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Rough Drafts

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I didn’t plan this type of life. I’m always punctual; I always do things well. But Monday my second week at the job, I’m still scurrying around the bathroom at 8:56 AM—a quick rinse with Scope, a swipe with the blush, when I jab myself right in the eye with mascara. My eyes start tearing—the brown-black mascara is everywhere.

I splash my eyes with water and then dab at the black with toilet paper. The mascara’s about gone—just a smear under my right eye. The mirror, still streaked from last month’s tenants, smudges bits of my face in the reflection: my chin and left eyebrow both blurry. I look more tired than usual, my face thinner, longer. Behind me in the mirror hose hang off the shower rod and last week’s newspaper sits on the back of the john. “What a dump,” I think, but it’s exactly what I want: two rooms in an old house, a town of unfamiliar faces.

I’m about to finish the job with cotton swabs. My eyes are deep set and shadows catch below them, but I see mascara in the curve and the slight indent below the eye. I slow and touch the spot with a finger. This seems important: the dim light in the bathroom; the way I can’t hear if I’m breathing, not as if I’m alone, but as if I’m not here at all. Slowly, I blend the mascara into skin to make a soft grey and then dab foundation over the top. If my right eye matched the left, it’d look like lack of sleep. It’s that subtle. I practice looking down, looking suspicious, looking nowhere.

I think of carefully folding tissue into my bra at age thirteen. I held my breath for ten seconds before tiptoeing down the stairs into the kitchen, cold-shouldering Mom’s oatmeal, her quick-clipped talk, the way she sipped her coffee as if inhaling the only good in the world. I avoided her eyes and let the screen door clack shut as loudly as possible. I slouched like a spy the whole twelve blocks to school, but once there I loved being ordinary. Back arched, chest out, I strutted past lockers and the secrets they held, glad to be like everyone I’d ever known: average. Only Carla Ortella noticed the slight rounding of my breasts.

I think of spending babysitting money on turtleneck after turtleneck. Every color imaginable: pink, chartreuse, fuchsia, and berry red—colors to hide the marks of pretended passion, colors to hide that there was nothing to hide. Some weeks I’d pinched my neck before tugging on a sweater, just to know something was there, something that shouldn’t show.

And I think of winter: standing on the porch in a snowstorm and eating an apple, biting right into the bruise, hearing no crunch. The bruise of that apple. The shadow below my eye. I wash my hands and try to forget, to think of nothing. But when I head downstairs and walk around the corner, the bus is pulling away.

It’s 9:40 by the time I slip into the office. The copyeditors are staring at their desks, pretending to think in complete sentences, carefully punctuating everyone else’s dreams. They sit poised, ready to delete paragraphs and restructure thoughts.

This wasn’t a job I wanted, but it’s as good a place as any; it isn’t where I was before. Here I can delete things that aren’t important—things that aren’t rugs under someone’s feet. Here a question mark has never seen How will I live? or Where will I go? And therefore is only a word, a transition without plans.

I think of the way children cry when you’re leaving, in gasps, trying to breathe in the last of you. Then I think how much it can hurt to breathe, the weight on your chest, and how all of this has nothing to do with now or here or with people I barely know within arm’s reach day after day.

By the time I settle in for my second week, the editorial staff is well into the third chapter of a 300-page book tentatively entitled The Great Fake Out: Religion in the Public Arena. On the bulletin board above my desk, my coworker, Luanne, has thumbtacked APRIL 21, the book’s deadline. It’s February.

Not till after I get coffee and pull my chair close to the desk does she nod and look at her watch. She blinks her eyes slowly, brushes hair from her forehead, and then she winks and hands me a doughnut. “A worm for the early bird,” she says. I think maybe this is supposed to be a joke, but now she’s frowning. I can tell she hates me—that they all hate me. No doubt they finished their coffee and were reading copy by 9:05, all in a row like this, looking meticulous, stereotypically neat, efficient. They look at me like I’ve really screwed up, as if my absence has caused the deletion of whole chapters, as if the first page of the book will now read “Chapter 3: Recognizing Wolves,” and an errata will be glued, book by book, to the back page: “Due to an illness beyond one copyeditor’s control, Chapters 1-2 have been omitted.”

In a passage describing co-hosts on Bible talk shows, I change She ruins her life to He or she ruins his or her life—more awkward yet more accurate. I removeyou must surrender and wherever submission appears, I cross it out and write repression. I’m starting to get into this: add something here, take something else away.

But by eleven o’clock, I’m getting restless and a bit ticked off that no one’s noticed my handiwork. I turn to Luanne, “You think this should be a semicolon or a period?” Then I start to read: “Actually, it’s easy to tell the difference between the two; for example, the charlatan—”

“A period,” Luanne interrupts. She looks at me, at the page, and at me again, touches her own eye, and incorporates the gesture into brushing back her bangs. “Or a semicolon,” she apologizes. What she means is: It’s not worth fighting over. It doesn’t matter.

* * *

Tuesday I get up by six thirty and apply my makeup slowly; this time a little darker. I brush brown and pink eye shadow onto my lids, use eyeliner with a steady hand. I trace my lips with a dark plum gloss and then smack them loudly. The dress I wear is the color of rain.

I get to the office early, sip my coffee black, and spend a half an hour humming to myself and concocting excuses: “I ran into the corner of the cupboard door” or “The ten-year-old brat next door was shooting rubber bands again—just missed my eye.” I don’t mention fists or belts or broken plates, but I think them, think them so loudly they fill my head, shatter all over my face. When the others start trickling in, first the receptionist, then Luanne, then the guys in shipping, then my boss, Doug, I sigh dramatically, “So much quieter,” as if I’ve just escaped from a Kiss concert. Nobody nods, but they notice me. They know that I live alone, that I just moved here, and that I have no friends—I don’t need any.

The guys in shipping cluster around me. They are all six foot or taller and wear Extra Large. There’s no way out. They shake my hand in jerks, bark “Dave, Paul, Vern, Deano, Dan,” and demand that I remember, not mix them up. I keep my hand as limp as possible, smile only slightly, and stutter my name. They look me up and down three times, and then ask me if I made the coffee; they tell me it’s bitter.

On the way to our separate offices, Doug, a big man with a wide tie, follows me. By my door he’s suddenly awkward. “Doing a good job,” he stammers, “coming right along.”

I look away. “Yeah, it’s coming OK,” I say without any conviction whatsoever. Then I leave him standing in the hallway, just where I want him. He doesn’t know where to look or what to do.

Later, when Luanne surprises me and asks if I want to go to lunch, I surprise her back. “I’m meeting someone,” I say. I don’t even look up.

But I spend the thirty minutes of lunch alone at the drugstore makeup counter. Cosmetic companies don’t know anything; all of their names are stupid:blushing beigeravenous redpassionate pink. What about abuse-me apricotSpit-at-me-with-your-stale-breath salmon? Won’t fit on the labels? Too much for the average housewife? I take a felt-tipped pen from my purse and think of drawing lines straight as arrows through the adjectives provocativetempestuous, and sexy, leaving the colors not strong but by themselves: peachturquoisesilver. Instead, I line the air and then trace the lifeline on my palm.

When I check the price of some foundation, the ink smears on my hand like a cut and comes off on the bottle. I move to the register, hand the clerk $16.30 for burnt-orange blush, tawdry-tan foundation, and three shades of lipstick, all dark. The girl, a teenager, looks me right in the eyes. She knows.

The rest of the week, I decide to dress up, wear my makeup heavy, and consistently arrive fifteen minutes late. I stop at shipping on the way in, steal stamps and scissors, and tie string around my middle finger. I ask for zip codes to Xenia, Fort Knox, and Three Mile Island or the postal rates to Hiroshima and Dachau. When one of the shipping guys looks at me to see if I’m kidding, I stumble over a box and then lean on his arm.

I make sure I’m the last one to finish my coffee. I make sure everyone can tell that I’m nervous and shaky. And then I drop my cup in the hallway. I pretend to try not to cry, and instead I whimper, softly as if under blankets, pillows, as if I can barely breathe. I’m in the corridor by the coffee machine; the others are at their desks. They poke their heads outside their doors and ask, “Have you seen Doug?” or “Have you seen the cover artwork?” or “Does a colon go in or outside of quotation marks?” I answer, “no,” “no,” and “outside,” dabbing coffee off of my blue suit, the one that hangs too loosely on my frame, looser now than ever. I act as if picking up broken pieces of mug is the most natural thing, as if I’ve done it every morning of my life, as if I’m glad the mug didn’t hit me in the head.

I pretend to be embarrassed and look down, and then I suck the blood from a cut on my finger. The piece of mug in my other hand says “THEN YOU DIE.” I throw it away with a loud clunk and go back to my desk. Ten minutes later, I realize I’ve spotted the copy with blood, and I try, unsuccessfully at first, to cover the splotches with white-out.

