Is Celebrity Culture Eroding American Evangelicalism? This Publishing Insider Says Yes
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(OPINION) Evangelical Protestantism, by most accounts the largest camp in American religion, has run into various troubles lately, as I and many others have chronicled.
Now there’s ample Internet buzz about Katelyn Beaty’s diagnosis of one factor in a new book from a major evangelical publisher that’s well worth coverage: “Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits are Hurting the Church”.
Make that hurting the “White evangelical” church.
The type of personality cults she describes are pretty much absent in mainline Protestantism, Black Protestantism (there are some glaring exceptions in the health-and-wealth world), Catholicism and other U.S. religious bodies. By coincidence, Rodney Palmer, an American Baptist who teaches preaching at Palmer Theological Seminary, echoed her concerns just last week in an article for the progressive Baptist News Global website.
Inevitably, Beaty has much to say about the media that we practitioners and consumers should ponder.
She’s a well-marinated evangelical as author, former print managing editor of flagship Christianity Today magazine and currently a New York-based acquisitions editor with Baker Publishing Group, one of the majors whose Brazos Press division published “Celebrities”. Note the company’s other book imprints: Baker Books, Baker Academic, Bethany House, Chosen and Revell.
For this reason, The Guy finds especially newsworthy — and gutsy — Beaty’s chapter treating the evangelical book industry, which is said to pour “jet fuel” on the type of fandom, branding and marketing she decries.
The bottom line, here: This bite-hand-that-feeds angle alone offers a strong story theme that journalists could draw from this book. By her account, the business is rife with inferior products from big names, underpaid and unacknowledged ghost writers, plagiarism and gambits to goose sales numbers that border on fraud. What do industry leaders say in response?
Otherwise, Beaty offers a notably perceptive analysis of celebrity-hood, including the all-too-frequent spiritual damage, psychological twists and moral rot it inflicts on the celebrities themselves. Naturally, she surveys some of the resulting money grubbing, power plays and sexual scandals.
The nub of her case: Celebrity is not merely some helpful tool to get the gospel out. It exercises “more power over the user than the user has over it. It turns out to be a wild animal — cunning, slippery, and insidious. And that wild animal is now tearing up the house of God from the inside out.”
Except for the late Rev. Billy Graham, the celebs she examines have limited fame outside their religious subculture. The average American may have idly seen some of a Joel Osteen telecast, heard about a Rick Warren or Tim Keller bestseller, seen an ad for a Beth Moore appearance or read news items that guys named Carl Lentz and Ravi Zacharias are in trouble. But these personalities, so influential with their followers, do not rank up there with Justin Bieber, Bob Dylan or Kanye West — whose religious involvements also get mention here. Complaint: This book needs a reader-friendly index to keep the players straight!
Like so many in her younger generation, Beaty is quite candid about related wariness toward 21st century evangelicalism. A conversion experience in 1998 swept this United Methodist youth into the evangelical world as a fan of its famed preachers, writers and musicians. Now she understands the “spiritually dangerous” side of the “evangelical consumerism" that she herself embraced, when churches mimic secular celebrity-hood rather than challenging it.
Beaty is similarly ambivalent about even describing herself with an “evangelical” label that’s been “sullied by political alliances, by central whiteness and resistance to racial justice, by a leadership culture that seems to reward bullyish men and silences women.” It’s interesting that, unlike other evangelical complaint writers, she barely mentions former President Donald Trump.
Is there no hope? She adds, “Ordinary people are the primary way God has worked in and through the world over the centuries,” and such folks made possible her own continuing commitment to the Christian faith.
I’ll end with a point of personal privilege: The Religion Guy is increasingly irritated by too many Protestants’ erasure of the line between worship of the living God and mere entertainment, with those night club-style performances on Sunday mornings. Their attitude is infesting modest neighborhood congregations with parishioners’ tic of applause for musicians who perform during worship. Exception: Feel free to laud musicians' flag-wavers once the benediction has formally concluded the service!
Richard Ostling is a former religion reporter for The Associated Press and former correspondent for TIME Magazine. This piece first appeared at Get Religion.