Tag: Karen Swallow Prior

Being Human — Chapter Nine — What’s the story: mourning glory?

This is an adaptation of the ninth talk from a 2022 sermon series — you can listen to it as a podcast here, or watch it on video. It’s not unhelpful to think of this series as a ‘book’ preached chapter by chapter. And, a note — there are lots of pull quotes from various sources in these posts that were presented as slides in the sermons, but not read out in the recordings.

Content warning — we are going to be talking about violence; and I am going to touch on the way that violence is gendered, especially around family violence, and I do not want that to take people by surprise.

If I asked you to describe the stories you have been consuming lately in a sentence, how would you do it?

Here are a few of mine:

An elite soldier’s unit and family are killed as a result of a deep state conspiracy involving the military and big pharma, so he goes on a rampage, killing everyone involved.

Or…

A retired military police officer hitchhikes around the U.S. and manages to stumble into a deadly conspiracy; he uses his investigative skills and capacity for violence to solve it.

Or… and this one was a favourite… A folk-singing spy with PTSD, whose father works for the CIA, is sent undercover in an engineering firm so he can prevent the election of a pro-nuclear Iranian presidential candidate, or failing that, assassinate him; he sings his way through his trauma and questions about the cost of participating in violence.

At the time of preaching this series, Amazon had just launched the new Rings of Power Tolkien epic, which is fascinating because Tolkien thought very carefully about stories and their power — and about technology and the way it changes us.

In a letter about Middle Earth he explains that magic in his world — especially the destructive magic of Mordor — was a picture of the machine in ours.

“He will rebel against the laws of the Creator — especially against mortality. Both of these will lead to the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective — and so to the Machine (or magic).”

— Tolkien

The machine is operating through:

“… all use of external plans or devices instead of development of the inherent inner powers or talents — or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills.”

He sees this as the operations of “the enemy” — who he calls the “Lord of Magic and machines.” He says:

“The enemy in successive forms is always ‘naturally’ concerned with sheer Domination, and so the Lord of magic and machines.”

This created stuff warps us — like the One Ring warped Gollum — and anyone who wields it, and perhaps like swords and weapons shaped those who wield them; coming with a cost — the sort that get explored through the violent battle for Middle Earth.

The thing about stories is that they are powerful; they shape our understanding of the world — they shape our imaginations and desires, just like images — stories are part of what Charles Taylor, and Jamie Smith (who was the guy who wrote You Are What You Love), call the social imaginary — the background to our beliefs; the stuff that shapes our imagination.

“A social imaginary is not how we think about the world, but how we imagine the world before we ever think about it… it is made up of, and embedded in, stories, narratives, myths and icons.”

— James K.A. Smith

It is not just architecture and images that shape us — stories do as well. They help us make sense of the world; stories are what help us figure out what data we receive as “truth,” and what we do not.

“These visions capture our hearts and imaginations by ‘lining’ our imagination, as it were, providing us with frameworks of ‘meaning’ by which we make sense of our world and our calling in it.”

You could argue that telling stories — whether it is history, or fiction, or the myths — the big stories we live by — is part of being made in the image of the God who has structured history, and his word, as a story; that one of the things that separates us from other living creatures is that we tell stories — you do not see koalas building libraries.

Stories also shape the way we live — they teach us how we should live. There is a philosopher, Alisdair MacIntyre, who reckons the modern world has become a bureaucratic machine, where asking “how should I live?” gets reframed as “what is the most efficient way to make things happen.” He reckons the way out of the machine is to recognise the place of story in our lives, and in cultivating virtue; and that we can only know how we ought to live in this world if we can understand ourselves living in a story — knowing our origins, our beginning, our setting, and our destination — and who we need to be to get there.

“I can only answer the question ‘what am I to do?’ If I can answer the prior question: ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”
— Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

The “machine” means we often treat “non-fiction” — facts — as more important than stories, but this is making the mistake of treating us more like robots than humans; we live and breathe stories.

We spent some time previously unpacking Israel’s origin story — the creation story in Genesis — and imagining how it shaped the life of God’s people, not only living as God’s priestly image-bearing people in the Eden-like promised land, looking after the temple —

but imagining how that story might have shaped Israel to live differently in Babylon, where life was defined by an altogether different story — we dug into it a bit — the Enuma Elish — the story of the gods of Babylon creating the world through violence, from the bodies of dead and defeated gods.

Last week we talked about the powers and principalities that the New Testament describes operating to keep us captive; these spiritual powers are the animating forces behind the systems that make us less than human as we get swept up in them so that we are imprinted by them to represent those powers; to live, so to speak, as characters in their stories (Ephesians 6:11-12). In Babylon the powers operated through an idolatrous regime that celebrated violence.

Walter Wink was a Pentecostal theologian — he wrote a book called The Powers That Be about these systems that we can observe in the world. He was probably less inclined to see spiritual beings pulling the strings behind these observations, and more inclined to see collective human rebellion against God — but he talks about how the same story that animated Babylon, through its creation story — the idea that killing is in our genes; that to be human is to fight against evil, to destroy enemies, with violence — animates the empires of the modern West. He says of the way this story permeates our imaginary:

“The implications are clear: human beings are created from the blood of a murdered god. Our very origin story is violence. Killing is in our genes.”

— Walter Wink

It is this story, that he calls the myth of redemptive violence — the idea that whatever the problems we face, at the end of the day victory will take violence — heroic standing up against the forces of evil and triumphing, throwing them back into the abyss while wielding a sword.

“This Myth of Redemptive Violence is the real myth of the modern world. It, and not Judaism or Christianity or Islam, is the dominant religion in our society today.”

— Walter Wink

It is this story, not the Gospel, that shapes the politics of a post-Christendom world; and is the dominant religious story in our world; it is behind how we “imagine” the world before fleshing it out.

“By making violence pleasurable, fascinating and entertaining, the Powers are able to delude people into compliance with a system that is cheating them of their very lives.”

It is the myth you will find making violence entertaining — in The Terminal List, and Reacher — and even in Rings of Power — deluding people into compliance with a deadly and dehumanising system. Our stories are a little more complex — all these stories are critiquing violent conspiracies and evil, even embodied in a deep state — but they are offering violent solutions, even if, like in Patriot and Middle Earth, the stories leave us asking questions about the cost of wielding the sword. These powers — idol machines — do not just use one story, but this myth of redemptive violence is built into our world, and it is destructive.

Wink reckons there is more going on under the hood in our entertainment, the stories we consume, than we realise. He says in this story politics becomes ultimate; the state and its armed forces are responsible for throwing chaos into the abyss, and those who buy the story will offer themselves up for holy war.

“Salvation is politics: the masses identify with the god of order against the god of chaos, and offer themselves up for the Holy War that imposes order and rule on the peoples round about. Peace through war; security through strength: these are the core convictions that arise from this ancient historical religion, and they form the solid bedrock on which the domination system is found in every society.”

This myth props up what the former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex as he left office in 1961. We talked about this back in our Revelation series.

He was worried about the rapid development of an arms industry as a product of the Cold War. He said American factories once made ploughs, but they had learned to make swords, in a permanent industry of vast proportions designed to supply the armed forces.

“American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well… We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions…”

— Dwight Eisenhower, Farewell Address, 1961

He reckoned people had to be really careful about the way people making money from this industry would chase power and influence, because it had the potential to change the economic, political, and spiritual makeup of the country.

“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex.”

And this seems a world away from us, here in a small church in a city across the world, but the degrees of separation might be smaller than you think. Our military industrial complex is a lot smaller than the U.S. We look at their gun culture as an idol, while consuming the same stories that justify those cultural norms — the same stories that prop up this idea that nations solve problems with violence — and these stories also prop up the idea that individuals should use violence to solve problems, and especially that men should; they shape how we understand masculinity.

Did you notice that the three shows I started out talking about all have violent men as heroes? There is a certain view of the world that sees masculinity as being about male power — the capacity for violence — so they can be protectors, and so women can swoon over such masculine men.

It is not just our entertainment — so much of our Christian content, the books we read, the stuff we listen to or watch, comes from the U.S. And the church in the U.S. has shown itself, in the last few years, to be marching in lockstep with the dominion system. This same myth of redemptive violence is used to justify grabbing hold of political power to win a culture war, or any sort of conflict against your enemies.

There is a writer in the States, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, who wrote this book Jesus and John Wayne, exploring how this same myth has embedded itself in the church.

We are products of our culture; of what we consume, she says:

“The products Christians consume shape the faith they inhabit.”

She traces the way that the modern church has developed a sort of “militant masculinity” — idolising power and the capacity for violence, militant heroes like the western star John Wayne.

“For many evangelicals, these militant heroes would come to define not only Christian manhood but Christianity itself… Wayne modelled masculine strength, aggression, and redemptive violence… Little separated Jesus from John Wayne. Jesus had become a Warrior Leader, an Ultimate Fighter.”

This is a picture of our “social imaginary” preconditioning us to read the Gospel stories in a particular way that is more Babylonian than Biblical.