Everything’s going OK when I come to the passage “let not your adornment be merely external, braiding the hair, wearing gold jewelry . . . ” I draw a thin line through the letters. In the margin, I write Ye shall know a book by its cover; act accordingly. After the phrase “let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the imperishable quality of a gentle and quiet spirit,” I insert and the mentality of a doormat. I think of writing Chinese fortunes for a living, crediting stray thoughts to a mystic. I imagine poking pieces of paper between the crisp folds of a cookie. I imagine writing A stranger will change your life and having someone—a young man, a girl, an old lady—wait not in terror but in hope, wait patiently with faith. I partly retract what I’ve done, writing STET next to my changes. Later, when Luanne goes over the page, she erases the markings, corrects the spelling errors I missed (insubstantelinigmarenagade), and doesn’t say a word.

I try to work for an hour or so, but things are too quiet, so I put my head in my hands. When Luanne asks if I’m OK, I say “No” and head for the bathroom. In the stall, I stare at the freshly painted door. I touch it with my fingers, my palm. Then I take a nickel from my pocket and scratch out a sentence. It’s several minutes before I can remember my new phone number, remember which one it is. When I do, I carve the numbers an inch high, watching as the paint chips float, tiny as snow, to the tile. I think of sneaking into the men’s restroom and scratching my address, my social security number, and my measurements into the wall beside the urinal. Instead, I clog the toilet with paper towels and watch as it overflows. I move to the fluorescent-lit mirror, reapply my lipstick, and accidentally bite my lip. Blood dries on my chin in a thin line. I don’t wash it off.

From then on, someone asks me to lunch everyday. They ask about work, sports, and the weather. I answer as cryptically as I can, “Yes, there were six kids in my family, and we never once fought,” or “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge,” or “70% of all married women cheat on their husbands within the first five years.” They don’t know what to say. They try to laugh, but can’t; they try to look sympathetic. Usually they shift uncomfortably in their seats, slurp soup, and say, “Did you see that miracle shot of Bird’s? Just try to stop them now!” or “Heard it’s going to hit fifty tomorrow. About time.”

* * *

March I start hanging out with the guys in shipping. At work they poke their heads in my office, grin, and ask me how I’m feeling this fine morning. We’ve got the routine down to a T. After work, we stop at Tony’s, buy a couple of rounds, and maybe a few of us wander over to the Wayside. When we walk in, they steer me toward the bar. I learn everyone’s drink and how to carry four pitchers of beer at once. On good days, I can dance like this between tables. I can sing. I make up lyrics and pretend they’re old. I add my name to the songs, the names of the guys. Some nights I call everyone Joe.

The second week, I start surprising them: cream them in darts, slaughter them in pool. For fun, they try to make me nervous and wolf-whistle every time I lean over for a shot. One asks me my favorite color of ball. Another says to knock ’em hard. As soon as my arm is cocked, someone bumps against me, pretending he’s drunk. And always they swear at my last ball as it banks and spins toward the corner. We play snooker, cutthroat, and nine-ball for hours; eight out of ten games I win. All the while, the guys are smiling, waiting. I try to see myself in their eyes, but they move too quickly and won’t stand still.

Some nights I look up to see I’m dancing with the wrong man, someone I don’t know and haven’t met. He knows everything about me: my birthday, my mother’s maiden name, and what I like most for breakfast. Sometimes across the bar, I see a woman nodding. She touches her lip, her eyes, incorporates the gesture into brushing back her bangs. She nods again, doesn’t smile.

* * *

Most nights, I stay out till five o’clock and come into work late with shadows under my eyes. Instead of getting angry, Doug becomes friendlier and more relaxed. He touches my arm in passing and gives me rides home in his new Ferrari. He slips opera tickets in with my paycheck and tells me to take a friend. Some days he calls me into his office, locks the door, and refuses to take any calls. It’s then that he asks me about the others, about job morale—do they like him? Are they happy? What do they do for fun? How much do they drink? I play dumb and smile, and then I wink the way the guys in shipping taught me. I start to call him Douglas, holding out the second syllable for two seconds and smiling when I say it. He tells me about his cousin, a stripper on the South Side who changed her name to Lola when she was eighteen. He gives her extra tips to help her out and make her way through college. He tells me a guy in shipping is a voyeur who steals pink lingerie from Sears; the receptionist has had three abortions; Luanne was once a call girl at the Ritz. It’s a joke, I think, and I laugh.

On Sunday, Doug wants me to meet him at the track and not tell the others. He’s an hour late and swearing. I win $50.70 on an exacta. But his horse loses, so he tears my ticket in half. I try to piece it together with clear fingernail polish, but it doesn’t hold. Still, when Doug asks me to his apartment to watch ball, I go and hope that his team will win. He throws potato chips like confetti in the air, slaps me on the back, and screams louder than anyone I know. I cheer with him, though I don’t care who wins.

The next week when editing finishes half the book, it gets its own electric pencil sharpener—”for a job well done.” I get tickets to a charity ball and a $100 bonus. For nothing, absolutely nothing.

I buy myself a silk short-sleeved blouse, ash gray, and wear it to work the next day. “A present,” I lie just to make them self-conscious, eye me over a bit more than usual, “from some man I met last week at the Purple Sunset. I’m talking to him, right, for about ten minutes—big guy with a great tan and muscles like a construction worker, only he claims he’s a surgeon—and he hands me a package, says, ‘Here, this ain’t my size, anyway . . . ‘” Of course, by this time whoever’s listening knows I’m lying my head off, and they laugh nervously. I see them, though, after lunch or just before quitting time, glance shyly at the bruise below my sleeve. (It only shows when I raise my arm.) Other days, I see their eyebrows twitch at the scratch on my neck, the burn on my lower wrist. I shrug, tell them “tennis, cat, iron” before they can ask. Or, to get them off my back, I say the impossible and wink: “Butch dropped in again. I made his coffee strong, and he socked me.” Or “Look, I didn’t want to tell Sam about us, but he had this cord around my neck and . . . ” They roll their eyes and groan. I get the reaction I want.

The next Monday, after we’ve worked together for over a month, Luanne gives me her number and tells me to call her, so we can get together for a movie, hang out, chat, hit the clubs. Alone in my apartment, I try to dial the number she gave me, but get the crisis hotline. I hang up before they ask me my name. I check the paper, number by number, and try again in a half an hour, and then an hour.

* * *

In April, the whole staff works late on the book. Some Saturdays we come in by nine o’clock, wear jeans, and order out for pizza. I roll up my sleeves so they won’t get in the sauce and eat six pieces in one sitting. In the hallway by the coffee machine, I teach Doug to do the tango. He grabs my hand too tightly and won’t let me lead. Luanne and I do a line dance and kick out our legs. We make up funny rhymes about the book and other people in the office and then chant them as loudly as we can. Our co-workers clap. We bow and bow again. When we settle down, we work quickly and get twice as much done.

Once, when the others are gone, Doug massages my shoulders and leans over the desk. “This passage here, at the bottom,” he says brushing against me, “weakens the entire argument, don’t you think? Can you make it stronger? More believable?” I look at him to see what he means and he’s laughing. About what? He raises his hand to his eyes, brushes back his bangs. “. . . then this pilot says to the stewardess . . .” But it’s too late; I’ve missed the transition.

He starts asking me questions that aren’t his business: where I’ve lived, why I wear long sleeves when it’s seventy? I start coming in earlier, staying later. I keep a running record of everyone’s errors, including my own, and then leave the list on Doug’s desk at the end of the week. I make up charts and timetables, redo style sheets. For hours I sit at my desk and hear nothing but the scratch of my pencil. I start getting to the office by seven o’clock to make the first pot of coffee. When I spill hot water and scald my hand, there’s no one there to see it, to tell.

* * *

In May I wear summer suits and no underwear and keep my makeup light. I sit outside at lunch and try to get a tan. I smile at only certain people and am promoted. By mid-month, I forget the names of all the guys in shipping, but remain civil—when I see them at wrestling matches, I wave. Twice a week I bring in gourmet coffee and jelly-filled doughnuts. I eat half the doughnuts myself and give the others to Luanne. I tell them I know a secret and, though they ask me again and again, I won’t say what it is. On payday, I stay late with Doug, drinking bourbon, breaking every pencil exactly in half, burning old copies of books, laughing. When he tells me to sock him in the stomach as hard as I can, I do and I know that I’ve hurt him. I wait for him to hurt me back. I wait.


At the Feet of Giants: An Interview with Gregory Wolfe, Part I

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Gregory Wolfe is editor and founder of Image, a quarterly journal that has featured prominent writers, sculptors, painters, and poets for over twenty years. The journal also hosts the Glen Workshop, fellowships for emerging writers, learning trips abroad, and numerous speaking engagements across the country. In Part I of this interview Wolfe discusses beauty, and in Part II he continues this discussion, riffing on the history of the journal and the importance of sleeping well.

