PSYCHO and the past

I wrote recently about Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds as a meditation on Sin here. Hitchcock also explored the effects of Original Sin in his classic work Psycho. Often this film is touted as the first classic modern horror. However classifying this film as a horror or thriller, does not do the film justice as it is a penetrating study of human sin and evil.

The main focus of this study is the films villain Norman Bates. Bates initially appears to be an affable young man who runs a hotel. Behind the hotel is a creepy looking Victorian home. The home is symbolic of the way that the past haunts Bates. Bates is a man with a secret. In a fit of jealous rage he killed his overbearing mother, however he cannot face his guilt. His mothers influence is so great over him, that she still rules him from the grave. Hitchcock allows you to think until the final scene that the villain is Bates’ mother. Bates’ has been living a double life, he dresses up and acts as his mother, as her voice lives on in his psyche.

The film is a powerful warning of the way that the past can rule over us, how the influence and voices of others can overtake us. Hitchcock shows us how evil can grow even in the seemingly benign soil of a mother and son relationship. How codependency can ruin natural relationships and how the past can reach out and strangle the future. The film illuminates the way that the influence of the past can burrow beneath our skins and fester in the hidden parts of us, keeping us in an invisible prison.

Norman Bates is a modern day incarnation of Lot’s wife. Both illustrate the way that the past can move one towards sin. The story of Lot’s wife is a fascinating one. One short sentence speaks volumes.

 23By the time Lot reached Zoar, the sun had risen over the land. 24 Then the LORD rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the LORD out of the heavens. 25 Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, including all those living in the cities—and also the vegetation in the land. 26 But Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.

One of the strong overwhelming themes of the book of Genesis is newness, the new things that God is doing in human history to right the wrongs of the fall. The story of Lot’s wife in all of its strangeness makes a clear point, Lot’s wife does not simply look back to the past, she looks back with a yearning heart to the city of Sodom, a city that represents all of the violence and injustice of the fall. Norman Bates is the same, he looks backwards to the dysfunctions and twistedness of the past. It is interesting that Lot’s wife is turned into salt, something which the desert is filled with, something which kills plants, and destroys soil, and prevents new growth.

In contrast to Lot’s wife we have the figure of Abram, who too hears a call to leave behind the past, to embrace the new things that God is doing; sometimes he wavers, sometimes he fails, yet he doggedly maintains the path of faith, towards God’s future of newness.

More thoughts on Hyperreality

Brian Rice of Leadership Connextions International has written a PDF essay interacting with the themes from my book The Trouble With Paris. It is always exciting and fascinating to see how your ideas can spread and be built on by others. Interesting to see that Brian is not afraid to name names when it comes to who he sees as the practitioners of hyperreal Christianity. Check it out here

Romantic Anxiety

As a culture we have moved away from traditional approaches to relationships which favour commitment and unconditional love, to an approach which veers from contractual to consumerist to simply confused. Just look at the way in which our language betrays our confusion over romantic and sexual relationships.

“Yeah me and him are having a bit of a thing“

“I don’t know how we got together it sort of just happened.“

“Are you guys on now?”

“Yeah me and her just did it”

“I am not sure but I think that he thinks that we are together now”

Such imprecise and non-descriptive language shows just how unsure we have become as we navigate the field of relationships. We have left behind the markers and boundaries which guided us in the past and which are used by every culture to facilitate romantic relationships and now we are making it up as we go along.

There is now a whole field of media which explores this new territory, be it chick lit, romantic comedies, or Sex in the City clones such as Cashmere Mafia/Lip Stick Jungle etc. What is common to all this modern day story telling is the tangible anxiety around relationships, which is akin to a kind of collective fumbling in the dark.  Half the action is centred around the way that characters brainstorm and put their heads together to interpret and solve the new conundrums that modern relationships throw up.

Thus the average single person (and many marrieds) finds themselves in a strange universe in which every previous clue that could lead to a rewarding romantic relationship has been erased. There are still just as many people out there looking for relationships, it is just that our culture has thrown away the manual in an attempt to increase our personal freedom. Instead of discovering personal freedom we have only increased our loneliness and sense of personal lostness.