She has the receipts — she quotes a guy named Doug Wilson, who, thanks to the Internet, enjoys a pretty wide readership in Australia. In one of his books, Wilson says it is essential for boys to play with swords and guns; to meet a deep need to have something to defend, something to represent in battle. You might have heard stories like this; that there is this inbuilt capacity for violence that is necessary in case you have to save someone.

“… it is absolutely essential for boys to play with wooden swords and plastic guns. Boys have a deep need to have something to defend, something to represent in battle.”

— Doug Wilson

Note: since preaching this series in 2022, Wilson’s infamy and influence has increased and in a recent “no quarter November” he was selling branded flamethrowers.

For Wilson, to beat our weapons into pruning hooks too soon — to not be part of the military-industrial complex and buying the myth of redemptive violence — that will leave us fighting the dragon with a pruning hook.

“And to beat the spears into pruning hooks prematurely, before the war is over, will leave you fighting the dragon with a pruning hook.”

— Doug Wilson

Like Eisenhower, he has this passage from Isaiah in mind — where God will bring restoration and a transformed world, replacing war, violence, with peace, so that instead of making weapons people will make farming tools, pruning hooks and ploughshares.

“He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.”

— Isaiah 2:4

Folks like Wilson do not think that day of the Lord has come yet. For them we should still be armed and dangerous, with the weapons of the world.

Du Mez also points out just how angry Wilson got at the idea women might be warriors, for a bunch of reasons including that they are not as good at the “important work of violence.” Now, you have probably got your own thoughts about women becoming soldiers, but that is not the point. When you make the enemy someone who can be stabbed, you rob women of their place in the battle against the powers.

“… they were a sexual distraction to male soldiers, they could get pregnant, they distorted ‘covenantal lines of authority,’ and they were not as good as men in ‘the important work of violence.’”

When Eve is created as Adam’s helper (Genesis 2:18), it is the word ezer; a word with military connotations — more like ally — that is used of God throughout the Bible. Ultimately this myth of redemptive violence, that wants men wielding swords and fighting people, is the myth of redemptive patriarchy; a myth of redemptive male violence.

It is a myth built on the cursed pattern of relationships in Genesis 3 where “he” rules over “her” — not where they rule together and she is an ally in the cause. And we do have a problem with the myth of redemptive patriarchy and male entitlement through power here in Australia. It is expressed in the rate of family violence perpetrated by men in our country, and the soaring numbers of sexual assaults perpetrated by boys in our schools. This does not come from nowhere; it is supported by narratives that paint heroism as using power to make the world what you think it should be. Domination, rather than the sort of dominion we were made for, is built into our lives at a societal level, and an individual level.

I am not sure these folks going on about taking up the sword, with a vision of masculinity that sees an inherent capacity for violence, have read their Bibles, where our enemy is not flesh and blood, but the devil, and his schemes, these powers, spiritual forces (Ephesians 6:11-12) — a real gun is not going to be much more useful than a toy one at this point.

And the “armour of God” we use in this fight — it is not armour geared towards violence; the sword in this war is the word of God; get your kids to play with it. And the way of life that prepares us for this fight is not playing with guns, it is prayer (Ephesians 6:17-18).

Plus, even though our enemy is the dragon-serpent — if we take up the sword and respond with violence, the story of the Bible seems to be that we defeat ourselves and choose his side — and the victory over the dragon comes through non-violent redemptive sacrifice.

Satan enters the scene as some sort of legged serpent, a dragon (Genesis 3). And then, when Cain is angry at Abel, God says sin is crouching at the door — like some personified wild animal, a power, desiring to have him (Genesis 4:7). And when he gives in to that power, he gets violent; he kills his brother (Genesis 4:8). This is a thread we traced through Genesis; to Nimrod, the violent killer who built Babylon and Assyria (Genesis 10:9-12).

The temptation Satan offers through the powers is the same one he offers Jesus in the wilderness — as we saw in Matthew — the temptation to grab hold of the kingdoms of the world with power (Matthew 4:8-9); to play the Babylon game; to run a domination system, or enjoy its rewards. To bow down to the dragon and serve his kingdom, embracing his way of death. And Jesus does not grasp. We do not actually fight the dragon — we are not the hero. Jesus does. Jesus is. And he tells us his kingdom features peacemakers (Matthew 5:9), that his people will reject violence, and turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39), and love our enemies (Matthew 5:44), and he tells his disciples to put away their swords, because those who draw the sword will die by the sword (Matthew 26:52).

The whole point of his life was to model something different to a life under the powers, the power of Satan — the violent dominion systems, because he came to model the kingdom of God, and invite us to join him in it. Even if Revelation depicts him defeating the dragon, his victory is won at the cross, through the blood of the lamb (Revelation 12:9, 11). He confounds the beastly myth of redemptive violence and provides an altogether different story for us to live by, just like Genesis did for Israel. And he calls us to put away our swords, deny ourselves, and take up our cross — following him (Matthew 16:24). Jesus invites us to life not under the powers — the power of Satan — the violent dominion systems, but in the kingdom of God. He invites us to life in a different story — the story told in the Old Testament from start to finish — from Moses to the Prophets — Jesus says he is what holds the story together (Luke 24:26-27). He says the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets — the whole Old Testament — are written about him; that he has come to fulfil them (Luke 24:44), and that this fulfilment is not found in wielding a sword, but suffering and death on a cross, by being crucified by those who wield swords, so that he might bring forgiveness of sins and new life by the Spirit (Luke 24:46-47). His death and resurrection are the climax of history, and of the integrated collection of books in the Old Testament.

The whole story of the Bible is a story that invites us to be truly human by resisting violence and domination and the powers, and finding life in God’s kingdom.

In this story we are not the hero. We cannot save ourselves or fix the world, and the military industrial state cannot throw back the forces of chaos, because they are often aligned with the forces of chaos, even as God appoints them as the sword. Heroism in this story is not about the sword; the sword is deadly. It does not just kill our enemies as we swing it, it destroys us with every blow; violence disintegrates us, taking us further away from the life of love we were created for, that Jesus embodies.

The way of life that comes with the story of Jesus is to take up our cross. It is the life Paul describes in Philippians 2 (Philippians 2:5). A life shaped by Jesus and his story, because his story is now our story, and it provides the pattern for all our relationships. And I want to suggest that life in this story is going to involve two commitments that change how we engage in the world in ways that make us truly human — first, a commitment to being better readers of stories, and second, committing ourselves to living in God’s story, the story of Jesus, and so embracing non-violence as we embody the story of Jesus.

This will mean becoming better readers of the Bible — the sword we are meant to wield — and participants in its ongoing story, so it shapes our lives and actions (Ephesians 6:17). I reckon, often, we are not great readers of the Bible, and part of the key to reading the Bible well, especially in narrative bits, is not just to see Jesus as the fulfilment of the story, but to ask “am I seeing behaviour that is like Jesus in this story, or like the pattern of the dragon, or cursed relationships?”

The Bible is full of descriptions of violence, but that violence normally gets destructive and out of hand rather than being redemptive. So we will celebrate David slaying his giant — explicitly without a sword (1 Samuel 17:50) — but not notice how violence becomes embedded in his family system and basically destroys everything as his sons go to war with him, and each other (2 Samuel 12:10). And somehow we will say Christian men need swords or guns or violence (or flamethrowers). The story of the Bible exposes the problem with our hearts, and with the idea that we can turn to violence to solve our problems.

Being better readers of stories might also mean reading better stories. Karen Swallow Prior, who I mentioned last chapter, is a professor of literature. She has written a book called On Reading Well, about how the stories we choose to engage with can be paths to cultivating virtue, because stories do actually teach us how we should live. She reckons stories work better than facts, or other forms of education that focus on techniques, because they let us imagine different experiences so we can explore new ways to live.

“Literature replicates the world of the concrete, where the experiential learning necessary for virtue occurs. Such experiential learning does not come through technique.”

We see characters reacting to situations in ways that are concrete where ideas might be abstract. So the sorts of stories we watch, and the sort of characters that shape our imagination — that matters. As we judge the characters we encounter that shapes our own character.

“… the act of judging the character of a character shapes the reader’s own character. Through the imagination, readers identify with the character, learning about human nature and their own nature through their reactions to the vicarious experience.”

But this will also mean being more sensitive to the formative power of stories around us — not just the myth of redemptive violence, but visions of the good life built on grasping and consuming and being the hero of our own story — so we can spot the powers and disarm them, and expose them to rob them of their power over us and others; and that we might even choose stories that cultivate virtue in us.

And maybe we need more Inklings — more Tolkiens and Lewises telling stories — whether in books, or TV, or video games, or just to our kids at night — that subvert the powerful myths of our world, that offer escape, and even what Tolkien called “the eucatastrophe” — the unexpected happy ending.

“The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale… the consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn.’”

— Tolkien, On Fairy Stories

Tolkien believed our hearts desire this eucatastrophic moment because we are created to experience the unexpected happy ending caught up in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.

“The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels… among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable Eucatastrophe.”