The Other Journal (TOJ): Our current issue is about beauty, and so in the spirit of jazz, in which melodies are traded over time, performer to performer, I thought I would start with a quote from Dostoyevsky about beauty and let you play with that for a while. It is a fairly common one: “The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious, as well as terrible, God and the devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.”1

Gregory Wolfe (GW): That quote puts beauty in polarized terms, in terms of God and the devil, which is pretty traditional. Beauty has been a polarizing subject from the beginning. There are very few things that seem to be simultaneously really, really good and potentially really bad. Generally, things that seem really good and things that seem really bad are separate from one another. It’s rare that the same thing is seen, sometimes by the same person, with this ambiguity of being potentially one of the greatest things in the world and one of the worst things in the world. There is a long tradition of seeing beauty as dangerous because of its seductive power.

In that view, beauty is something that takes away your freedom and takes away your judgment; it is a kind of seduction. So from the beginning of human thought, the subject of beauty has evoked a kind of moralistic response because people feel that it is unpredictable, powerful, visceral. It could take you from where you are to some place where you may not want to be, or at least shouldn’t be, and so in some ways, it has evoked these moralistic responses that have sought to control it and confine it. I think that the notion that the devil plays around with beauty is deep-seated and of course, the very biblical/mythological understanding of Satan himself was that he was Lucifer, he was light, he was the light bearer, he was the most beautiful of all angels. And you might say that, almost like in a classical myth, there is this idea of the beauty of Satan being part of what led to his vanity, to his rebellion, and to his downfall. You can see it in Plato in the ideal republic; you can see it in various religious movements; you can see it in iconoclasm.

On the other hand, though it’s often playing catch up, there is also this other tradition that suggests that beauty is something very, very good, that it’s mysteriously allied to truth and goodness and the old philosophical formulation of what they call the transcendentals—the three great attributes that God had in total perfection and fullness—truth, goodness, and beauty. It is just the nature of our somewhat contorted Western tradition that truth and goodness have often seemed to be the workhorses, or as I sometimes say, they’re the big sisters, and beauty is Cinderella.

Beauty doesn’t seem to have the gravitas and moral rectitude of truth and goodness, but what the deepest thinkers have understood is that you can neither deify beauty and place it in isolation nor demonize it and place it in opposition. It is always mixed in with human experience, and to discern what beauty is doing, to discern the beauty of a situation, work of art, or a natural scene, is part of the way that we navigate through the world, and so I try to stress a happy medium between this deifying and demonzing of beauty. In one sense, though, I suppose I do work a little overtime for beauty because I think it has been the Cinderella over the centuries, stuck behind philosophy and theology.

Another way to look at it: if you look at the human faculties that engage those transcendentals, I think of another trinity: faith, reason, and then the third term that rarely makes it into any philosophical/theological formulations—imagination. Again, just as we hear about truth and goodness, we hear about faith and reason. No one’s quite willing to elevate imagination to a third power of the human soul. It really wasn’t until the Romantic era that poets and writers began to really think hard about beauty as part of the human capacity. The Romantics come with their own baggage, but at least they had that going for them; they really fought hard about that, particularly people like Coleridge and some German thinkers like Schiller.

TOJ: The church is very forward with evangelists of truth and evangelists of goodness, but I am hard-pressed to name an evangelist of beauty. Is this something that you would call yourself?

GW: You are raising another cluster of issues there. Obviously, on the one hand there is a kind of opposition between the terms evangelism and art, because as people have pointed out down through the centuries, one of the things that is most important about art is that it doesn’t preach. It’s not didactic. It gives you space that you inhabit imaginatively, space in which you’re reading between the lines to get truth rather than it being presented to you. Art is not proclamation. It’s not propositional truth. It’s this intuitive response that the imagination makes to a beautifully crafted object. So, in one sense art doesn’t evangelize.

But I think what you are asking me is a very straightforward question, which is “Are there people who need to evangelize for the importance of beauty?” and I’d say there are two types of people who do this. One is the people who simply make the beauty—the artists and the writers—and then there are the midgets like me who skitter around the feet of the artistic giants, saying “Don’t be scared of these artistic giants! They’re amazing! Welcome them into your life!” I am just a pygmy. I am just trying to explicate the liner notes so that you can read and not be scared of these incredible giants.

So, yeah, I’m a critic. I sometimes call myself an impresario. My personal vocation and my job is to try to advocate within the Christian community for beauty and for beauty’s spiritual and theological entanglements and associations—just as I go out into the secular sphere, which doesn’t officially have as much problem with beauty as we hypermoralistic religious people do, but which nonetheless has its own problems in seeing the relationship between beauty and the infinite, beauty and the transcendent. There are people who need to occasionally articulate these things because, as I said, beauty is the subject of debate, controversy, uncertainty, ambiguity. So, occasionally, there are people who try to make straight the way for deeper appreciation of the original creative voice, and in that sense I am a servant, a midget servant trying to serve that larger experience of the creative voice itself.

Please read Part II of our interview with Gregory Wolfe here.


Notes
Click the images at the bottom of the Notes section to purchase these books from Amazon.com and help support Gregory Wolfe and The Other Journal.

1. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. by Constance Garrett (New York, NY: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1999).

At the Feet of Giants: An Interview with Gregory Wolfe, Part II

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Gregory Wolfe is editor and founder of Image, a quarterly journal that has featured prominent writers, sculptors, painters, and poets for over twenty years. The journal also hosts the Glen Workshop, fellowships for emerging writers, learning trips abroad, and numerous speaking engagements across the country. In Part I of this interview Wolfe discusses beauty, and here in Part II he continues this discussion, riffing on the history of the journal and the importance of sleeping well.

The Other Journal (TOJ): You spoke earlier about the temptations to either kill or idolize beauty, and I was wondering about your experience of putting together a literary journal. Could you tell a little about the journey and work of avoiding spectacle and flash while remaining faithful to beauty?

Gregory Wolfe (GW): We could be here all day on that one, not only because I like to hear the sound of my own voice or talk about myself, but because I’ve lost some sleep over it. It’s amazing—this area of the literary/arts quarterly seems like a sleepy little area, but in a way it is hotly contested; it is full of adventure, thrills and spills, and near-death experiences. I had no idea how such a quaint little thing like a literary quarterly could bring my family to the brink of economic extinction and how intense some of the moral issues would be.

I suppose that anything I say is going to have the danger of sounding like back-patting, but we have had to face some serious judgment calls about how we do what we do—how slick are we going to be? What is the relationship between surface and depth? Where is the level between being too elitist and inaccessible and being too populist and too pandering to dumbed-down tastes?

And I suppose that if there is any charge that could be leveled at us about the last twenty years, it’s the charge of elitism. I sometimes have to laugh, but there are well-meaning people that sometimes say quite innocently that Image is such a “scholarly” journal. When they say that I respond, “There are no footnotes! There is no academic jargon! These are short stories and poems and paintings!” But what they mean is that this is deep stuff; this is challenging material. This is a six thousand–word short story. Who reads six thousand–word short stories anymore? We all read blog posts. We’re reduced to Twitter, which is 140 characters. That’s the nature of the modern and postmodern era. So we at Image are liable to this charge of being, in fact, very old-fashioned and out of touch with the times.

I am not impervious to the sting of being called elitist. I am an American like anyone else—Europeans are all sophisticated with their wine and stuff, but Americans want a beer and a good Hollywood movie. And so I twitch like any other American twitches—I don’t want to be seen as elitist. On the other hand, the serious literary quarterly and serious art, fiction, poetry, paintings, sculpture—these things do require something of us. There should be a midget running around pointing to the giants; there should be some voice saying that we don’t have to eat the five million Big Macs there are to be eaten. A few of us should have a nice filet mignon or even a vegetarian platter, not this instant, tasty, nutritionless, fattening confection that is the ubiquitous popular culture which we live in.

So just to give you a sense of the sorts of decisions we made that exemplified this—number one, the layout of the journal. It’s classical. It’s very low key. It’s a journal, so we didn’t make a magazine with funky layouts. Open it up—it has nice typography, but it is like a book, which means that you are not looking for inset quotes and little cartoons. You’re just going to get into this literary experience, to lose yourself in writing, the way classic literature asks you to do. We’re not going to gussy it up.

Even the cover design is white background. I could show you all sorts of other journals, and in fact, I do a presentation for the interns about the front cover. I can barely fit the presentation into an hour because of all the assumptions that go into what that cover looks like—the marketing assumptions, the philosophical/aesthetic assumptions. For example, we try to do a whole work of art on the front cover, and that’s because we respect the work as a whole. We’re not just making it a background. Some magazines will have a very colorful front cover, but the work of art is lost—it’s just colors and swirls. We use the full work in its integrity, and we don’t crop it. We don’t overprint it. Again, the point is that this is a publication that is going to ask you to engage the work in its full experience.

