequences are flawlessly portrayed. I mean, how many times have we seen some variation of the good guy sliding across the ground to snatch a much-needed weapon in perfect choreography with the bad guy? Yet the scenes tighten with primal fear.

It's too bad Gibson brought the spotlight onto his alcohol problems and his feelings about Jews just months before this film was released. Of course, he said he was sorry, and I believe he's sincere (how could he have worked among the diversity of Hollywood and made it so far if he was a full-blown bigot?). Still, many will hold those incidents against him and choose to skip Apocalypto, which is an undeniable work of cinematic art, a display of profound artistic vision.

I'm in awe of the guy.