So that is the first bit. The second bit is a commitment not just to believing the story of Jesus is true, but to living in it — which will mean letting it provide the shape of our life. That will mean rejecting the myths offered by our world, by the powers, including the myth of redemptive violence, and arming ourselves instead with the sword that is God’s word by taking up our cross and following Jesus. This is harder than it sounds, but it is also less abstract than it sounds, because it is exactly what Paul is describing in Philippians 2. This is, in MacIntyre’s words, the story that teaches us “what we are to do” in any moment. The death and resurrection of Jesus are the culmination of the story of the Bible — the story that reveals the truly human life to us, both the way to life and a way of life.

The theologian Michael Gorman has been mega-helpful to me with this stuff, and he reckons Philippians 2’s retelling of the Gospel is both the central organising story of Paul’s life, and of our life as Christians. He says in the cross and resurrection Paul sees God revealing that faithful and holy opposition to evil — redemption — is not found through inflicting violence, but through absorbing violence and death, turning the other cheek.

“Covenant fidelity, justification, holiness and opposition to evil are not achieved by the infliction of violence and death but by the absorption of violence and death.”

I want to be careful here, because I am not saying that if you are being abused by the sort of person who believes that violence is a legitimate answer you should stay subject to that relationship, or the violence. What I am saying is that responding with violence, taking up the sword, produces a vicious cycle, and to forgive and relinquish that right to take up the sword and destroy your enemy is to embrace the way of Jesus. Wielding the sword, turning to violence, will always shape us, and it will shape us to believe and participate in a story that is counter to the Gospel. This also does not mean we do not let those whom God has given the sword — the government — pursue justice.

But this is where we go wrong when we think the idea for raising masculine men is teaching boys to play with guns and swords, encouraging them to kill the giants or dragons in their lives, to be the hero, and teaching girls to look for a violent protector, rather than teaching them to fight evil not by repaying evil with evil, but by embracing life in God’s story.

In this story the dragon loses as God’s power is displayed in the weakness of the cross, in Jesus’ refusal to grasp power the way Satan tempts us to, and as the full weight of the violent dominion system is brought against Jesus, God is liberating humans — his violent enemies — by forgiving us instead of crushing us and destroying our rebellion.

“The normal human temptation to squash enemies, to eliminate the impure other, is not the response of God in Christ. Instead, God reaches out to reconcile: people to God, and people to people.”

This is not the myth of redemptive violence but the story of redemptive love and grace. Our normal human impulse to squash our enemies is not the way God works. God works, through Jesus, to reach out and bring reconciliation; between us and him, and between us and each other.

This experience of love as the story of the Gospel becomes our story shapes how we live as disciples of Jesus; as we take up our cross, not because we have to throw the forces of chaos back into the abyss, but because we recognise that this is how Jesus did it, this is how he resisted the powers. He did not grasp, or embrace violence, but gave his life, suffering death on a cross (Philippians 2:6-8).

Gorman says these verses are showing us what true humanity looks like, in contrast to Adam, and what true divinity looks like, as we seek to bear God’s image in the world. He says to be truly human is to be Christlike, which is to be Godlike — and for Paul, and for Gorman, this means to be crosslike in our life in the world.

“The incarnation and cross manifest, and the exaltation recognises, Christ’s true humanity, in contrast to Adam, as well as his true divinity. Therefore, to be truly human is to be Christlike, which is to be Godlike.”

The Gospel is a story that does not just restore our relationships from a pattern of sin, to a pattern of godlikeness, it transforms the way we see masculinity, or femininity — our humanity — it reshapes all our relationships, and how we understand life imitating our hero as we are transformed into his image. It calls us from violence and into communion and love and a life of reconciliation and peacemaking.

He says the church is a community that inhabits the life of God by inhabiting God’s story, as God inhabits us by his Spirit and transforms us into people who reveal his character in our lives. Our life story, in relationships pursuing the way of Jesus, embody and proclaim the story we are part of. The participation in this story and retelling of this story shapes us because it becomes the story that shapes our actions in the world.

“The church inhabits this triune, cruciform God, who in turn inhabits the church. Thus the church’s life story embodies and thereby proclaims the narrative identity and gracious saving power of the triune God.”

God is inviting you into his life, and into his story — to leave the stories of the powers behind, the violent ways of death and destruction, and find life together with him, and so to become truly human. Will you keep living as people shaped by his story as we dwell in it together?

September 10, 2025 Add Comment

Being Human — Chapter Eight — Being true-ly human in an age of deception

This is an adaptation of the eighth talk from a 2022 sermon series — you can listen to it as a podcast here, or watch it on video. It’s not unhelpful to think of this series as a ‘book’ preached chapter by chapter. And, a note — there are lots of pull quotes from various sources in these posts that were presented as slides in the sermons, but not read out in the recordings.

We have covered a lot of ground this series. We have looked at many of the ways we are being disintegrated as humans; pulled apart because we are pulled in so many directions all at once; we are bombarded with images in the spaces we occupy, in ways that shape our desires; our technology allows us to overcome the limits of our bodies, and there are narratives telling us the best thing we could do is leave our bodies behind and become immortal by making ourselves one with the cloud.

We have seen how there is a real sense that as we have shifted from Christendom, where there was a shared story about the world — where God was God, and the King and Queen were the rulers, and everyone knew their place, and you did not change — to a modern liberal democracy, where we are free from forces beyond ourselves; and we have closed ourselves off to those forces, and to the supernatural — in the West. How we now prefer to express ourselves and be authentic as an expression of this liberation. We saw how this means we have lost a great narrative; a story that unites us as humans — to each other, and to God. And this also meant moving away from communion with God — the triune God who is a community of love — being how we understand what it means to be human. We have now become authorities — self-authors of our own lives.

We saw how the world has become not just complicated, but complex.

We are caught in global webs and supply chains we do not understand. We have seen how our technology shapes our brains — through dopamine hits and how this is been co-opted by limbic capitalism — and how what we see is shaped by the algorithms of surveillance capitalism; to sell us stuff based on our desires and addictions and patterns of behaviour. If all this is true, it presents us with a challenge when it comes to knowing what is true — and being able to tell when we are freely acting as individuals — who are meant to be free from powers outside ourselves, and free to express ourselves. How do we know if we are expressing our own desires, or the desires implanted in our head by the machine world?

When we talk about these unseen forces shaping our thinking so we will use our bodies, and our energy, and our money in service of their kingdoms — while telling us we are free — this is what the beastly powers and principalities the Bible talks about look like in the real world. This is how — in Paul’s words in Ephesians 2, we are dead, captivated to fleshly desires, and under the power of the prince of the air. Being truly human is about being liberated from the serpent’s coils, and his lies (Ephesians 2:1-3).

Part of the disintegration happening to our humanity — and perhaps our own individual experience — involves our inability to know what is true because we are not just bombarded with images of the good life that fire up our desires, but with competing ideas about what is true. And if the systems we plug into and play with are not just geared to shape our desires, our beliefs and our thoughts through ‘scripted disorientation’ in ways we cannot see, we are going to find it tricky to know what truth is. This makes the task of building one another up “speaking the truth in love” or literally “truthing in love,” difficult, and makes it likely that, instead, we will be swept all over the place; ‘blown here and there’ (Ephesians 4:14-15).

So as we start tying up these threads — looking at the world that is disintegrating us — I want to suggest that we are made to be integrated; that we are made to be whole; joined up; connected — one — integrated in body, mind, and soul — sure, but also integrated into community — with other people — in the body of Jesus as our reading describes us and united — one — with God. This is the key to being truly human and holding it all together; and what has happened with all the social change we have covered is that these integrities have been pulled apart — because we — together and as individuals — live lives in the world that believe the lie of the serpent.

This is especially challenging in our age of digital propaganda — empires have always used imagery to enforce beliefs in truths within their system — Israel had the temple and sacrificial systems and its ritual life, Babylon had its stories and idols, Rome had its temples and statues and stories and spectacle — but in the 20th century a guy named Edward Bernays — Freud’s nephew — drew on his uncle’s insights and applied them to public persuasion — in his book Propaganda.

It was a popular book in the image management project for the Nazis in Germany — but it is also a handbook for modern politics, advertising, and “public relations” — you might know that is the field I worked in before ministry.

In his book’s opening paragraph Bernays says the manipulation of our habits and opinions is foundational to democratic society.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.”
Edward Bernays

While we feel free, it is like we are caught in a web by these spider-men who spin their lines so:

“We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”
Bernays

And these spider-men — not the friendly neighbourhood variety — are the true ruling power in our societies.

“Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
Bernays

There has also been a massive increase in what the academic Harry Frankfurt called bull**** (note, I didn’t use this word when preaching, I called it ‘bullpoo’) — a technical description of deceptive speech that is not outright lies, but does not bother trying to be true.

Frankfurt reckons we are surrounded by spin, by misrepresentation, by bull****, which he says is a type of speech “… unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about…”

He suggests it arises from “the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs.”

He has just described Twitter (now X); but also the animating forces of fake news and troll machines and the outrage industry, and the spiders spinning political speech who cannot speak straight sentences but use what George Orwell called doublespeak.

Like surveillance capitalism, and limbic capitalism, these propaganda machines are unseen forces manipulating and shaping our beliefs by spinning webs of half truths — the powers and principalities in our world propping up empires built on spin and idolatry and deception and that bull****.