We now find ourselves in a strange and ultimately self destructive position, we simultaneously seek commitment whilst running away from it. We want it both ways.

Maybe its time as a culture to rediscover the biblical concept of covenantal relationships. To again dive into that strange yet alluring sea of commitment,

Mission in the Age of Facebook

One of the amazing stats of Church history is that in the year 100 AD there was approximately 25,000 Christians in the Roman world. Only a couple of centuries late in the year 310 AD there was approximately 20,000,000 Christians. This statistic is often used today by all kinds of organizations and churches as an inspiration for how the church can grow.

However there are a few crucial differences between the early church and the context that we find ourselves in today. I want to explore just one of these. That is the concept of Relational Depth and Relational Breadth.

Relational Breadth is basically the amount of people that you know. In his book The Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell notes that if you want to spread an idea or create a movement, it is essential to have a wide group of acquaintances to whom you can share you ideas with. One of the key factors in allowing people to have relational breadth is technology and security. The early church existed in a time of great technological advance, the Roman road and system of governance made travel relatively safe and quick, the common languages of Latin and Greek made communications across ethnic groups possible. Once Rome began to wain and the Dark ages set in, the gospel not only slowed down in its movement, but it actually retreated with many former Roman subjects returning to paganism.

Today globalization and technology offers us tremendous opportunities for relational breadth. You can become facebook friends with someone you have never met in Iran and begin chatting to them online, exchanging photos and stories. Soon the biggest speaking English country in the world will be India, Chinese and Spanish are spoken across the globe in all kinds of environments. Jet travel acts like a modern day Roman road, allowing people to quickly traverse the globe.

However what the early church had that we don’t have is relational depth. Being one of the great trading races, many cities in the Roman Empire had a Jewish minority, complete with Synagogues and neighbourhoods. After the destruction of the temple in 70 AD Jewish refugees poured out of Israel and into the Roman world. If you were a Jewish Christian and you wanted to share the gospel, you could pretty much point to a Mediterranean city on a map and be able to find an uncle, cousin or someone from your old neighbourhood to go and stay with.

You would be able to rock up at your third cousins house and thanks to middle eastern hospitality traditions be taken in as a long lost son, be fed, and live with your Jewish kinfolk. You had deep coventantal commitments to your relatives and fellow Jews. The kind of social commitment that is rarely seen today.

Now the thing to remember was that most city dwellers lived in Roman apartments which were extremely cramped, the rooms had little or no ventilation and were dark and dank. So most people in apartments hung out in the courtyard, you literally lived in your family and neighbours pockets. So you could not hide your behaviour. People saw how you were at your best and your worst, they saw how you treated to business partners, your spouse and your kids, if you were a spiritual fraud you would be spotted in seconds. This was relational depth, you lived in deep community with people even if you were just passing through town. Thus when Christians arrived their witness was on display for everyone to see. Their example shone out.

However today with our tremendous relational breadth, we have little relational depth. Sure you might be able become friends with someone in Iran, and talk chat online with them about your favourite album; but you have no idea what they get up to in their real life. They could sell crack cocaine from a school bus for all you know. We move jobs today often, we move homes, we even move cities, many rarely see family, we don’t even know the names of the people in our street. This creates tough turf for the growth of the gospel.

In order for the gospel to grow again, we need to match the breadth of our relationship, with depth of relationships. In our facebook world where it is possible to have a thousand friends on your page, but still sit at home lonely. Part of our kingdom mandate is to go deeper with people, to again create depth of relationship, the growth of the gospel depends on it.

Strange Cargo

I was about to go to bed the other night when the late movie came on. It was an old black and white film called Strange Cargo. I thought that I would watch for ten minutes and then go to bed. However before I knew it I was engrossed and I stayed up and watched the whole film. The movie tells the story of a group of inmates escaping from the notorious French penal colony known as Devil’s Island in French Guyana.

The first third of the film focuses on the escape and the sexual tension between the two lead characters, and so you completely miss the entrance of the character Cambreau (played by Ian Hunter pictured left in the photo), who initially appears to simply be one of the escapees. However as the film progesses you begin to notice that there is something strange about Cambreau, while the other escapees hobble and scramble their way to freedom, Cambreau walks with a strange lightness, purpose and confidence in his step.

