Pop music isn’t my thing, so I never really watched an episode of American Idol—except once, when someone I knew personally landed in the top ten. But even pop-music holdouts like me can’t help seeing the headlines and the highlight videos; the show was a ubiquitous cultural presence. Until it wasn’t. The New York Times tells the tale:
The ratings declined, gently at first, and the “Idol” pop-star spigot began trickling dust. The show stopped producing big new stars around the time that YouTube emerged as a musical force, and that’s probably no coincidence.
The problem for “Idol” was not so much that reality TV went away—it’s still all over cable and the networks—but that “reality,” the cultural force of authenticity and disintermediation, had dispersed into social media.
Authenticity is the desire to have an intimate, direct connection with another being, unobstructed by the layers of glitz slathered on by mainstream media juggernauts. Disintermediation is the removal of the middleman—in this case, Simon Cowell and his cohorts—in order to achieve that authenticity.
In an entertainment-driven world full of celebrity handlers and auto-tune, regular people have both retreated to hipsterish irony and hungered for something real. American Idol—like Survivor two years before it—was supposed to provide the real: it was a talent competition that regular Joes (read: William Hung) could enter. The viewers voted for the winners—what could be more authentic, less intermediated?
Authenticity and Culture
YouTube stars have just as much overlaid glitz as the faces on the magazines in the checkout aisle—some of them are now showing up on those magazines themselves. You, the viewer, may be just as distanced from the person by the carefully crafted persona, but you don’t feel like you are. YouTube invites you literally into their living rooms to watch them jam or dish or kvetch or exercise or (my favorite) multitrack.
Some very conservative American Christians like to talk as if they stand entirely apart from American culture, which is kind of like a fish insisting to another fish (through bubbles) that he’s actually flying through the air. No, they are shaped by it too—no one can be a-cultural. Cultures are a result of God’s good creation. All food is ethnic food; all clothes and gestures and customs and institutions both express and form cultural identities—they communicate and consolidate.
You might think, then, that Christians on the other end of the spectrum (those who explicitly set out to engage the culture for the sake of the gospel) would have an advantage over the self-professed cultural isolationists. At least the contextualizers are self-conscious—and hopefully therefore self-critical—about what they’re doing.
But our most respected evangelical self-critics don’t think so. Andy Crouch, author of the excellent culture-engagement manifesto Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (IVP, 2013), says, “The world has changed us far more than we will ever change it. Beware of world-changers—they have not yet learned the true meaning of sin” (200). Some Christians really do seem to act as if the fall cannot touch cultural forms; using those forms is for them no more significant than choosing among the thirty-one flavors of ice cream at Baskin Robbins. No music or dress or lingo is better than any other, only more or less useful for reaching a target demographic. If the cultural forces of authenticity and disintermediation are cool, then they’re good.
Disintermediation and the Local Church
That brings us to your relationship to the Bible and the church. Whether you’re closer to the isolationist or the accommodationist end of the spectrum, do you think it is possible that your church has escaped the two powerful cultural forces that brought down American Idol? If you’re reading this in Myanmar or Djibouti, perhaps so. But most of my readers are Westerners. “Escape” isn’t really possible, only resistance, co-opting, or wisdom.
Among countless similarly incisive comments in his famous quartet of books, David Wells says in The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008) that “churches that actually do influence the culture—here is the paradox—distance themselves from it in their internal life” (224).
Now, when I raise the possibility of “distance” and “escape,” I don’t mean to imply that authenticity and disintermediation are entirely bad. They’re not; they’re partly good. Jesus struck an eternal blow for authenticity when he flayed the Pharisees for their hypocrisy in Matthew 23. And the Bible “disintermediates” to a degree—though he also gave us pastors, Jesus is the one true mediator between God and humanity; no more “priests” are necessary (1 Tim. 2:5).