If these forces are at work in our world how can we know what is true? How can we live truly? Especially if it is all fragmented and now there are multiple spiders spinning multiple webs — all offering their own truths according to our interests — like in a democracy — there is a reason people say we live in a post-truth world. Part of the shift away from God has involved separating big-T truths — facts — about earth from our spiritual values — personal little-t ‘truths’.

The author Nancy Pearcey borrows a picture from Francis Schaeffer of a two-storey (and two-story, pun intended) house to describe this shift and the way it plays out on modern questions of truth about our bodies, and our lives — in this metaphorical house, empirical objective truth — the scientific realm — is one storey, the facts, that shape public life, and beliefs about God falling into the subjective storey of private beliefs — values — where what is true for you is not true for me.

But what if those areas — morality and theology — are areas where there is actually capital-T truth that should shape not just our lives, but society?

And — to be fair — part of what led to this fragmenting was a lack of integrity on the church’s part — historically, with the corruption that prompted the Reformation. The Reformation created multiple ways to be Christian; it made multiple truths imaginable in Christendom — but it is happening presently too, where the church, which is meant to teach us truth, has acted like the powers and principalities — using our power to abuse and force people to conform while claiming to represent the capital-T Truth — and then employing spin and propaganda and cover-ups — people have inevitably — as they have walked away from those abusive institutions — walked away from the truths they proclaimed.

This has led a bunch of folks my age and younger towards deconstruction. This might be where you are at — right now. Now — I am all for deconstruction when we are deconstructing falsehoods and abuses in the church — both church traditions here are children of the Reformation; and I am all for recognising the way abusive institutions have caused wounds that intersect in damaging ways with the truths we have been taught by those institutions — and I recognise at times it can be super tricky to separate God from the church… but our deconstruction also has to extend to the powers and principalities corrupting the church — to seeing if these behaviours are true — if they are godly — and the risk with deconstruction is where we find ourselves “did God really say” and being drawn by those same powers to grasp onto things God says are bad for us. Deconstruction will only get you so far — it becomes disintegrating and destructive without reconstruction being part of the picture; without some sense that truth exists and that to be fully human is to live a life of integrity — one that is true.

If we want to be truly human — well, our origin story has something to say here — not just Genesis — but the Gospel — and Ephesians 2-4 (the Bible reading for the sermon) — unpacks what it looks like to find our life in that story, rather than the propaganda pulling us back into the serpent’s coils.

We do not live in a two-storey universe where there are facts related to the material world and values related to the spiritual side of life; if the same God is the creator of heavens and earth then — sure — there are two storeys — but there are truths in each; that we split them is a product of a disenchanted world where we get rid of the heavens and spiritual thinking, and see it having no bearing on reality.

And then ultimately we see that the Bible tells one story of the two storeys being brought together. Jesus turns up to end the exile — from Eden and Israel — as the tabernacle-in-the-flesh who brings heaven on earth — who comes to save us from homeless life in non-places — and he does not do this by restoring the temple to its former glory — as heavenly space — you might remember as we worked through Matthew’s Gospel that our origin story — the Gospel — is the story of heaven and earth coming together as the heavenly human brings the kingdom of God. To be truly human is to get our facts straight about heavenly life; about God and who he created us to be as we reflect heaven on earth as his image-bearing people.

We also live in a two-story world — in the narrative sense — we are either living in God’s story, or the serpent’s. The serpent was the first creature to introduce uncertainty about facts when it came to the upper storey — the heavenly realm — he got humans questioning ‘did God really say’ — questioning ‘is God really good’ (Genesis 3:1). He was a propagandist… putting the ‘pagan’ in pro—pagan—da. And since that lie worked so well he has been using this same deception to devour others. To disintegrate us — using powers and principalities — elemental forces — to shape the world and so shape our beliefs.

Humans became captives to deception — to deceptive idolatrous systems that harden our hearts into stone — like the people of Judah (Jeremiah 17:1). Idols and sin rewrite and rewire so that our hearts are “deceitful above all things” and “beyond cure” (Jeremiah 17:9). We need new hearts — with truth written on them by God, rather than idolatry inscribed on them by us — so we will see what is true (Jeremiah 31:33).

Which is what Jesus came to bring — the Word of God from the beginning — God tabernacling in the world (John 1:1, 14), as he came to liberate us from the father of lies — the devil — and those — like the Pharisees — who would build systems of deception to pull people away from God (John 8:44-45). Jesus used his “I am” statements through John to identify himself with the God who created the world and he describes himself as the way, the truth, and the life — the one in whom both storeys — the heavenly or spiritual — and the material — are held together and expressed as one integrated truth (John 14:6-7). And he calls us to find life in him — and John says he writes so that we might believe this true human is the path to true life (John 20:31).

So that we might — as Jesus puts it — find life in oneness with the triune God, being drawn into the eternal communion of love — through him (John 17:20-21),

as he provides hearts that point us to the truth by giving us the Spirit — the Spirit of truth (John 14:16-17, 16:13).

What is interesting in John — given the way he sets up deception as devilish and truth as found in Jesus — is how he reports Pilate’s words at Jesus’ trial — here Jesus is up against the face of the bull machine — Rome — in Jerusalem; the deceptive idolatrous regime that claims to be bringing heaven on earth, and is full of spin — and Pilate looks at Jesus, who claims to be king — not Caesar — and that is the charge against him — Jesus says he has come on the side of truth; to testify to the truth, that everyone who listens to truth — two-storey truth — listens to him (John 18:37), and Pilate says “what is truth” (John 18:38)?

We are all Pilates now…

Pilate does not recognise truth when it is standing in front of him. He becomes wrapped up in the serpent’s schemes, and the schemes of his children: the Pharisees. Jesus is executed. And in that moment — as the serpent strikes his heel, the serpent is crushed (Genesis 3:16); his grasp on humans — built through deception — comes unravelled as he is exposed; and as God’s nature — his love — is exposed for those who can see the truth — we were dead — in our sins — following the serpent’s story (Ephesians 2:1-2), but now, God who is rich in mercy has made us alive… by grace (Ephesians 2:4-5).

If you sit here and you are convinced by the evils of a world built on deception and manipulation and what that does to our humanity in a world where we have walked away from God — that is the serpent — that is the same force at work in the world that is exposed as a deceived world kills God’s son. Come out. Believe the truth. If you are tempted to deconstruct, or disintegrate — to proclaim one truth and live another — come back to Jesus. Away from death.

Not only is the serpent diabolical — literally — God is good and loving and shows that in the way Jesus radically refuses to use his power to manipulate and deceive; to the length he goes to in order to not be coercive, so that he dies, humiliated, on a cross to make a way to life with God, and expose us to the truth about God.

Jesus — the way, the truth, and the life — offers the pathway to the integrated life of communion with God, and others, we were made for — and the path away from the deception of the serpent, and our deceitful serpent-like hearts. He reconstructs us.

Paul talks a couple of times in his letters about people having been bewitched — and enslaved — to the elemental spiritual forces of the world — who are opposed to Jesus (Galatians 3:1, 4:3). He talks about these forces built on hollow and deceptive philosophy, rather than on Jesus — the fullness of God in human form (Colossians 2:8-9). He says we died to those with Jesus, and so we should stop living by their scripts (Colossians 2:20). It is interesting that in both cases he is talking about people who want to operate as though we are under law creating rules as truths to live by — not grace — but there is a pattern where spiritual forces are being used to pull people away from truth. Away from oneness with Jesus.

In Ephesians 4 he describes what this looks like — what it looks like to be one with Jesus. One with each other. In communion — as one body and one Spirit (Ephesians 4:4-6). He describes a life grounding ourselves in the truth, and speaking it to each other — whether that is through particular speaking roles in church; or speaking to one another as the church — the goal is that we be established in the truth of the Gospel and united and mature in Christ, so that we are not infants tossed around by the deceitful scheming of people in the world who are serpent-like (Ephesians 4:11-14).

Paul’s antidote to a poisonous post-truth world hell-bent on our destruction is being people who “truth in love” — that is the literal translation — in the body of Christ — living integrated lives grounded in truth as we grow together… built up in love. This “truthing” in love certainly includes speaking the truth — because Paul is going to come back to that — we are to avoid lies — and, I would suggest — as much as possible propaganda and that bull (Ephesians 4:25).

Paul talks about the same heart-hardening that the Old Testament sees as a product of idolatry (Ephesians 4:17-18) — and that is part of the picture for us in a world where we are bombarded with lies and images that shape our hearts — so that we give ourselves over to greed and indulgence (Ephesians 4:19). Paul is describing their world — and ours.

But we are people who are committing to be taught in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus (Ephesians 4:20-21); putting off the selves shaped by deceit, that spin our webs of deceit even as we are caught in them — to become new people shaped by the truth, and committed to speaking it in a world of deceit as we become like God again, reflecting his righteousness and holiness (Ephesians 4:22-24).

And that is hard. Because deceit is hardwired into our world — and — without the Spirit — it is hardwired into our hearts. And we have to learn this. We have to learn to hear truth, and we have to learn to speak it — and speak it in a way that makes it plausible in our disenchanted two-storey world where this stuff is ‘value’ rather than fact — and where the institutional church has often been complicit in propaganda and that bull and abuse… and where we are formed to have — and voice — quick opinions about everything.