While the other prisoners deviously betray each other, Cambreau shows incredible self sacrifice, often placing his life at risk to save others. He says little, but when he does talk he makes sense, slowly the prisoners begin to look to him for advice and decision making. While one prisoner who is religous spews judgement and hatred upon his fellow escapees, Cambreau treats each prisoner no matter what their background with humanity.

As several prisoners confront their deaths, Cambreau whispers to the escapees in their last moments, helping them to face death with dignity, and aiding them in their last moments to see the error of their ways and make peace with their God. Cambreau stands up to the prisoners who attempt to cheat him, provocatively forcing them to confront their own issues, and to gain self awareness.

As the film progresses you can’t help but feel that there is something mysteriously magnetic about Cambreau. As the escapees reach their final destination, you realise that the Strange Cargo that they are carrying is Cambreau himself. The final clue of the film as to Cambreau’s identity is given in the final shot of the film as he walks off in to a dark corridor and an old sailor crosses himself. You realise that the escape is just a metaphor for life, and that what you have been watching is a contemporary account of Jesus’ incarnation on earth, Cambreau is Christ.

For a film shot in 1940 I have to admit I was quite shocked with the level of religious symbolism in the film. At the time this film was seen as quite daring, the Catholic church felt that some of the content of the film went beyond the sensibilities of the day. I have to admit this is definitely one of the better religious film that I have seen. If it ever again comes on late one night make sure you stay up!

Sin and the Birds

On Sunday at church I preached on the concept of Sin, using Alfred Hitchcocks’ The Birds as a tool. I first saw the film as a kid and was fascinated with the concept of birds attacking people (which does happen here in Australia when magpies get a bit overprotective during spring.)

On Sunday I spoke about the way in which sin has become quite an unfashionable topic both inside and outside of the church. In The Age newspaper the religious affairs reporter Barney Zwartz noted the following regarding the concept of sin in the modern world

“ ”Sin” has been disappearing for a while. American psychiatrist Karl Menninger (a non-believer) wrote in 1973 in Whatever Happened to Sin? that the word was rarely heard. “Does that mean that no sin is involved in all our troubles – sin with an ‘I’ in the middle? Is no one any longer guilty of anything? Guilty perhaps of a sin that could be repented and repaired or atoned for? Is it only that someone may be stupid or sick or criminal – or asleep?

This trend has accelerated. Look at celebrities who get into trouble and have to apologise. Perish the thought that they were callous, brutal, treacherous, selfish, insensitive, self-indulgent or greedy – they “made a mistake”. It is a phrase emptied of moral content by comparison with the alternatives. A mistake is when you take the wrong turn while driving; keeping on until you have overrun Poland is not a “mistake”.

No one is guilty any more, they are all victims. Modern psychology has reached the paradoxical conclusion that society can be collectively guilty (as with the recent stolen generations apology), even though it is comprised of individuals who are all innocent.”

Barney Zwartz.  The Resurrection of Sin  The Age Mar 21 2008

Zwartz’s accurate observations make Hitchcock’s study of sin in the Birds all the more relevant. To understand The Birds you have to realize that the Bird attacks that occur throughout the film are simply symbolic of the chaos and confusion caused by human sin and brokenness. The movie is set in the sleepy Northern Californian town of Bodega bay. An innocent romance begins between Mitch (played by Rod Taylor) a handsome bachelor and Melanie (played by Tippi Hedren) a beautiful socialite. However the movie explores in depth the interpersonal chaos that this relationship brings into the town and the family of Mitch. Every bird attack is preceded by a conversation in which one of the characters expresses pain that another has caused them. The film critic Donald Spoto says of the theological significance of the symbolism of the bird attacks,

“It would be…accurate to say that the attacks are the emblematic of original sin, the basic selfishness and weakness to which everyone is susceptible, to which every generation contributes and which causes even the innocent to suffer by virtue of their mere presence in the world…The birds are, then, humans forces of deception and abuse, representing all the unacknowledged frailties and imperceptions with which, however unwillingly, we hurt each other. The culprits of the story are not psychotics or people who murder or steal; they’re folks just like us, people who hold one another with less honor than they deserve, who without commitments tease and play and act selfishly, refusing to go deeper than the shallows.” 