Those are debatable decisions. It’s more radical than you would think, because you’re going to have twenty years of people saying, “Well, no wonder! You could have twenty or fifty thousand subscribers if only you would turn it into more of a magazine and make them short 500-word pieces!” And I am sitting there feeling more conflicted than you might think. I want fifty thousand people to subscribe to my journal rather than four or five thousand people. But if I made the compromises I’d need to make to get all those subscribers, I wouldn’t sleep that well at night. There are people in the culture business who have, frankly, sold out, because of the pressure to pander. But I don’t think they sleep very well at night. I need my sleep.

TOJ: So, why? What makes that decision for you every time those temptations come up? What holds you through the dark night?

GW: I don’t want this to come across as sort of playing on my Stradivarius here for sympathy. There have been a lot of rewards. Just as you might say that we often get fewer subscribers than we would if we were more slick and populist, we often get compliments that are not just tossed off lightly. They’re often almost like testimonies. People will talk to me about Image at conferences; I will be sitting there in our booth, and they will come up and they will testify. They’ll say, “This has meant something to me.” And I know they’re not talking in either mere aesthetic or spiritual terms, but of this really interesting spiritual/aesthetic experience the journal gives them. So I want to make it clear that although it’s been tough to hold the line for a serious literary quarterly, the rewards, while not monetary, have been deeply felt. There are human spiritual rewards for doing it this way. It’s those testimonies that convince me that what we’ve been doing is right.

I also want to make it clear that however much I am the founder, I have always been surrounded by people who’ve put incredible labor and lifeblood into this, too. For example, my wife, co-editors, the first person who donated the money to print the pilot issue. I’ve always been surrounded by an incredible cloud of witnesses and coworkers.

TOJ: The testimony part is interesting. I recently read a story, “The Sparrow” by Ron Hansen, in the twentieth anniversary issue and shortly afterward an ache like a prayer came over me. That story was so good that it surprised me. I have read a lot of the giants—Flannery O’Connor, Merton—and it was this story that made my day better.

GW: We often hear that. It’s not so much that the material is overtly intended to become a devotional, and yet, it can be. I’ve had people tell me that our daily blog is part of their devotional because Monday though Friday they can be guaranteed to read beautifully crafted 800-word essays that are often about the same thing that we are about, which is the way that art, faith, and life intersect one another. I think a well-told story, though only theological by implication, can be a part of one’s spiritual life on that given day.

TOJ: I have been impressed by the way, over twenty years, Image journal continuously finds new talent. I always assumed that there was a rather small pool of creators that were concerned with sort of spiritual matters, or with the struggle of the seen and the unseen. But in every issue, there are new names and quality work. What are your thoughts on that?

GW: When we first started, we thought that we might only find material for four or five issues. We thought maybe we would at least make it into some footnote someday in some essay on the cultural history of the late twentieth century—“a short-lived little journal attempted to uphold the notion that even in late modernity great art could still be created out of the encounter with this Judeo/Christian tradition.”

Little did we know that the culture was changing around us. Something happened for which renaissance may be too strong a word, but let’s say there was a revival. In some ways, I would argue that the high-water mark of secularism in the public culture was probably the 60s and 70s, and certainly, by the late 80s when we started, there were a lot of signs that spirituality, Christianity, was going to be given at least the occasional place at the table, at least more than it had been. The “fortress” mentality that Christians had developed over the course of the previous hundred years was dated and no longer relevant. There was more openness. A part of that was that Christians were understanding that there were more ways to witness to their faith than proclamation, apologetics, and politics. There was a hunger for other ways of communicating and nurturing one’s self, and art has played a really big role in that. So I think there is at least, you could say, a revival.

At one point I think the top three best-selling classical composers in the world were Arvo Pärt, Henryk Górecki, and John Tavener, all three of whom are devout Christians—well, Tavener’s been a little flaky lately, but at any rate, they were at the time. Their music was a synthesis of postmodern minimalism with ancient chant and polyphony. So I think the culture is changing. I think the cultural elites are changing. I think many Christians and the church are changing. And I think the work is being created more than it has been for many, many decades. We don’t seem to have a shortage. I mean, there are still just four issues a year. We’re selective; we have a maximum of eight artists and eight short stories a year, and that works to our advantage because we don’t dilute too much and try to prove something, but within that amount of space we have had no shortage.

TOJ: What are some of your hopes and dreams for either yourself or the church in regards to beauty and creativity?

GW: There are many levels of dreaming. One of them is hoping that all the fundraising and administrative work of making all this happen will be lifted a little bit from my shoulders in the coming years so that I could exercise a little more of my own creativity and get back to writing some more books. That’s a personal desire.

Institutionally, I think there is a lot more that we could be doing. Part of it is doing what we already do, but doing it better. Paying our authors more professional fees—artists have been abused so often as people that don’t really do anything or as people who are doing something that is not really worth that much or at least compared to somebody who works a real job. And so, just to pay our authors more competitive fees for the work they have to produce would be a great place to start.

Beyond that, we do much more than a journal these days—we have a website, a blog, a summer workshop, a study tour to Florence, Italy, a postgraduate fellowship, and we’d love to give out more fellowships to writers and artists to give them space and time to create. We’d love to start a book publishing wing of what we do. Eventually, we’d love to found something like an artists’ colony, a place where people can come and get serious work done in fellowship with one another, in prayer and conversation, cross-fertilization over weeks and not just a fleeting conference or workshop. So there’s a lot that still needs to be done to institutionalize this thrust that has been so powerful in the church this last couple of decades. This realizing of the importance of art and imagination needs to outlast my lifetime. Image and other similar institutions really need to become part of what the church in America is all about.

Please read Part I of our interview with Gregory Wolfe here.


Notes
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Paparazzi in the Hands of an Angry God: Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, and the Birth of American Celebrity Culture

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I’m your biggest fan,

I’ll follow you until you love me
Papa, paparazzi

—Lyrics from “Paparazzi” as performed by Lady Gaga

The Greatest Day in New England History

The streets of Boston course with life as a crowd greater than the city’s total population joins in celebration. Commerce grinds to a standstill. Women faint. Grown men weep. The governor joins the standing-room-only multitude on Boston Common, declaring it the greatest day in New England history.

Are we witnessing the 2004 Red Sox World Series victory parade? No, that paltry event celebrating the end of eighty-six years of cursed athletic frustration attracted a mere two-thirds of greater Boston.1 This is something far more historic. It is the 1740 farewell sermon of British evangelist George Whitefield—the man Harry Stout has identified as “Anglo-America’s first modern celebrity.”2

And Whitefield’s celebrity is no accident. It is the result of a carefully orchestrated public relations tour de force. Whitefield and his publicist, William Seward, have worked tirelessly to promote the evangelist’s exploits, writing as many as a hundred personal letters, articles, and journal entries a day to a vast network of leaders and publishers throughout the New World. Incredibly, 30 percent of all works published in America in 1740 are written or inspired by Whitefield. By the time he reaches Boston, all of New England is in a fever pitch. Six weeks and 175 sermons later, “virtually every New England inhabitant” has heard Whitefield preach face-to-face.3

One hundred miles to the west, the fiery preacher Jonathan Edwards waits not with condemnation, but delight.4 Rather than dangling the “paparazzi” of his day over the pit of hell, Edwards is carefully following the media’s coverage of Whitefield’s every move. He has even invited the innovative young preacher to fill his famous pulpit in Northampton, Massachusetts.

In fact, it is Edwards who helped start this media sensation. His “biopic”Faithful Narrative5 has been an international best seller for nearly three years, making Edwards a towering public figure in his own right and helping to stoke a deep hunger for spiritual awakening throughout the colonies, a hunger now filled by Whitefield’s flamboyant preaching and growing celebrity.6

While many Christians today decry our shallow media-driven celebrity culture, leaders of the Great Awakening recognized that media-driven celebrity was exactly what was needed to capture society’s imagination with spiritual realities.

And capture it they did. By year’s end, perhaps as much as 15 percent of the population of the American colonies professes conversion to Christ in one of the most transformative social movements in American history.

Twenty-first-century culture-makers seeking to birth another society-wide Great Awakening would be wise to pay careful attention to the lessons Edwards and Whitefield learned in using celebrity for the glory of God. In a media-saturated age that has birthed both pseudo celebrity and profound cynicism regarding heroic celebrity, Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield point the way toward the wise and intentional use of celebrity for the glory of God. Edwards and Whitefield helped birth not only one of the most transformative cultural movements in America history—the First Great Awakening—they also helped launch America’s celebrity culture. Twenty-first-century leaders seeking to effect genuine societal transformation might consider following Edwards and Whitefield’s example of the compelling authenticity of a life well lived, the courageous ambition of genuine humility, and the unmistakable stamp of divine exaltation in order to overcome contemporary pseudo celebrity and utilize heroic celebrity for the glory of God.