I am going to suggest two ways we might change how we approach truth, as people — how we work towards integration rather than disintegration — that will hopefully make us more likely to speak truth and less likely to spin that bull.

If what the Bible says — what Jesus says — not what the church says — if it is true, then Jesus is truth — and the truth about Jesus operates both in the material world — the world of facts — and the spiritual world — the world of values — in fact, he integrates the two; and so should we. We should reject the idea that we have a public and a private self — or that there is no truth — we are all going to pick a framework to work out truth from anyway; and none of us is free from powers beyond ourselves — so we are not losing anything if we choose to start with God — the creator — being the one who gets to declare what is true — and with Jesus’ claims that he is the way, the truth, and the life — and God in the flesh — as a starting point for assessing other truths.

I want to suggest the first real act of pursuing truth is contemplation — prayerful contemplation — the philosopher Hannah Arendt — whose intellectual project was trying to figure out how people in Germany came to believe the lies of the Nazis — she reckons we can only know truth; and live truly, if we stop moving and speaking — if we cease — if we be still and know that God is God. We have to free ourselves from the webs that entangle us.

“Every movement, the movements of body and soul as well as of speech and reasoning, must cease before truth. Truth, be it the ancient truth of Being or the Christian truth of the living God, can reveal itself only in complete human stillness.”
Hannah Arendt

Contemplating truth will mean listening to God — making headspace and time to engage with God’s word and pray that God’s living and active Spirit might guide us, through his living and active word, push us outside of the forces at work in our world against God, and towards God.

We will look more at this next week — but there is a trick to reading God’s word in conversation with other humans — within traditions that might need deconstructing — it is not always easy to separate our experience of people using the Bible without love, from the truth the Bible contains — and there is a whole internet industry geared towards deconstruction that basically sounds like people asking “did God really say”… but I reckon one guide is to read the Bible the way Jesus did — as one story — that testifies about him so that we receive Jesus as God’s truth.

True speech is actually going to require listening — to God — first of all — and to others — before we run around with our opinions. This sort of contemplation is not just an individual act — it is one we pursue as we engage in “truthing in love” together. I reckon the modern church is too geared towards actions and words — and online hot takes — that bull — without truth because we do not live contemplative lives.

Part of this contemplative life is going to involve cultivating the humility to recognise your limits; that your access to truth is limited by your brain, and your body, being stuck in a particular time and space — so you invite other people to speak the truth in love to you — and — as much as possible, receiving that truth without being defensive — this is something I am working on, personally — but if you are subjected to powers outside yourself, and told you are free — and that you have your own truth — you need someone to burst the bubble; we are not in a good position to be objective about ourselves, or the world — our standpoints, our experiences — the forces that have worked us over — we cannot see them, but others might be able to — especially older folks who have been through a bit — and older folks — I think I can still speak on behalf of the younger folks — we need you. But, there is a flipside where older folks might have been stuck in bad traditions so long a younger perspective can be helpful too — this is where the “in love” bit comes in to our truthing — so younger folks, let me embrace middle age and tell you we need you to speak truth to us older folks too; calling us to repent; to deconstruct and reconstruct our lives around the truth.

C. S. Lewis reckoned we should also listen to dead people — not in a spooky way — but by reading older books from outside our time — books from our time are a product of our standpoint, but in the words of older, dead, Christians we might find ideas that critique our take on the world.

“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.”
C.S Lewis, in his prologue to a translation of Athanasius ‘On the Incarnation’

In the olden days there were monastic folks who would withdraw from the city and go live in the desert — these desert mothers and fathers had a totally different perspective on their time — and the practices of the church — and listening to voices outside our experience; and outside the norm — might be part of proper humble contemplation. Read less white men. Listen to the people who are deconstructing because of the way the church has bought into lies, and contemplate how we are part of that picture as the church; the body of Jesus.

This contemplation might liberate us from forces we cannot see in our own time, and our own hearts — it might help us deconstruct lies in order to reconstruct our lives around truth. It might help us actually speak truthfully, rather than speaking that bull. We need that sort of truth in our lives.

The second practice is integration — it relates — but if we have this capital-T truth about God and humanity that truth should be true in every sphere and integrated into our lives and our actions and our other beliefs. It can be tempting in a world built on lies to embrace scepticism about all claims — but I wonder if integration — starting with a foundation — is a more hopeful posture — where, rather than being suspicious of voices that do not conform to our experience — our standpoint — we ask ourselves “how does this fit with what I know to be true because I know Jesus?” We are kind of perfectly positioned in how we are meeting together as two traditions to humbly recognise that different human traditions have limits; that there will be truths we have been blinded to by our traditions, and to humbly seek to reform and integrate those truths into our lives — our habits — and our beliefs as we seek truth together. Real truth is truth that is embedded into our lives — and a community — that is how “truthing in love” is about more than just words — but speaking truthfully to each other also requires the work of both contemplating and being able to integrate the words we say with true things about the world, and about God.

Part of the disintegrating nature of spin and that bull is that it is almost never substantial or integrated with deep traditions — with ideas beyond itself. Spin, or bull****, emerges from a lack of expertise, rather than expertise. The writer and academic Karen Swallow Prior has this great advice she gives her students about the pursuit of truth being about integrating deep knowledge, rather than creating totally new thinking, built off an old story by Jonathan Swift about a spider talking to a bee…

“This story within the story consists of a discourse between a spider (a “Modern,” who symbolizes for Swift the worst of modern subjective thinking) and a bee (an “Ancient,” who symbolizes the best of traditional classical learning).”
Karen Swallow Prior

The spider has spun a deadly web built from within itself, just to entrap others — and the bee, facing its death, points out that the spider brings darkness and death — it produces nothing but excrement and poison from its work; it is disconnected to anything beyond itself, while a bee builds a nourishing house of life-giving sweetness by connecting the life it builds to a community and to a structure it puts together from outside itself. She reckons our approach to finding and speaking truth — in her case it is about students being “bees, not spiders.” Integrating knowledge in their essays is about avoiding spin and building knowledge from good sources outside ourselves, but she sees her task in a post-truth world as, increasingly, helping people spot the difference between the poisonous lies of the spider, and life-giving truths — nectar.

“I see now that the challenge is increasingly to better equip students to distinguish between poison and nectar, to build from strong materials rather than to create airy edifices which, like spiderwebs, are easily swept away once their lethal work is done.”
Karen Swallow Prior

She, like Paul in Ephesians, sees the key to not being swept away, or sweeping away others, as being firmly planted in the truth of the Gospel, and having it integrated into the other truths we believe and speak.

Be bees. Not spiders. People committed to living truthfully and in love together; one with God and each other — and to speaking truthfully to each other and the world as we bear witness to the true human who is the way, the truth, and the life.

September 8, 2025 Add Comment

What might a ‘Christian aesthetic’ look like? And why bother?

Late last year I was listening to the podcast Cultivated (one of my favourites), and about halfway through this episode the panelists started talking about what a ‘Christian aesthetic’ might look like.

“That makes me think of a question that I’ve been thinking about a lot, that I’d love to talk about and explore, is: what would a Christian aesthetic look like, if you go beyond the content level, which is often how we talk about these things, right? Something is Christian if it tells a story from the Bible, or has a Christian theme or message. Protestants are prone to that kind of word/propositional orientation anyway, less than Catholics, who are oriented more towards the visual. What would it look like to think about an aesthetic, a form, that’s ‘Christian’, certainly in architecture there are certain forms or styles that we could point to and say ‘that’s a ‘Christian’ aesthetic,’ that’s a form that has been created and has always been associated with Christianity …” — Brett McCracken, Cultivated Podcast

It’s been something of an ‘earworm’ or a ‘brainworm’ for me since, coupled with my love of the idea that when Christians did start building their own buildings, they incorporated the cross into the floor plan, and put the highest point of the ceiling above the intersection, so that the space itself represented the story of the Gospel, and that Jesus death serves as the bridge between earth and heavens, that will ultimately bring heaven to earth. That’s a ‘certain’ sort of form — a provision of a habitat that helps us embody the Christian story from the ground up (though for most of us, who are architecturally illiterate, and textually literate, this sort of thing might be meaningless — greater actual literacy is not a reason to be illiterate when it comes to aesthetic stuff though). I love that idea — while also pondering if the very decision to own public buildings, rather than meeting in homes, was a good move (aesthetically or ‘formally’). I say this having been pastoring a church for four years that has now met in a rented public theatre, an empty ‘box-like’ room, and now a church auditorium with all the modern bells, whistles, screens and lighting — each ‘space’ has shaped the life and experiences of our community and our gatherings in profound ways.

The Cultivated conversation explores questions of form, or a Christian ‘aesthetic’ when it comes to Christians making art, I’m interested in considering what it looks like to ask these forms in our architecture — our use of space both public and private, and social architecture. How we create a ‘stage’ or a habitat where we embody the Gospel story as ‘characters’ and form habits.

One of the ‘modernist’ assumptions that ends up shaping ethics (how we live) is that we are consumers in a machine-like environment, that things have utility, which led to a corresponding rise in utilitarian ethics and pragmatism, and through all this, we Christians in our modernist framework have tended towards making pragmatic rather than aesthetic choices about space (and even art). Here’s a cracking quote from Karen Swallow Prior, from that same Cultivated podcast episode.