Donald Spoto. The Art of Alfred Hitchcock  pg 336

Thus The Birds has a counter cultural message which speaks clearly to our society which is obsessed with rights over responsibility and victim-hood over moral accountability. The brokenness and hurt within us causes us to in turn hurt others. In one scene in the film, Hitchcock has a group of children playing blind-man’s bluff, this was deliberately inserted by the director as a metaphor for how we humans blindly injure others with our own dysfunctions. We are all responsible for our actions, if modern science has taught us anything, it is that we live in a symbiotic universe, in which every action affects our environment.

The end shot of the birds is of Melanie and Mitch’s family slowly driving away from their home which is now overrun with Birds. Hitchcock deliberately had no “The End’ appear at the conclusion of his film, it is a frighteningly shocking message, that left unchecked the unredeemed human will has the potential to overrun creation. Hitchcock’s creatively retells the message of Genesis and the fall. We cannot simply divide the world into good and bad camps, we are all responsible for wrong in the world.

The ending of the BIrds is quite nhillistic, however the end of history as told by the Bible paints a world freed from the destruction caused by human sin and brokeness.

Prophets during the reign of Queen Lindsey Lohan

When I think of the word prophet a couple of images come into my mind, the first image is of crazy eyed, bearded biblical prophets shouting condemnation down on Israel from mountain tops, the second image is of travelling pentecostal preachers who posses an almost clairvoyant ability to look across a congregation and instantly perceive the hidden sins in peoples lives.

Both of these images are of course caricatures. But lately I have been asking the question “What does a prophet look like today?” The thing that got me thinking about all of this was a review of my book by that bible of reviews, publishers weekly. The review was not that bad, but one line stuck in my mind “Sayers’s negativity about the culture is almost endless”. It was so innocuous, yet it annoyed me, what were they saying,? that I was one of those Ned Flanders type Christians who wags their fingers at the world? What made things even worse in my mind, was when amazon put the review up on my books page (check out the damage here.) Of all the positive reviews why did they have to choose that one?.

But then I thought back to a moment when I completed Alan Hirsch’s Apest survey which illuminates which category of Ephesians 4 leadership styles that you fit into (Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Shepard, Teacher). I came out as Prophet by miles. But I thought what do prophets look like today? There are not many around. There are so few in the church, most get driven out. Yet there are so many filmmakers, authors, musicians, journalists, politicians, humanitarians, even business leaders who you can tell posses a prophetic heart just waiting to be brought into the the kingdom.

So maybe you are more of a prophet than you think. But how can your recognise the traits of a prophet? Here are four key functions that prophets fufill.

1. Prophets are Endlessly Negative about the Culture. Why? Because the standard by which they measure things is not a pragmatic one. They measure our current reality against God’s coming reality. They do not say “Hey things could be worse” They measure where we are now against God’s perfect will for humanity and our world. They will never be happy until Christ returns and the heavens and earth are remade in perfection.
2. Prophets listen to the pathos of God.In his wonderful study of the Hebrew prophets, the  Jewish writer Abraham Heschel notes that prophets don’t just listen to God, they are attuned to the pathos or pain of God. Thus the prophets life can often be punctuated by great sadness, even sometimes depression. Like all humans they reflect the image of God, but specifically they reflect his sorrow at the fall of creation. Being a prophet is a bittersweet place to live in, it can be tiring and painful, yet the prophet holds a unique place in which he or she feels the heart beat of God.
3. Prophets are a counter voice.  Israel was unique to other cultures in that she had both kings and prophets. The prophets always spoke from the margins of culture, they spoke not just for God, but for God’s heart for those who were on the fringe of culture. You will notice that in the bible that prophet’s ministries were often matched to the reign of kings. They acted as the cultures conscience.
4. Prophets speak truth. The prophets spoke truth into times dominated by lies and false realities, they shone lights into the darkness of deception. They helped people understand and interpret their lives during times of great confusion, chaos and change.