Celebrity

Celebrity is perhaps the most coveted and least understood concept in contemporary culture. While the billion-dollar celebrity industry seems to grind out a new subject for fifteen minutes of fame nearly every fifteen minutes, the scholarly community (and the church) has scrambled just to stay current.

Recent scholarship has produced numerous claims to the title of “America’s first celebrity,” ranging from John James Audubon (c. 1826) to Walt Whitman (c. 1850), Buffalo Bill Cody (c. 1885), Douglas Fairbanks (c. 1920), and Ernest Hemingway (c. 1925).7

Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield certainly precede each of these contenders, but were they true celebrities? The answer is, perhaps, yes and no.

Celebrity as Star

If one takes the perspective that celebrity is a purely modern invention, then obviously Edwards and Whitefield can’t be celebrities. Many scholars find a strong enough connection between celebrity and modern mass media to assert that “there is no such thing as celebrity prior to the beginning of the twentieth century.”8 This school of thought is strongly rooted in film studies and the rise of the Hollywood star-making business. Before 1910, the motion picture industry (following the literary industry) sold story. After 1910, they realized that what they were actually selling was stars—men and women who moviegoers liked and personally identified with beyond the actual quality of their performance.9

For instance, producer Brian Grazer chose the virtually unknown Tom Hanks over hundreds of actors vying for the lead in Splash (1983), not because he was the most talented, but because he had the greatest “likability.”10 Soon Hanks joined the pantheon of Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, John Wayne, Harrison Ford, et cetera—actors America loved not for how they played their role, but simply for who played the role.11

Hollywood quickly recognized that we are psychologically drawn to identify with stars and this media-generated personal identification evoked a public hunger for access to the private lives of stars. In small-town America, everyone wanted to know the triumphs, tragedies, gossip, and slander connected with the “in” crowd. But in the emerging global village, the most popular kids in town are the ones who are most visible on the big screen.

Aided by the media-driven celebrity industry, stars quickly became what Richard Schickel calls “intimate strangers.” People wanted to know these stars and be connected to them personally. Graeme Turner asserts that we can actually “map the precise moment a public figure becomes a celebrity”: when their “private lives attract greater public interest than their professional lives.”12

It wasn’t long before stars began to realize that they had become a commodity to be marketed and traded, not only by studio heads, but also by their own publicity people. Within a few short years, the public relations and celebrity gossip industries were born.13 Soon paparazzi was a household word.

Since Edwards and Whitefield were dead for over a hundred years before the first Hollywood stars were born, it is hard to see how they are celebrities in this limited sense of the word.

Celebrity as Hero

However, other scholars adopt a broader understanding of celebrity, one that seems to better fit Edwards and Whitefield. These scholars root their understanding of celebrity in the Latin words for “fame” (celebritas) and “being famous” (celebrer) and in Western society’s desire to “celebrate” greatness.14

Human beings need heroes to emulate. Both the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions developed strong “hero-making” story cultures. We tell the stories of heroes such as Hercules, Achilles, Odysseus, Perseus, Jason, Atalanta, David, Elijah, Esther, Mary, Paul, and Peter because they embody the virtues valued in our culture.

Yet for a cultural hero to be a public role model, they need to be bothvirtuous and famous. A virtuous man or woman whose story goes untold simply can’t be emulated. Therefore, the desire to be great and the desire to be famous are not necessarily mutually exclusive. As Paul boldly declares, “Follow me as I follow Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1).15

Perhaps it is more helpful to follow Daniel Boorstin’s distinction between a genuine celebrity and what he calls a “pseudo-celebrity.”16 Pseudo celebrities, as the Hollywood school of thought asserts, are differentiated mainly by the “trivia of personality,” whereas true celebrities are heroes who are distinguished by their achievements, virtues, and character.17 Edwards and Whitefield appear to fit this second type.

Although there is no universal consensus, celebrity studies seem to point to four distinct stages18 in the creation of a genuine celebrity: (1) A definingincident or accomplishment makes someone a “hero”; (2) some kind ofidentification with the hero’s character sparks admiration and a desire to connect with the hero; (3) intentionality by the hero (or someone acting on behalf of the hero) meets public desire for a greater connection by providing access to their “story” and their life; and, (4) the public’s identification with the hero exerts influence in other people’s lives that shapes their behavior.

Edwards’s celebrity clearly fits this pattern. (1) Edwards’s public story begins with a clear defining incident—a powerful revival among the youth in his church results in the conversion of 300 people, a quarter of the town’s population, transforming youth culture in Northampton.19 Soon there is “scarcely any in the town, old or young, left unconcerned about the great things of the eternal world [. . . .] The work of conversion was carried on in a most astonishing man¬ner [. . .] and the number of true saints multiplied [. . . until] the town seemed to be full of the presence of God.”20 (2) These events spark a profound identification, not only in America, but across the English-speaking world. Edwards’s church became “the talk of New England” and famous British cleric Isaac Watts declared, “We have not heard of anything like it since the Reformation, nor since the first days of the apostles.”21 What minister (or Christian) would not want this to happen in their church? People wanted to know more.

(3) Edwards responds to this interest with acute intentionality. He publishesA faithful narrative of the surprising work of God in the conversion of many Souls in Northampton, and neighbouring towns and villages of the County of Hampshire, in the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay in New England. It becomes an international best seller reprinted at least ten times in three languages before Edwards’s death and over fifty times since.22 (4) Faithful Narrative provides Edwards with the influence and “international audience for which he longed.”23 More than any other published statement, Faithful Narrative would “define the standard expectations for evangelical conversion”24 and firmly establish Edwards as the “revival expert” with broad readership for his future publications on the Awakening. For over a century, it serves as a nearly canonical corpus for New England revivalism. More dramatically, it opens the door for interest in Edwards’s more scholarly works so that Edwards eventually comes to be known as “America’s greatest theologian.”25

Notice the key role that intentionality plays in Edwards’s celebrity. Without his providing the story, there is no story, and therefore, no celebrity. Without Edwards’s providing a personal account of the revival—an incident he did not “cause,” but which spread to his church from the surrounding villages26—this “towering intellectual figure” could very well have remained unknown and unread.27

Whitefield’s celebrity also appears to fit this four-stage cycle. (1) Whitefield’s first trip to America (mostly in Georgia from 1737–1738), followed by his tremendously successful campaign in London, creates an internationalincident that introduces him into popular imagination. Whitefield’s adoption of John Wesley’s practice of “field preaching” (versus preaching inside churches) coupled with his profound dramatic gifts and unusual anointing create a sensation. His sermons are some of the most compelling theater of his generation, recasting “biblical history in a theatrical key.”28

(2) Whitefield’s preaching generates tremendous public identification. Theater is all but unknown in America, and Whitefield’s dramatic performances (in comparison to the logical treatises offered by most New England pastors) connect in an unprecedented way. People love Whitefield. They flock to hear him preach. They relish his willingness to take on the (ancestral hierarchical) establishment. They can’t get enough of him. Newspapers normally committed to business and political news are filled with accounts of his success.

(3) In preparation for his second American preaching tour (1740-1741), Whitefield demonstrates unusual intentionality in managing his celebrity. He fashions a clearly defined and “audacious” plan to build on his momentum and transform his revival movement into “an international event with himself at the center.”29 He and his publicists unleash a barrage of publicity employing careful use of social networking and mass media. People are able to “personally” connect with him through him publishing his personal journals and maintaining a grueling schedule of personal appearances.30

(4) Whitefield’s growing celebrity soon grants him unparalleled influence. He is able to network with the rich and powerful, target key social causes (especially orphans and African American education), and take controversial anti-institutional stands on the issues of his day (unconverted ministers). Whitefield becomes “the first in a long line of public figures whose claims to influence would rest on celebrity [. . .] rather than birth, breeding, or institutional fiat.”31

Like with Edwards, it is difficult to miss the critical role intentionality plays in Whitefield’s celebrity. His use of William Seward’s immense talent as a public relations officer is critical to his success. He certainly would have connected with people without it, but he could never have attracted such remarkable crowds without the tireless efforts of Seward and his network of advance men. As Stout writes, “Where other influential preachers [. . .] wrote learned treatises and preached in meetinghouses [. . .] to audiences totaling in the thousands [. . .] Whitefield wrote best-selling journals and drew audiences that must be totaled in the millions [. . . .] For comparison one must look to an electronic age and [. . .] movie stars.”32

Clearly, both Edwards and Whitefield were true “heroic celebrities.” Without the celebrity account provided by Edwards’s Faithful Narrative, it is entirely possible that America would not have been primed for Whitefield’s publicity and preaching. From a human perspective, it is not unreasonable to claim that Edwards and Whitefield’s efforts helped initiate America’s first celebrity culture, and that celebrity culture in turn helped birth the First Great Awakening.33

Mark A. Noll, arguably the most influential historian in our contemporary understanding of the First Great Awakening, notes that although revival can be viewed as the result of a movement of the Holy Spirit, it can also be interpreted as an effect of human agency and leadership: “By taking note of the agents who, whether perceived as servants of God or merely adept shapers of culture, historical explanation adds the sphere of human responsibility to realms of theological principle.”34 The leaders of the First Great Awakening were young men of great natural gifts who preached, wrote, promoted, and built institutions with unusual force. Their actions mattered, regardless of their motivations or by what power they were energized. This in no way minimizes the Holy Spirit’s role in the First Great Awakening. Something truly remarkable occurred in this movement that no amount of human effort has ever been able to recreate (although not for lack of trying). However, it does emphasize that the Holy Spirit worked though human leaders who made wise use of the means at their proposal, including their celebrity.