“We’ve inherited a lot from the Victorian age and we don’t even realise it. We often don’t even distinguish between Victorianism and Biblical Christianity. And one of them is utilitarianism. And so we have undue emphasis on the idea that things must be useful, that they must have a purpose, in order to be valuable, of course, you know, when we apply that to human lives we know what that results in, but I think that’s part of what makes us uneasy with art, that, you know, as Oscar Wilde said, ‘all art is utterly useless’ right, and what he meant by that is it’s just there to be enjoyed, it doesn’t have to fulfil a purpose, which of course is a sort of a purpose. Modern Christianity is uncomfortable with something that is just there to be enjoyed and take pleasure in… we think we have to be on mission all the time and fulfil some sort of purpose” — Karen Swallow Prior, Cultivated Podcast

Here’s the thing though; art does ‘serve a purpose’ — it is part of the ‘backcloth’ of life, part of the ‘environment’ we live in or the habitat we inhabit, art-as-artefacts are part of what forms a ‘culture’, and so art shapes our seeing of the world both directly as we engage with it, and subtly (by being part of our ‘environment’). And if we bring in my favourite academic discipline — media ecology — and one of its maxims: the medium is the message, then we start to see that forms do inherently communicate something along with content. To keep ‘ecology’ on the table — think about the relationship between the words ‘habitat’ and ‘habit’. If we want to be creatures of habit — those who habitually live out the Christian story because we are formed as characters within God’s story — not our own consumer-driven stories with us as the hero, but as disciples — maybe we should consider our habitats — how we structure and design space, including what it looks and feels like — an application of a ‘Christian aesthetic’ to how and where we meet and live…

I’ve been challenged to re-imagine how we approach church as Aussies who believe the Bible is the word of God, and that the Gospel is the story of Jesus arriving in this world as the king who conquers sin, satan, and death and who launches a kingdom — his people, to live a life, for eternity (but starting now) where these enemies have been destroyed, so that we’re free from their grip, and he is victorious.

I’m struck by how many of our practices as Christians are adopted from a modernist world with modernist assumptions — a couple in particular, that the world is ‘disenchanted’ (thanks Charles Taylor) and that we are simply ‘brains on a stick’ who need logic and facts to make good ‘rational’ decisions (thanks James K.A Smith). I’m simultaneously struck by the way this adoption of a ‘modernist framework’ as ‘the Christian frame’ has us reeling because we now live in a post-modern, post-Christian, environment and our practices aren’t keeping people (humanly speaking) or persuading people, and how much this framework has shaped our understanding of making disciples or Christian formation, and in this post, I’m particularly considering how that approach to formation has de-emphasised embodiment, and so de-emphasised our ‘environment’ and the arts. So that the idea of a ‘Christian aesthetic’ seems a bit wanky — we’ve lost a sense of deliberately Christian architecture or art, whether within the life of the church or in the witness of the church to the world (or both).

“I want there to be a place for evangelistic art, really, really, really good evangelistic art. I want there to be a place for art that has very obvious utility. I don’t have a problem with that. But once you get in the field of the Terence Mallicks, and he’s making a movie about creation, and dinosaurs, and trees and light. You’re asking yourself a really important theological question: How does God perceive light, and sound, and texture, and scent? Because that’s what he’s talking about. Because if we have a theological way to frame God’s care of those things in creation, then Terrence Mallick is a profoundly Christian artist…” — David Taylor, Cultivated Podcast

We reformed evangelicals in reacting against worldly idolatry of beauty (too high a view of creation), and the way we’ve seen that play out in the Catholic Church with its iconography and expensive cathedrals, have tended to over-correct, adopting and almost ‘dis-embodied’ approach to life in the world — so we think less about space, and place, and beauty than other streams of Christianity (including the Pentecostal stream, who have a different ‘frame’ but, perhaps, are more likely to uncritically adopt the forms that are popular in our world).

There’s been a recent pushback against modernity (and post-modernity) by people who realise we’ve been breathing the air for so long that it has become normal — that perhaps, to quote another podcast I’ve listened to quite a bit lately — Mark Sayers in This Cultural Moment — we’ve been colonised by our culture, rather than ‘colonising our culture’ with the Gospel. Sayers argues you should understand the west in three eras — pre-Christian, Christian, and post-Christian; that missionaries have often come from the ‘second culture’ — one shaped by the Gospel into the pre-Christian world (think Africa, or the world the early church operated in), and that the ‘third culture’ — the ‘post-Christian’ culture lives off the fruits of Christianity but ‘wants the kingdom, without the king’ — it has moved on to a new story about what human flourishing looks like. In episode 2, After discussing Leslie Newbigin’s return from the mission field in India to ‘post-modern’ England, and his realisation that the ground had shifted such that the west is now a post-Christian mission field, not “Christian” or “pre-Christian.” Sayers talks about some of the misfires of the early ‘missional’ church (including his early attempts at a missional church), which adopted secular forms, or aesthetics, to shape the teaching of the content of the Christian story. He said his question was: “how do you do a kind of church that incarnates into the culture of my friends?”

“Gen-X culture was hitting… post-modern culture was hitting… so the question was how do we incarnate into post-modern or Gen-X culture. I planted this congregation. We didn’t have singing. We didn’t have sermons. It was conversation, you know, clips from the Simpsons, we didn’t have a “front”… I was very much influenced by some of the alternative worship stuff that was happening in the UK. It was an attempt to use the cultural forms, it was the framework of missiology, but there was a thing that I missed was that there was an assumption that if you did this and you just did mission, then it would re-energise Christians, it would bring alive their faith, it would bring the church back to its core purpose… the model then of the three cultures is the idea that the third culture is not a ‘pre-Christian culture’… it’s not a return back to culture one, we’re turning to culture three… what it is, is a culture that is defining itself against Christianity, wants some of the fruits of Christianity whether it knows it or not, consciously, and therefore has a corrosive and caustic effect. The science of missiology taught people in Christian culture not to colonise people in culture one, when they’re communicating the Gospel to them, but what I realised was happening was that when I was in culture two incarnating and using cultural forms to speak to culture three, a post-Christian culture, that it was colonising us.”

John Mark Comer, the co-host of This Cultural Moment, sums this up as ‘you go out with the Gospel of Jesus, and instead of influence, you are influenced. Instead of shaping, you are shaped.” You uncritically take on the aesthetics of the world, and they start to shape how you see the world.

James K.A Smith puts it this way, in a series of paragraphs from chapter 3 of his book You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit:

“In our desire to embed the gospel content into forms that are attractional, accessible, and not off-putting, we look around for contemporary cultural forms that are more familiar. Instead of asking contemporary seekers and Christians to inhabit old, stodgy medieval practices that are foreign and strange, we re-tool worship by adopting contemporary practices that can be easily entered precisely because they are so familiar… confident of the form/content distinction, we believe we can distill the gospel content and embed it in these new forms…” — James K.A Smith, You Are What You Love

He says this ends up with us saying “come meet Jesus in the sanctified experience of a coffee shop; come hear the gospel in a place that should feel familiar because we’ve modelled it after the mall”…

“”Forms” are not just neutral containers or discardable conduits for a message… what are embraced as merely fresh forms are in fact practices that are already oriented to a certain telos, a tacit vision of the good life.”

“When we believe that worship is about formation, we will begin to appreciate why ‘form’ matters. The practices we submit ourselves to in Christian worship are God’s way of rehabituating our loves towards the kingdom, so we need to be intentional about the story that is carried in those practices. By the form of worship, I mean two things: (1) the overall narrative arc of a service of Christian worship and (2) the concrete, received practices that constitute the elements of that enacted narrative.”

“Only worship that is oriented by the Biblical story and suffused with the Spirit will be a counterformative practice that can undo the habituation of rival, secular liturgies.” — James K.A Smith, You Are What You Love

Sayers and Smith are essentially pointing to the same truth, through different (though related) paradigms. If our forms or aesthetics are predominantly derived from the world around us (not that this is always terrible) there is a risk that we will be shaped by the world, rather than the forms or aesthetics that are predominantly derived from our story, and the practices of Jesus and teachings of the New Testament. Both Smith and Sayers/Comer land in the same place — spiritual habits — or ‘disciplines,’ shaped by the Gospel story, which include coming to terms with our embodiment as the key for transformation. Smith, for mine, leans too heavily into the medieval practices that developed as the church moved into ‘institution’

Now. I’ve written quite a bit about where I depart from Smith’s proposed embodiment of these insights (that I love), I think he ultimately picks the medieval, or pre-enlightenment (or Augustinian), church as a particular point in time disconnected from our modernist assumptions so that its practices will be counter-formative… while I think much older (pre-Constantine) practices of the New Testament and early church — forms and practices specifically developed in the Christian story — are both more disconnected from modernism, and from Christendom and its ‘forms’ — such the backdrop is more like ours, and the practices Christians adopted against that backdrop are more likely to be helpfully counter-formative for us. It’s not that everything between then and now is wrong, or that we shouldn’t be progressing in our telling of the story of God working through history to bring about his kingdom, it’s just that I’m not sure the practices produced by Christians when we were in the cultural ascendency are the ones we should pin ourselves to when trying to rehabituate and rehabilitate the church. I’m not sure it’s enough to say our post-Christian inclination to adopt the forms of our culture wasn’t at the heart of the church when it built cathedrals that looked a lot like castles (Solomon had a similar issue here); even though I’m prepared to cede that the medieval church, at times, might have had a less sinister approach to aesthetics and practices than it did when Luther kickstarted the Reformation (using popular forms from outside the church), and Calvin adopted a particular sort of iconoclasm that went far beyond doing away with inappropriate and idolatrous aesthetic practices. Anybody trying to learn from history inevitably goes back into the annals to find some point where they think the church departed from a faithful model, and to find faithful counter-examples; this is inevitably an inexact science built around drawing analogies (see Dreher and the Benedict Option for another example of this phenomenon).