But when the search for authenticity, for the real, tempts us away from the real things God really gave us, cultural pressures become unhealthy. I mean that although “all are yours”—every YouTube pastor or WordPress blogger who has anything good to say is a gift from God for your benefit (1 Cor. 3:22)—you are still called to form real-life connections with the people of your local church. The church is the physical place where real people physically congregate to listen to real-time preaching from a real person who has been given genuine authority in your life (1 Pet. 5:1–5). The people in the pews around you will, like yourself, be inauthentic in some way (likely in many ways). You yourself are not a fully authentic Christian; we’re all fallen. But the people in your church are more real than the people on YouTube, and the life you live with and for them is more genuine than the growth you might gain from online preachers and bloggers.
In Crouch’s latest book, Strong and Weak: Embracing a Life of Love, Risk and True Flourishing (IVP, 2016), he observes that social media can provide a meaningful opportunity for the vulnerable and powerless to “bear risk together rather than be paralyzed in suffering”—think Arab Spring. But, Crouch says,
When the residents of the comfortable affluence of withdrawing use media to simulate engagement, to give ourselves a sense of making a personal investment when in fact our activity risks nothing and forms nothing new in our characters, then “virtual activism” is in fact a way of doubling down on withdrawing, holding on to one’s invulnerability and incapacity while creating a sensation of involvement.
The irony of the “authenticity” demanded from and delivered by social media is that it’s not really authentic. It’s voyeuristic: the viewers get to feel like they’re in on whatever action is taking place, but they’re taking none of the risks necessary to really play a meaningful role in the life of another. They’re paying nothing for the intimate personal knowledge they are trying to gain. These voyeurs are not loving their neighbors; they’re being entertained by their faults without helping them bear their burdens.
Neither is Facebook authentic. It’s common to point out that you don’t really know your non-local Facebook friends; you know their online personas. We all curate our personas carefully, selecting according to some principle of our own what to reveal and what to leave hidden. I know a bright, highly educated young mom who had to get off Facebook because the apparently perfect lives (and children) of other mothers was weighing too heavily on her spirit. I’m not denying that this public-image curation happens in real life; I’m only suggesting that it’s more difficult.
The Pillar and Ground of the Truth about You
That’s one of the reasons I think good old-fashioned church attendance is so important in this culture of fake authenticity. Church friends are in one another’s homes, listening to one another’s prayer requests, and observing our mutual interactions. Church members were keepin’ it real before it was cool (and after).
It’s partly through our sometimes boring, maybe even frustrating, face-to-face interactions that the church “attains to the unity of the faith, the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13)—something that’s hard to do by ourselves in the comfort of our swivel chairs.
The cultural force of disintermediation—combined with an already strong American bent toward autonomy, antiauthoritarianism, and individuality—may push you so far that you think you don’t need a pastor or a church. You can just study the Bible on your own. But Paul says in that same passage of Ephesians 4 that your pastor(s) and elders, for all their flaws and all yours, are supposed to help edify, unify, and even perfect you until you are more like Christ.
Authenticity (with Some Mediation)
My wife and I just moved from an East Coast church of nearly one thousand people to a Pacific Northwest church of nearly fifty. We sit a lot closer to our new pastor, no matter where we are in the room, than we ever could in the big auditorium back East. We have both commented upon the authenticity “added” to our pastor’s message via the simple decrease in the amount of airspace between his face and ours. I’m not criticizing my old church in the least, only observing that we feel we are benefiting from this spatial proximity—we need the teaching and the influence of a pastor given to Christ’s body. We know the Bible better and love the Lord and our fellow church members more precisely because of his mediation. Even though, in a (limited) sense, he stands between us and the Bible, the divinely intended result is more faith, greater unity, and better knowledge.
If the cultural pressures of authenticity and disintermediation could take down American Idol, then they can surely impact Christians and churches—for good and ill. We’ve got to embrace what is worthy in this cultural moment and yet distance ourselves from any force that would push us away from our God-ordained means of spiritual growth. Want authenticity? Go to church.
Mark L. Ward, Jr. (PhD, Bob Jones University) serves the church as a Logos Pro at Faithlife, makers of Logos Bible Software. He is the author of multiple high school Bible textbooks, including Biblical Worldview: Creation, Fall, Redemption (BJU Press, 2017).