Edwards himself came to embrace the importance of human leadership in the Awakening. One of his central contributions to religious self-understanding was his refusal to accept an either/or dichotomy between divine and human impulses. His first work in the midst of the Great Awakening, Some thoughts concerning the present revival of religion(1741), was an urgent appeal for human leaders to promote the work of God by wise and strenuous efforts.35 His first major publication in the aftermath of the Great Awakening, A treatise regarding religious affections (1746), was in many ways his “second thoughts about the first great awakening.”36Edwards claimed that Satan won a great victory in the Awakening because human leaders failed to embrace their God-appointed role in directing such a powerful “pouring out of the Spirit of God.”37

Edwards and Whitefield were not leaders who shirked their human responsibility. Their model points toward a possible future for leaders seeking to become “adept shapers of culture” in the twenty-first century. However, before we can directly apply the principles they employed in the eighteenth century to our contemporary setting, we must first account for a factor with which Edwards and Whitefield never had to contend: contemporary pseudo celebrity culture.

The Rise of Pseudo Celebrity

The problem with the celebrity cycle is that it is essentially value neutral. The process that makes someone a heroic celebrity is essentially the same as the process that makes someone a pseudo celebrity. As the Hollywood school of thought contends, something went seriously awry with celebrity in the early twentieth century. It is as if somewhere we decided that if you can’t be a true hero without also achieving fame, why bother with virtue at all? Contemporary media makes it all too easy to skip heroism and jump straight to the stardom of a pseudo celebrity who is “well-known only for being well-known.”38

In pseudo celebrity, the inciting incident moves from important to trivial (and/or contrived); intentionality moves from important to critical; andidentification moves from character to personality. The pseudo celebrity “develops their capacity for fame, not by achieving great things, but by differentiating their own personality from those of their competitors in the public arena.”39

As I write this article in early August 2010, the Internet is abuzz with the “dry erase girl” resignation hoax. This meme serves as a great example of how the four-stage cycle can be applied to the creation of pseudo celebrities. (1) On the morning of August 10, The Chive, a relatively unknown Web site, creates an incident by posting a series of pictures under the banner: “Girl quits her job on dry erase board, emails entire office.” The hilarious photos, received from “a person who works with [. . .] Jenny,” chronicle a young worker’s struggle with her boss’s sexual harassment, her subsequent resignation, and the outing of her boss’s odd Internet viewing habits. (2) By the afternoon of August 10, the public’s identification with Jenny’s plight makes the story is an instant Internet sensation. The photos “soared to the top of Google and Twitter trends, and a group of Facebook pages popped up to honor” the brave underling.40 Who wouldn’t root for this perky persecuted worker and her “heroic” actions? People were dying to connect with Jenny and know more of her life and future.

(3) The role of intentionality becomes obvious on August 11, when the Web site TechCrunch reveals that it was all a publicity stunt. “Jenny-the-Dry-Erase-Girl” is really Elyse Porterfield, a struggling young actress hired by The Chive to perpetrate the hoax.41 (4) By the evening of August 11, Porterfield and The Chive editor have garnished sufficient influence to be interviewed by CBS News Entertainment to discuss their successful creation of the hoax. Thirty-six hours after the first posting, The Chive and Porterfield are hot properties. Could an acting role be far behind? (And of course, I’m pulling for Porterfield. She is so darn likable.)42

In less than two twenty-four-hour news cycles a hoax is: (1) perpetrated, (2) debunked, and (3) milked for enough publicity to become national news and achieve celebrity status. Porterfield is the paramount pseudo celebritycreated via what Boorstin calls a “pseudo-event fabricated by the media and evaluated in terms of the scale and effectiveness of their media visibility.”43

Notice, however, how the final stage of influence is still very much intact. In fact, the defining characteristic of the contemporary pseudo celebrity culture is the shallow but powerful nature of the identification it engenders. Pseudo celebrity endorsements are both effective and pervasive, because these superstars are integral parts of our lives and intimately tied to our greatest hopes and fears.

In a culture devoid of meaning and relationship, the pseudo celebrity system offers powerful images to direct our lives. Media outlets create an “illusion of accessibility and relationship.”44 In a society hungering for close personal relationships, the pseudo celebrity system delivers pseudo-relationships with people we feel connected to but have never met.45 When Lady Gaga sings, “I’m your biggest fan, I’ll follow you until you love me,” she is eerily describing the zeitgeist of paparazzi culture.

Through pseudo celebrity culture, we perpetrate a new American mythology: not the maxim that strong character, hard work, and perseverance will eventually lead to success and happiness, but rather be in the right place at the right time, with the right YouTube video and you too can be famous. The underlying story behind pseudo celebrity becomes: it could happen to me. Not everyone can be a hero, but anyone can be famous. Accomplishments might put someone in a position to be noticed by the media, but only the intentional courting of the public eye can produce an ongoing celebrity.

This is the underlying secret of our pseudo celebrity culture: it’s all about the Benjamins. Celebrities are needed to drive the economy, sell the products, and fill the airtime so as to generate advertising dollars to sell even more products. Pseudo celebrities are the ultimate wedding of consumer culture and democratic aspirations.46 In a society cynical about truth, and without a clear sense of common good informing our ethical decisions, the pseudo celebrity system guarantees that even if I don’t know how to live a meaningful life, at least I’ll know how to dress.

On Being a Twenty-first Century Heroic Celebrity (and Not a Pseudo Celebrity)

Does this trivialization of celebrity mean that twenty-first-century culture-makers should eschew all celebrity and start dangling our own paparazzi over the pit of hell? Perhaps. But if the realm of celebrity is stripped of every true hero, all that remains will be pseudo celebrities. And a world without public heroism is a profoundly unbiblical idea. Without contemporary additions to the Hebrews 11 hall of fame, how can we expect a new generation to “Remember your leaders [. . . .] Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith”? (Heb. 13:7). If we don’t have heroic celebrities who are broadly famous in our culture, then haven’t we lost our culture already? To put a twist on Edmund Burke’s oft-quoted aphorism: “All that is necessary for pseudo celebrity to triumph is for heroic celebrities to do nothing.”47

Still, some might argue: yes, we need heroes, but shouldn’t we leave hero-making to God? You would certainly think so if you read evangelical devotional literature. Even thoughtful historians often help perpetrate the myth that the Holy Spirit alone drew the giant crowds that followed the saintly Whitefield, as if he wanted only to be left alone with his Bible. Consider Stephen Mansfield’s hagiographic account: “What could explain the crowds, always the crowds? It must be simply the grace of God and his decision to use a slight, squint-eyed boy to change lives.”48

My point is not that the supernatural impact of Whitefield’s ministry is difficult to account for except by the grace of God (more on this later), only that Whitefield carefully cultivated and judiciously utilized his celebrity for the glory of God. Why should twenty-first-century leaders be any different?

Moses was “more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth” (Num. 12:3), yet he wrote books that celebrated his own heroism. Nehemiah certainly wasn’t shy in trumpeting his own accomplishments. And David commissioned the telling of the heroic story of Ruth in order to clear up a public relations problem in his (Gentile) heritage. Yet Moses, David, Ruth, Nehemiah, Whitefield, and Edwards possessed at least three further traits that define their heroic celebrity and which might help mitigate against contemporary pseudo celebrity.

The Compelling Authenticity of a Life Well Lived

Edwards and Whitefield were men of remarkable integrity. Edwards was no pseudo celebrity scholar. He was the real thing. He was devoted to the calling of his craft, often spending thirteen hours a day in his study. Nor was he a public figure who wilted in private. He developed a profound contemplative prayer life, forged a beautiful marriage, and stayed deeply involved in the lives of his eleven children.