I think we’ve often made the distinction Smith points to between form and content when it comes to the Gospel — being flexible on form and firm on the Gospel as an expression of the sort of ‘contextualisation’ Paul writes about in 1 Corinthians 9. And it’s not that we shouldn’t play with expressing the Gospel in different forms — that’s part of being human and forms being cultural expressions — but I do wonder if we’ve been deliberate enough in developing a particularly Christian culture, or forms, or aesthetic that might pair with the Gospel content as we adapt our engagement with a variety of cultures so that our ‘medium’ and ‘message’ work together to disrupt and challenge idolatrous status quos (which are often packaged aesthetically). I wonder if we’ve created a universal flexibility on forms without grappling with the idea that ‘the medium is the message’ — and without critically asking what forms or mediums undermine our preaching and living of the counter-cultural, subversive, aspect of the Gospel.

Social architecture and how the habitat of the home shaped a new habit for the early church

Paul is able to both understand and embody a culture and challenge it in the way he does so — it’s what I think he does in Athens — and to do it in a way that doesn’t challenge the way we Christians operate in our own spaces, where he’s one of the architects (divinely inspired) of a radically different aesthetic, or form. A totally new use of space that is utterly subversive.

Paul’s treatment of eating immediately after he talks about his adaptability in 1 Corinthians 9 is interesting. Eating with people is a ‘form’ now (see anthropologist Mary Douglas’ fascinating essay ‘Deciphering a Meal’) and was a ‘form’ that had a particular meaning in the ancient world in both Jewish and Graeco-Roman culture. There are ancient records from the Roman world observing the dining habits of the Jewish people.

“Living in their peculiar exclusiveness, and having neither their food, nor their libations, nor their sacrifices in common with men.” – Philostratus, Life of Apollonius V.33

“They sit apart at meals, they sleep apart…” – Tacitus, Histories 5.5.2

The Jews had a particular practice — not becoming impure by eating with gentiles. This form had a meaning — the Jews saw this as something of an aesthetic practice, a thing that made their eating more beautiful (and this is apart from the dining program aligned with their calendar of festivals).

The Romans had their own forms, or aesthetic, when it came to dining, Pliny the Younger describes a meal around the table of an acquaintance (and again, there’s a certain sort of ‘physical space’ required for this, and an ‘aesthetic’ created by that space, check out the adjectives attached to the content).

“I happened to be dining with a man, though no particular friend of his, whose elegant economy, as he called it, seemed to me a sort of stingy extravagance. The best dishes were in front of himself and a select few, and cheap scraps of food put before the rest of the company… One lot was intended for himself, and for us, another for his lesser friends (all his friends are graded), and the third for his and our freedmen.” — Pliny the Younger, Letters, 2.6

Paul takes that form and, with Jesus, talks about three particular forms — eating at ‘the table of demons’ (1 Corinthians 10:18-21), eating with non-Christians in their homes as an act of love and mission (1 Corinthians 10:27-33), and eating together as the church (1 Corinthians 11:17-34). The act of eating together as a church required a particular sort of space — a home, organised in a particular sort of way that created a form — and this form might be part of a sort of aesthetic framework that transcends time and place.

What he describes in chapter 11 is a new and subversive form of eating; a new aesthetic; where people of different ethnic backgrounds and social class were to meet together around a table as equals, united as one by and in Jesus. This unity was a certain sort of aesthetic. A beautiful, embodied, picture of the Gospel. Part of a Christian aesthetic must grapple with the idea that as ‘images’ we humans are a certain sort of divine art (we are God’s handiwork, ala Ephesians 2). Part of our forms will include the way we inhabit space together. This form of eating together communicated the message — and it still does. What we eat — the content — around that form might change from culture to culture, across time and space (apart from the bread and wine), but the habit of gathering around a table might actually be at the heart of a Christian use of space — our social architecture in our public spaces and our homes. It creates, or assumes, a certain sort of habitat.

Sketching an aesthetic for Christian habitats — homes and church owned buildings

Let me unpack this a bit specifically as it relates to aesthetics and our how our ‘habitats’ shape our habits and our character, and how we might shape our ‘form’ or aesthetic, or architecture, in a way that is both adaptive to different cultures, or ethnicities, while simultaneously challenging where those cultures or ethnicities are affected by sin.

What would happen if we designed our spaces — be it home or church owned buildings — with some attention paid to architecture not just for utility’s sake, but with an eye to how aesthetics at a level not simply of ‘content’ (eg obvious pictures, or the colour of the carpet) but also of ‘form’ — in such a way that the form helps us inhabit and retell the story of the Bible in such a way that it shapes our habits. We already do a bit of this when it comes to acoustics, and the ability for people to move through various stages of a church gathering in a functional sense (that supports the ‘habituation’ of good things). I was struck by something one of the pastors of the church whose venue we hire said about how deliberately they’ve designed their facility so that the space for the ‘service’ (the auditorium) is the same size as the space for eating and talking together as a community (the cafe area). It’s a great facility with an eye to a certain sort of aesthetic and attention to detail I’m not used to in the Presbyterian scene… but part of me wonders how much artificial lighting, smoke machines, and big speakers form the backbone of a Christian aesthetic (I’m not opposed to the idea that the development of technology is part of humanity’s role in God’s story, see John Dyer’s book From the Garden to the City for a nice balanced account of this). I’m also struck by how a poorly designed house (like ours) in terms of living, kitchen, and dining, space limits our ability to participate in the sort of eating together that happens in the early church; and my dreams about an ideal home or ‘church building’ are concepts with a certain sort of ‘social architecture’ underpinning them.

I’m not naively suggesting that this sort of focus on space or ‘the aesthetic’ will magically transform us — that we’re exclusively products of our environment such that the right habitat will automatically fix our nature; and I’m totally aware of our tendency to idolatry — that our default response to beauty is to objectify it and seek to make it our own — but I feel like instead of cultivating an appropriate approach to beauty, or aesthetics, to counteract our sinful hearts, we’ve uncritically adopted an almost negative view of beauty and baptised that as ‘utilitarian’ and so we’ve treated this as the Christian norm.

Here are some of my early thoughts, or ‘sketches’ about some elements (a certain sort of ‘content’ geared towards the ‘aesthetic’) and ‘forms’ (a certain sort of delivery of that content) that might be part of how we structure our spaces to be both beautiful and formative habitats that orient our habits around the story of the Bible as they act as spaces that help re-tell that story…