More than ever we need prophets today, we need counter voices to the dominant rhetoric of the day. We need young leaders who will act as the counter point to the kings and queens of our age, who will speak for God during the reign of MTV or Lindsey Lohan? Who will interpret and breathe truth into an age of hyper-consumer mirages? Who is willing to have their lives turned up side down, to sit in God’s pain for the world? To risk being unpopular in an age which has deified popularity?

I told my friend from high school about what publishers weekly said about me. He told me that was the best compliment that I could be given, he was the proud father of a young baby girl, that in the past he did not care so much, but now as a father he could barely watch the nightly news, he wanted the best world that his daughter could grow up in. He said that things have to change. So am I endlessly negative about our culture? Until Christ comes and remakes our world as he intended it to be… You betcha!

 

 

Leadership as avenue to Stardom

Take a walk through any toy store today and you will notice the amount of toys that are focused on performance and celebrity. 

A classic example is the Hannah Montana stage set (pictured left) which comes with stage lighting and everything you need to stage your own stadium concertin your lounge room. Now kids have always enjoyed playing around singing and putting on little plays. But today the emphasis on being in the limelight and being a star is incredible.

Douglas Rushkoff in his book Playing the Future coined the term Screenagers, which referred to the first generation to grow up completely in front of screens be they TV, PC or mobile cell phones. For the screenager meaning and worth is to be found being in front of the screen, the people who matter are on stage, the successful don’t just consume media but create it.

When I spent some time researching the lives of young leaders in ministry I saw this phenomenon in action. The idea of servant leadership seemed so passe to them. The aim was to get on stage and to get known, to them that was success in ministry. Those of you training young leaders need to be aware of this dynamic, we need to again promote the idea of servant leadership, not as a vehicle for becoming known but rather as a tonic for the soul.

The Pink Elephant in the Missional Room

There is much discussion at the moment about the missional movement. The realisation that the church is on a back foot in the West continues to push leaders to develop solutions that will ensure that the church has a future. Therefore if you head down to your local Christian book store, you will find volumes of titles on how your church can become more missional. At anytime there is probably a bunch of Christian professionals somewhere running a conference on missional church and engagement with secular culture. At this time all over the world Christian bloggers are pressing publish on hundreds if not thousands of missional blogs, where discussions about how the church can share its good news, occur in a kind of professional dialect that is almost unintelligible to the average person.

But there is a fat, stinky pink elephant sitting in the middle of the missional conversation that everyone is ignoring. The majority of ordinary Christians are suffering a loss of confidence in their faith, this is particularly true of young adults who in the past were at the front of missional movements.

There is a parallel to be made between the missional conversation and the modern architecture movement that grew out of the German Bauhaus design school of the early 20th century . The Bauhaus school attracted fresh, hip and passionate students, who wished to change culture, by creating buildings and designs that did not feature the ornate styles of the rich, they wanted to create a new utilitarian style for the working class. The Bauhaus was the most cutting edge design and architecture movement of its day, and its influence can still be seen in design.

However there was a problem, the building designs for working class people that came out of the Bauhaus, were being designed by middle class intellectuals. Thus many of its buildings were despised by the working class people who had to live in them. Some have been demolished due to their unsuitability for habitation. The modernist architects of the Bauhas presumed that they knew what was going on in the lives of ordinary people, sadly they were only listening to their peers. I can’t help but feeling that the same dynamic is occurring today in the church in the West. Many missionalleaders, experts, authors and pastors, are simply out of touch with the day to day faith experiences of ordinary Christians.

I remember talking about the missional movement to a guy who works in a job full time secular job, after my extolling of incarnational approaches and cutting edge missional strategies he stopped me, he said “I work seventy hours a week, I have to work to pay my mortgage, I don’t even have time to cook myself a meal when I get home, At work I would love to share my faith with my co-workers but we are all so under the pump that we don’t even have time to have lunch, let alone muse on the nature of God and the Universe. When these new missional experts have a plan for how guys like me can that actually works get back to me!” I retreated with my tail between my legs.