Although Whitefield never achieved Edwards’s “depth in his thinking about culture,”49 he began each day reading his Greek New Testament and returned to finish his master’s degree at Oxford after already achieving much of his fame. He worked tirelessly to improve as an orator (and actor). More importantly, he was a man of profound personal and financial integrity. He raised staggering amounts of money while maintaining a Spartan lifestyle that bordered on asceticism.50

Both leaders escaped moral scandal despite determined enemies and years in the public eye.51 This is not to say that these men were perfect; they both freely admitted their mistakes and misjudgments in their own writings. Whitefield wrote, “Alas! Alas! In how many things have I judged acted wrong. I have been too rash and hasty in [judging the] character, both of places and persons [. . .] I have used a style too apostolical [. . .] been too bitter in my zeal [. . .] and published to soon and too explicitly [. . .] By these things I have hurt the blessed cause I would defend.”52 But rather than repelling followers, such authenticity drew men and women to his celebrity. In short, they were actually men who could be admired; they were heroic celebrities who might be emulated.

Twenty-first-century culture-makers must strive for the same excellence in craft and character. Pseudo celebrity culture has bred cynicism regarding allcelebrities. Americans crave authenticity but expect duplicity. We are looking for our heroes to fall, and the celebrity media industry is only too happy to pounce when they do. Those who would aspire to heroic celebrity must be absolutely certain that they are up to the task.

Although pseudo celebrities sometimes become heroes over the course of time, heroic celebrities can become pseudo celebrities overnight. Ted Haggard became a national celebrity, not through his accomplishment of building one of the most influential churches in America, nor by his position as President of the National Council of Evangelicals; he became a household name by reason of his infidelity.

This calls for a ruthless commitment to the compelling authenticity of a life well lived. Scholars, ministers, businesspeople, musicians, politicians, filmmakers, artists, actors, and publishers had best count the cost before they dare enter the world of heroic celebrity. They need a radical commitment to master both their craft at a world-class level and the spiritual disciplines, marriage, family, and relational habits required to shape their character toward the fruit of the Spirit.

Great artists, scholars, businesspeople, and ministers are not formed in a day. Great marriages, families, and friendships are forged with great intentionality. Heroic character cannot be instantly formed by sheer force of will, but the ongoing practice of key spiritual disciplines put us in a position to receive the transforming grace of God and be “incrementally changed toward inward Christlikeness.”53

This also calls for a countercultural commitment on the part of thoughtful media leaders and public relations specialists to work against the forces of pseudo celebrity. In addition to Edwards and Whitefield, leaders of the First Great Awakening included not only one of the pioneers of publicity and public relations (William Seward), but also three of the key forerunners in modern mass communication: John Lewis, Thomas Prince, and William McCulloch.54

They were determined to use the power of the media to promote spiritual awakening through Edwards and Whitefield’s celebrity. Twenty-first-century media leaders must seek for the true heroes in our society and make certain their stories are told. They must also do everything within their power to insure that those they promote as celebrities are in fact heroes.

The Courageous Ambition of Genuine Humility

Edwards and Whitefield were also men of tremendous ambition to glorify God in the world. Early in his life, Edwards determined, “I will do whatsoever I think to be most to God’s glory [. . . ]” However, Edwards’s humility didn’t prevent him from developing a ruthless ambition to serve the coming of God’s kingdom throughout the world. He continued: “[. . .] and my own good, profit and pleasure to do whatever I think to be my duty [. . .] for the good and advantage of mankind.”55

Edwards saw no conflict in these two aspirations, having also resolved to throw off anything smacking of “gratification of pride, or vanity,”56 and he lived his life to maximally steward the gifts God had entrusted to him by establishing himself as a renowned intellectual force for good.57 Whitefield too was a man possessed of a deep passion for the glory of God with a corresponding repudiation of self-glory. Yet, he also held to a keen sense of the importance of his impact upon the world.

Certainly, the hierarchical worldview of Edwards and Whitefield’s day helped them seize those opportunities in ways that our current pseudo celebrity, democratic, level-playing-field worldview does not.58 They were encouraged to aspire to become “great men” from their youth, and their respective Yale and Oxford educations only reinforced the idea that they were God’s elite. They did not need to be asked to step forward as celebrities. They knew it was a responsibility entrusted to them by God and correspondingly seized the day.

Not so today. The cynicism of pseudo celebrity when combined with tireless assaults upon anyone who dares stick their heads above the democratic crowd has had a devastating impact on moral leadership. True heroes step back from the public limelight while pseudo celebrities push themselves forward. Those who do not possess true character and accomplishment manipulate the media for their own celebrity, whereas those who possess some modicum of humility shrink back. True heroes fear not only their own ego, but also the potential humiliation involved in having a target painted on their back. For instance, it is now a right of passage for nearly all intellectual, cultural, and spiritual leaders to have multiple Web sites devoted to their demise.

Overcoming our contemporary aversion to principled heroism will call for the courageous ambition of genuine humility on the part of twenty-first-century cultural leaders. Like Saul’s army before Goliath, unbelief sometimes looks a lot like humility. Genuine humility, on the other hand, sometimes appears arrogant. While lifelong soldiers cowered in fear, David was willing to push past his brother’s stinging accusation, “I know how conceited you are” in order to seize the heroic challenge (1 Sam. 17:28ff). Twenty-first-century culture-makers who wish to wisely use celebrity for the glory of God will also need to regularly weather the pseudo celebrity culture’s challenge of “Who do you think you are?” in order to stand as heroic celebrities.

This will also require careful partnerships with thoughtful public relations professionals and new media experts. James Monaco refers to persons who come to the public eye but fail to control their public image as “Quasars.” They are at the mercy of the media’s construction of their image, and that construction is nearly always bad.59 As media expert Phil Cook, exclaims, “If you don’t control your perception” and “the story that surrounds you [. . .] you’ll live the rest of your life at the mercy of those who will.”60 One need only look at the “Tina Fey effect” in the last presidential election for a warning against the dangers of losing control of your own image.61

Unlike the leaders of the Great Awakening, today’s leaders have allowed our culture’s perception of spirituality to drift at the mercy of the mass media’s construction. Oprah and Richard Dawkins have done more to shape mass media’s conception of faith (or lack thereof) than countless pastors and other spiritual leaders. Only by drawing upon the savvy leadership of the best public relations experts, journalists, filmmakers, television creators, and new-media mavens is there any real chance of reversing this trend.

The Unmistakable Stamp of Divine Exaltation

In the end, Edwards and Whitefield’s lives bore the unmistakable stamp of divine exaltation. Their personal lives and vocational success simply defied all human explanation. Although self-exaltation may lead to pseudo celebrity, there is a type of exaltation only God can bestow. As the psalmist declares, “It is God who judges: He brings one down, he exalts another” (Ps. 75:7).

Celebrity did not bring David in from the shepherd field, release Joseph from prison, nor fill Mary’s womb with divine offspring. They were men and women who followed the biblical injunction: “Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time” (1 Pet. 5:6). Each hero waited in relative obscurity—growing in character while mastering the disciplines of their craft—waiting for the moment chosen by the God whose eyes “range throughout the earth seeking to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him” (2 Chron. 16:9).62

For some, like Daniel and Esther, this call came at a relatively young age. For many others, like Moses and Anna, the call came much later. In either case, these biblical figures were ready when their moment arrived. Whether short or long, God used their time in secret preparation to forge in them the strength of character to support the weight of their calling. Edwards and Whitefield were men of similar character. When the divine moment came—in the 1734-1734 revival in Edwards’s church and the 1739 revival under Whitefield’s itinerant preaching—these two principal leaders of the First Great Awakening knew what to do. Once exalted by God to a place of celebrity, they were ready to bear the responsibilities it demanded and steward their celebrity for the glory of God. In doing so, they helped spark one of the most socially transformative movements in American history.

Will the twenty-first-century be any different? We may never know how many potentially dynamic cultural leaders will be lured by the siren song of pseudo celebrity, impatiently squandering their youth seeking fame instead of steadily building the craft and character required for their divine moment. Still, we must do everything within our power to help foster spiritual depth as well as professional excellence. In an age hungering for the depth of genuine authenticity to counteract the shallowness of pseudo celebrity, waiting for God’s timing could make all the difference.

The Greatest Day in World History?

Will we see again the equivalent of the crowds that thronged Boston Common for Whitefield’s farewell sermon? Perhaps not. But if we do, that crowd will more likely gather in movie houses worldwide and/or at a massive Web cast than a single venue. A twenty-first-century equivalent of Whitefield is more likely a cutting-edge filmmaker, actor, or television producer than a traditional evangelist. A twenty-first-century equivalent of Edwards might take the form of a C. S. Lewis, the Oxford scholar who built upon his prestigious position through popular writings and radio broadcasts that gave him a celebrity—the cover of Time magazine for The Screwtape Letters—that made his complex moral and theological arguments beloved reading for a generation of children and adults. Either manifestation would certainly be a great day for the world as we know it.