As I get around I find that ordinary believers in the West are using most of the little energy that they have to protect their own faiths in the face of the corrosive effects of secularism. Such a crisis of confidence in faith has devastating effects upon our ability to share our faith. If you look at the success of the early church in spreading the gospel, much of this success was borne out of people being so positive and excited about their faith that they told whoever they were in contact with, and also from the transformative effect of faith upon the lives of non-believers. 

For me this is where so much of the missional movement thinking falls down. The average believer living in the MTV West is not running about telling everyone about their faith, often when I speak to groups of young adults and ask them to compile a list of people that they know who’s lives have been transformed by the gospel, they struggle to name more than a couple of names if any. In fact many young adults I meet tell me that they think that their faith erodes their quality of life.

It’s great to have wonderful new missional strategies but if you troops are suffering from low morale you are not going to win many battles.

A denominational leader who has heard me talk about this topic approached me the other day to tell me that their internal research has shown that in the last five years, people in their denomination have become far more involved in social justice projects, and in community activities outside of the Christian faith, yet they are less likely than five years ago to share their faith. The missional movement has inspired people to get outside of the four walls of the church, to get active and involvedin their community and their world, but it has made a fatal error, it has presumed that ordinary beleivers are happy, ready and willing to pass on their faith to others. The missional movement has failed to show people what it is to live a vibrant and relevant faith in the soil of 21st century culture. It has not developed a new apologetic for a hedonistic, hyper-consumerist world.

If we are to inspire a new misisonal movement in the West, we must learn to again inspire people about their faiths. 

In his book The Discovery of God: Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism  David Klinghoffer notes that there is another creation story in Genesis besides that in chapter 1 and 2. Sure we know the creation story of Adam and Eve, who’s lives and world are filled newness and naivety. But Klinghoffer notes that there is another creation story that occurs in the lives of Abraham and Sarah, those two infertile, old and cynical desert nomads, who laugh at the idea of God giving them a child. Yet God remakes them in the midst of their exhausted cynicism, out of their tired seen-it-all-beforeness God changes history. If we are going to again learn what it is to do mission in the West we must listen again to this story, missional leaders must learn like God, to breath life into tired lungs, to re-educate, re-inspire and rehabilitate. The future of the church in the West depends on it.

Is Consumerism Evil?

For the last four years I have extensively taught, spoken and written about the effects of consumerism on our culture and our faith. I have found that one of the main questions that people ask me is “Is consumerism evil?”. My answer is no. Taken at its most basic definition, a consumer is someone who buys goods or services.

If I were to start a business selling hammers, I obviously would need to communicate to the public as to why my hammers are worth buying. I would need to extol my products virtues. I would need to communicate that they are well made and that they perform the function for which they were designed. This type of basic consumerism sells products on the basis of the merits of their function.

However today most of the advertising that we encounter sells products not on the basis of their function but rather applies various layers of meanings that appeal to human needs, wants and desires; we are now dealing with what I term hyper-consumerism.

Advertising today, uses sex, maternal instincts, our need for community, our desire for power and status, our need for meaning, and even our religious desires in order to coerce us to buy. Many of these messages are placed in advertising without the consumer ever being aware. To me this is the kind of hyper consumerism that I abhor.

One of the reasons that we have arrived at this point is that our secular culture no longer has a greater authority to appeal to in order to bring restraint upon our consumer desires. Fascinatingly throughout history Christians have developed various checks and balances in order to keep consumerism from running wild.

During the middle ages the Northern city states of Italy began to prosper immensely. This new found wealth created a problem of conspicuous consumption. In order to deal with this problem a lay lead movement begun called the Humilitari, in which ordinary people took on various vows of poverty in order to avoid the spiritual negatives that came with economic growth.

A similar movement began in The Netherlands as the spice trade brought incredible wealth to the Dutch in the 17th century. The Dutch Puritans encouraged enterprise and trade, yet also instigated various practices in order to ensure that their wealth did not erode their spirituality.

However today in our secular culture, there are no bigger stories that point to a reality beyond consuming goods and experiences. We are even encouraged to construct our identities from the things that we consume. In the past faith shaped consumerism, today consumerism shapes faith.

Faith gives us resources that point beyond a reality that is only shaped by consumption. As believers we can offer messages of meaning that are not just ruses to sell more stuff. Therefore it essential that we as Christians again need to explore creative ways to live faithful lives in a culture of consumerism.