In a media-saturated age marked by both an unhealthy appetite for pseudo celebrity and a deep cynicism toward heroism, it would be hard to find a better tonic than the courage and authenticity of Edwards and Whitefield, heroic celebrities unafraid to utilize their fame for the glory of God. The thought that we can sit on the sidelines and call down judgment upon today’s celebrity culture may be as dangerous as it is naive. We are called to be missionaries in a media-driven culture. Wishing it weren’t so won’t make that fact go away. To impact our image-driven generation for the kingdom of God will require entering the fray prayerfully, thoughtfully, and with great excellence.

And if all else fails, we can always dangle a few paparazzi over the fires of hell. Or, better yet, we can follow Whitefield’s example and hire them.


Notes
1. The 2004 Red Sox victory parade attracted an estimated 3 million out of 4.4 million in greater Boston (68 percent), whereas Whitefield’s farewell sermon drew 23,000 from of the city population of 17,000 (135 percent). Whitefield’s more modest estimate was 20,000 (118 percent). Mark A. Noll,The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2003), 79.

2. Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), x.

3. Stout, Divine Dramatist, 90; Frank Lambert, Pedlar in Divinity: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737-1770 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 128; Arnold Dallimore, George Whitefield: The Life and Times of the Great Evangelist of the Eighteenth-century Revival(Westchester, IL: Cornerstone Books, 1979), 527; and Harry S. Stout, “Whitefield, George,” Dictionary of Christianity in America, ed. Daniel G. Reid (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990), 1252.

4. George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 202.

5. Jonathan Edwards and C. C. Goen, A faithful narrative of the surprising work of God in the conversion of many Souls in Northampton, and neighbouring towns and villages of the County of Hampshire, in the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay in New England. The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 4: The Great Awakening (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972).

6. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 137.

7. Richard Rhodes, John James Audubon: The Making of an American (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. Blake, 2004); David Haven, Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2000); Richard Schickel, Douglas Fairbanks: The First Celebrity (London, UK: Elm Tree Books, 1976); Leonard J. Leff, Hemingway and His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribners, and the Making of American Celebrity Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997). Other proposed contenders include: Adah Isaacs Menken (c. 1855), see Renée M. Sentilles, Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Gertrude Stein (c. 1900), see Karen Leick, Gertrude Stein and the Making of an American Celebrity (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009); and Charles Lindbergh (c. 1940), see Randy Roberts and David Welky, Charles A. Lindbergh: The Power and Peril of Celebrity, 1927-1941 (Maplecrest, NY: Brandywine Press, 2003).

8. Richard Schickel, Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), 21.

9. Richard DeCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990).

10. Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (New York, NY: Little, Brown and Co, 2005), 45.

11. There are some who believe that Hollywood’s star-making days are over and are now being replaced by the experience-making of stadium theaters, 3-D glasses, concept movies, and CGI. Given the blockbuster opening weekend ($35 million) of the low-tech but star-studded The Expendables(2010), I suspect this argument will grow even more heated.

12. See Schickel, Intimate Strangers; and Graeme Turner, Understanding Celebrity (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2004), 3, 8.

13. Turner, Understanding Celebrity, 10.

14. Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame & its History (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1986).

15. See also 2 Thessalonians 3:7-9. All references are from the New International Version.

16. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image, or, What Happened to the American Dream (London, UK: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1861), 58; and Daniel J. Boorstin, “From Hero to Celebrity: The Human Pseudo-event,” in David Marshall, The Celebrity Culture Reader (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), 72-90.

17. Turner, Understanding Celebrity, 65.

18. Or elements; they do not always occur chronologically.

19. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 155, 160.

20. Edwards, Faithful Narrative, 11-14.

21. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 161; and cited in Jonathan Edwards and C. C. Goen, The Great Awakening, 36.

22. C. C. Goen, The Great Awakening, 90-92

23. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 171.

24. Noll, Rise of Evangelicalism, 80.

25. Robert W. Jenson, America’s Theologian: A Recommendation of Jonathan Edwards (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1988), x. See also, Joseph A. Conforti, Jonathan Edwards: Religious Tradition & American Culture(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Douglas A. Sweeney and Allen C. Guelzo, The New England Theology: From Jonathan Edwards to Edwards Amasa Park (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006).

26. Michael J. Crawford chronicles that between 1712-1732 the Connecticut River Valley alone experienced as many as fifteen revivals before the first of two “outpourings” in Edwards’s Northampton, Massachusetts, church (1734-1736, 1740-1742). See Seasons of Grace: Colonial New England’s Revival Tradition in Its British Context (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1991), 108. To his credit, Edwards’s own account mentioned “nearly every church in Western Massachusetts and twenty in Connecticut.” See Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 162.

27. Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1986), 228.

28. Stout, Divine Dramatist, 95

29. Ibid., 87.

30. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 200.

31. Stout, Divine Dramatist, xiv.

32. Ibid., xiii. Italics mine.

33. For more insight into the use of media, publicity, et cetera in the First Great Awakening see Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening”(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Harry S. Stout, “Religion, Communications, and the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution”The William and Mary Quarterly: A Magazine of Early American History 34 (1977): 519-541; and Michael J. Crawford, Seasons of Grace, 13ff.

34. Noll, Rise of Evangelicalism, 141.

35. Jonathan Edwards and C. C. Goen, Some thoughts concerning the present revival of religion in New England and the way in which it ought to be acknowledged and promoted. The works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 4: The Great Awakening (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972).

36. Gary David Stratton, “Jonathan Edwards’ (1703-1758) Theology of Spiritual Awakening and Spiritual Formation Leadership in Higher Education” (PhD diss., Talbot School of Theology, 2009), 59; see also Gary D. Stratton, “Jonathan Edwards’ Treatise Concerning Religious Affections and Gerald McDermott’s Seeing God,” Christian Education Journal 3 (2006) and Samuel S. Storms, Signs of the Spirit: An Interpretation of Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2007).

37. Jonathan Edwards, John Edwin Smith, and Perry Miller, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, in three parts. The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 2 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 5-7.

38. Boorstin, The Image, 58.

39. Turner, Understanding Celebrity, 55.

40. Helen A.S. Popkin, “Suckers! Why you fell for ‘Dry Erase Board Girl.’” msnbc.com, August 12, 2010, accessed August 14, 2010,http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38676768/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/.

41. Alexia Tsotsis, “Confirmed: HOPA Dry Erase Girl Is a Hoax, Identity Revealed,” TechCrunch, August 11, 2010, accessed August 11, 2010,http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/11/elyse-porterfield/.

42. Shira Lazar, “Elyse Porterfield, HOPA Dry Erase Girl Exclusive Interview [Video],” CBS News, August 11, 2010, accessed August 11, 2010,http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504464_162-20013366-504464.html.

43. Boorstin, The Image, 57.

44. Richard Dyer and Paul McDonald, Stars (London, UK: BFI, 2007), 17.

45. Chris Rojek, Celebrity: Critical Concepts in Sociology (London, UK: Routledge, 2010), 16, 52.

46. Marshall, Celebrity and Power, 10. See also Leo Lowenthal,Communication in Society. Studies on Authoritarianism 3, False Prophets(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1997).

47. Burke probably never used the precise phrase, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing,” but rather, “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one [. . .]” Daniel E. Ritchie, Edmund Burke: Appraisals and Applications (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1990), xiii.

48. Stephen Mansfield, Forgotten Founding Father: The Heroic Legacy of George Whitefield (Nashville, TN: Highland Books/Cumberland House, 2001), 64.

49. Noll, Rise of Evangelicalism, 108.

50. Stout, Divine Dramatist, 122-123.

51. This is not to minimize the doctrinal and methodological controversies that only added to their fame. See Stout, Divine Dramatist, 123.

52. George Whitefield and Robert Backhouse, The Journals of George Whitefield (London, UK: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993), 144. See also Dallimore, Whitefield, 333-354.

53. Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2002), 82

54. Noll, Rise of Evangelicalism, 143-144.

55. Jonathan Edwards and George S. Claghorn, Letters and Personal Writings (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 755.

56. Ibid., 753-4

57. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 134

58. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).

59. James Monaco, Celebrity: The Media as Image Makers, And, In Order of Their Celebrity (New York, NY: Dell, 1978).

60. Phil Cook, Branding Faith, Why Some Churches and Nonprofits Impact Culture and Others Don’t (Ventura, CA: Regal, 2008), 10, 49.

61. Edward Rothstein, “The Power of Political Pratfalls,” New York Times, October 12, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/arts/13conn.html. See also, David Carr and Brian Stelter, “Campaigns in a Web 2.0 World,”New York Times, November 2, 2008,http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/03/business/media/03media.html?ref=technology&pagewanted=all.

62. See also 1 Samuel 13:14; 16:7.





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