Gen Y role models for losing faith.

The fact that young adults are leaving the church in the West in droves is hardly new news to any of us. (You can download my PDF resource at to some of the reasons why here.) However what a lot of parents, pastors and leaders don’t know is that pop culture provides models and examples to Gen Y’s of how to turn your back on your faith.

Many of the pop culture role models that Gen Y young women have grown up with have moved from Christian teens to secular young women. Their behaviour charts a pattern that many young christian women counsciously or sub consciously mimic on their own journey’s away from faith.

Probably the most classic example is Britney Spears. If you are a 20 year old female Britney has dominated your pop culture consciousness since you were 11. Britney of course began here career espousing her Christian faith and her commitment to maintaining her virginity until marriage. However only a few years later we had the hypersexualized Britney in a wedding dress making out with Madonna, an image that was seen by millions if not billions around the world. Britney seemed to be playing out the classic Christian teen rebellion against her upbringing in front of the world, I remember clearly footage taken at a church service of Britney’s mother leading her down the front at an altar call in a hope to rehabilitate her daughter.

Young women have also grown up with Jessica Simpson, another singer marketed to teens and tweens, who also began espousing her commitment to keeping herself for her husband. Simpson began in Christian music, however just like Britney we only have to fast forward a few years, to find our former Christian recording artists, belting out a Nancy Sinatra cover writhing over a car in a bikini. Simpson now publicly states that she has left behind ‘religion’ and now favours a loose spirituality.

Now we have Preachers kid Katy Perry (see pic above left), who’s song “I kissed a Girl” is topping charts around the world. The song extols the virtue of girls kissing other girls in order to impress boys, and features Katy surrounded by females in various states of underwear and undress. What was Katy’s last album? Yep, you guessed it! A christian gospel album.

When you read interviews with these Gen Y stars the mantra of the day is can be summed up by Rihanna’s album title ‘Good Girl Gone Bad’. Gen Y’s live in a culture in which they are taught to live experientally, they are taught to experiment, sample, and then discard. One month it might be ecstasy, the next month Church, the next month casual sex.

Experiences can be consumed and then dropped in the blink of an eye. In this culture, foundational truth is irrelevant, all that matters is the accumulation of ‘fun’ experiences. Feelings rule over facts. This is not the postmodernism of the academy that so many Christians were worried about in the 90’s, this is the day to day operational postmoderism that Gen Y has grown up with Christian or not.

Strangely things seemed to have reversed now, in the past people went a bit wild in their teens and settled down. Now in our superflat culture it seems that faith is a ‘crazy’ thing that you do in your late teens and early twenties, an almost necessary but childish phase that you experience before you get real and commit to the ‘play ethic’ of hedonism.

Smugglers of Faith

I always have several books that I am reading at once. One book that I am reading is Hashish: A Smugglers Tale by Henri De Monfreid. The book has sold for years in its original French, but has been recently translated by Penguin as part of its classics series.

Yes I know what you are thinking, what a strange book to be reading. The book is a true life account of Monfreid’s naive attempts to smuggle as ship load of Hashish across the gulf of Suez in the 1920’s. (Strangely Monfreid did not even know what Hashish was. He just wanted an adventure.) Monfreid was intellectual, aristocrat, adventurer and smuggler all rolled into one and his book provides a fascinatingly romantic insight into a lost world.  

Monfreid must pass all kinds of check points, and customs officials, he must use his cunning and guile to get his cargo through. The book reminds me a book I read when i was very young called God’s Smuggler; which told the story of Brother Andrew a dutch missionary who during the cold war smuggled Bibles behind the Iron Curtain. As a young boy I was thrilled with the adventure and the idea of smuggling.  

Upon reflection I have found the motif or metaphor of smuggling as a provocative one to apply to the sharing of faith in today’s superflat culture. We are not in the situation that the church found itself under communism, harried and persecuted; instead we face a kingdom of empty happiness and flashy distraction.  What would it look like to be smugglers of Faith in our culture today, to use our guile and cunning, to subversively inject into public discourse, fresh biblical truths?