Light and life.
Natural light. I’ve been pondering how often we have church in dark rooms (for the purposes of projection and managing lighting), where there’s something from start to finish in the Christian story about God being ‘light and life’ — and some part of that is him being the creator of light. There’s something to the idea that the introduction of electric lighting has ‘deformed’ us in all sorts of ways (including the way the screens of our smart devices do things to our eyes and brains when, prior to their development, we’d have been sleeping). The use and availability of light shapes our practices. The Gospel is a movement from darkness to light, and we’re not meant to fear it. Do our spaces communicate something else, even if subliminally? Is projection (and lighting) a case of harnessing this good gift from God?
Water.
There’s something about how there are rivers running through the garden in the beginning, and the end, of the story (and, for instance, in Psalm 23) — and that it’s involved in baptism, that means some sort of refreshing, flowing, presence of life-giving water works nicely in telling the story. Plus, you know, that stuff about Jesus at the well and him being living water…
Trees and fruit.
The trees in the garden are a picture of God’s provision and hospitality, fruit his initial gift of miraculously sweet, juicy and sustaining produce (both on normal trees and the tree of life), which is also a metaphor for the ‘good’ or ‘flourishing life’ for Christians (think the parable of the sower, the ‘true vine’, the fruit of the Spirit). Tree imagery also features prominently in the design of the fittings for the tabernacle and temple, Ezekiel’s vision of the new creation, and the new creation described in Revelation 21-22. And of course, there’s the tree at the heart of the Christian story — the cross. I’m struck by how churches in the past put lots of emphasis on flowers, and how little I thought of that at the time, but how an experience of stepping in to a sort of ‘oasis’ when you gather with Christians — a space trying to capture something of the gardens at the beginning, middle (Gethsemane) and end of the Christian story might help the idea that we are an alternative kingdom — and this might spill out into a world (an environment) desperately in need of a better picture of relating to the natural world. I love the idea of a massive table laden with fruit being part of our experience of eating together — a recognition that for all our technological processing of food to make it more convenient and desirable (with sugars and fats), we can’t compete with what’s on offer in nature.
Table/feasting.
God shows hospitality to his first image bearing priestly people — with a garden full of good things to eat, and then Israel, his renewed image bearing priestly people are promised a ‘land flowing with milk and honey’; Israel marks its story with feasting (and fasting), with festivals tied to its life together. Sharing the passover, in particular, was a chance for the retelling of their story of creation/salvation through Egypt — and for Christians that’s the feast that became the first Lord’s Supper. I can’t help but feel we’ve been a bit reductionist and utilitarian with a move to individualised portions handed out during a service, formalising the ‘teaching function’ of the meal to what the priestly-pastor says during the carefully ‘demarcated’ time in our week, rather than this being something to do whenever we eat together. There’s an aesthetic element to the reduction of this practice (or its re-imagination). When Robyn and I have spoken about how we’d redesign our home, particular with hospitality being at the heart of our ministry philosophy, I’ve had this romantic idea of the kitchen and dining room being at the literal centre of our house, in a way that communicates something and also sets our rhythms for family (and guest-as-family) life together. We already have an obscenely big table that doesn’t really fit in the space allocated, but this is tucked in the back corner of the house. If the early church meeting in houses was a deliberate sociological and aesthetic practice — where our group identity and character were shaped by architecture — maybe we should consider how much our church buildings should take the shape of houses rather than auditoriums, concert halls, or whatever other space we uncritically adopt; or if we do start running spaces that look like public meeting halls, how we make them truly public not just big private spaces outside the home for us to use in ways that mirror the use of other private spaces that aren’t homes…
The Cross.
I do love the idea of the ‘cruciform’ church even as I’m subtly challenging the approach to space that began around the time we Christians moved out of homes and into cathedrals… but something of the ugliness of the cross and the utility it represented for the Roman empire being subverted and made beautiful in Jesus’ death is compelling to me in some way, and something about the reminder that at the heart of all the beauty in the world God chose this ugliness to shame our worldliness and to build something new needs to be at the heart of our theological approach to ‘aesthetics’ — if there’s no sense that the cross has challenged and overturned our appreciation of and use of beauty and creation then we’re trying to run ‘creation’ and ‘redemption’ as two separate poles in our framework rather than grappling with how those poles come together in Jesus’ death and resurrection. I’m not entirely sure what this looks like, but part of our thinking must surely be asking ‘how does this experience of beauty prompt me to sacrifice my desire to grasp hold of beauty for myself by connecting me to its maker and redeemer?’ Maybe it’s that things are sweeter without the fear of death and decay — the promise that ‘all things will be made new’ — and part of an ‘aesthetic’ is the reminder that even the good things we have now are not yet perfected.
Gold.
This one has been historically controversial because churches have lined themselves with expensive gold while neglecting the poor; but there’s something in the way gold is threaded from being ‘good’ around the garden (Genesis 2:11-12), to plundered from Egypt, to used for the tabernacle, priestly vestments, and the golden calf — then in the gifts laid before Jesus, and prominently featured in the new creation. There’s an aesthetic quality to Gold — an inherent beauty — that explains its value, and there is something to an appropriate not using gold for our own ends but to glorify God that expresses a refusal to try to serve both God and money. I’m not suggesting that our use of ‘gold’ — aesthetically — be at the expense of the poor, or in any way idolatrous; in fact if the poor aren’t being included and welcomed into our ‘richness’ then we’re doing it wrong (and maybe that’s part of the historical issues with the church and wealth). I wonder if somehow it’s more about the way that gold reflects the light than about it being exceptionally valuable, and there are plenty of gold coloured things that aren’t made of gold. I’m also sympathetic to the idea that gold serves as something of a metaphor for the inherent goodness of creation, that can be used to glorify God or idols. I have some thoughts about how this might be approached aesthetically, in both church and home, that doesn’t require much more than a trip to Kmart.
White.
Part of a tendency towards dark colours in buildings has been a focus on a certain sort of aesthetic, but I wonder how much we’ve balanced light and dark in our approach. There’s a bit to be said for the idea that being ‘clothed in white’ is a bold and stark statement in a world where mess is everywhere, and as much as gold might be part of our aesthetic because of how it reflects and amplifies light, white does this too.

Exactly what ‘forms’ these different elements take could vary greatly, and so my sense is that an approach to the ‘aesthetic’ is descriptive rather than a one size fits all ‘prescriptivity’ — which means the quote from the podcast I opened with, the idea that part of an historic definition of a particularly Christian aesthetic is that people might say “that’s a form that has been created and has always been associated with Christianity” is maybe not where I’m landing with this — and these forms aren’t distinctively Christian, you’ll find them in modern architecture, in Kmart, and in my favourite cafes. The extent that these are elements of a “Christian aesthetic” and not simply ‘beautiful’ is caught up with how the form/content stuff plays out in each place, and our creative intent as we carve out spaces that carry this aesthetic… but to want this to always be explicit is to fall into a certain sort of utilitarianism that kills art. Perhaps the thing that actually does away with the ‘Christian’ part of a ‘Christian aesthetic’ is when these things that are inherently beautiful are co-opted for idolatry or the service of self, not God. Part of a Christian aesthetic is recognising that Christians don’t have exclusive access to knowing what is beautiful in our world; we all innately recognise beauty. The problem with our use of worldly beauty or aesthetics has often been that it’s derivative, that we’ve simply tried to imitate cultural forms common around us, rather than creating our own cultural forms within our cultures built from our story. What we do have is the ability to connect what is true and beautiful to its source, God, and see it as the backcloth to his story — the redemption and renewal of the world in and through Jesus.

May 31, 2018

On outrage: Dead squirrels and the algorithmic distribution of news and attention

People are arguing about whether one can be outraged about a dead lion, when they could, alternatively, be outraged about dead babies. I think they’re arguing about the wrong thing, and outraged about the wrong thing, and we should be thankful that people aren’t just outraged about dead squirrels. Ultimately the questions that matter are the questions of what you are paying attention to, and how you’re doing that…

This is a series of posts exploring the nature of outrage, the internet, the human condition, and virtue. First, we considered that outrage might be a disordered form of loving attention

“…a squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” — Mark Zuckerberg, cited in the New York Times, When the internet thinks it knows you.

It used to be that media moguls would set an editorial agenda based on what they thought would sell papers. Well. They still do. It’s just a dying method for presenting an audience with ‘news’ via media.

That’s what news is. It’s how media works. The traditional broadcast media functions with an editorial agenda and a business agenda built on providing content that is relevant and of interest to its audience. It’s kind of our fault if these businesses choose not to show us shocking and harrowing things from across the globe, but tend to spend more time on dead squirrel issues, or even cute warm fuzzies if you watch The Project. We get the media we deserve.

Now, our media consumption is shaped by the people we connect to, and sources we allow, but more subliminally, its shaped by algorithms designed to give us exactly what it appears we want based on our habits.

The internet as we know and experience it is built on our desires and our curated network of relationships. The platforms we use online make their money by matching up our desires with solutions, or content.

Major platforms like Google and Facebook earn their keep based on shaping an experience of the Internet that is the experience of the Internet that most appeals to you. Our algorithmic experience of the Internet is a subjective experience, not an objective one. It becomes more objective only as we seek out truth through the application of our attention and our minds, going beyond what has been called the “filter bubble.”

These algorithms are coded to care about, or present to us, what they calculate matters to us in an immediate attention-hooking way, rather than what might be said to matter objectively. This filter bubble means we’re likely to be served things that engage our emotions, or even outrage us, based on how an algorithm understands who we are.

The filter bubble means we’re unlikely to be confronted with all the things that matter objectively, or even subjectively to others, if they compete with the subjective things that matter to us. Or as Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, put it when describing how Facebook decides what to put in your newsfeed (see above)… dead squirrels.

The media is like a mirror being held up to the things we care about. The media, including social media, plays a part in determining what we get outraged about, and now, also, where we get outraged about it.

This filter bubble raises a question about our moral culpability for attention, or inattention, are we really to blame for being outraged at the wrong thing if the thing we’re predisposed seeing is not X or Y, dead lions, or dead babies, but dead squirrels? What is our responsibility, as online citizens, if we’re aware of X and Y, when the default setting is ignorance?

It’s interesting how the question of attention, and default settings features in David Foster Wallace’s famous insights from This Is Water, a speech in which he is arguably extrapolating from and applying Iris Murdoch’s system of virtuous loving attention… He suggests our ignorance is the product of our decision to worship some thing, to give it our attention, and often that thing is our self.

The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the “rat race” – the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

I wonder if our tendency towards outrage in the face of disorder is also a product of a “constant gnawing sense,” but in this case its the sense of paradise lost. Of a world without disorder. But more on this soon…

I’m interested too, in the idea of being morally culpable for not knowing, or not being outraged — for not paying attention — to something beyond whatever else we do know about or are outraged about. Is it immoral to only care about a dead squirrel when there are lions and babies out there? Is it immoral to care about a lion, if you’re unaware of the babies? If we know about the babies, and know that most people only know about squirrels, is it immoral not to raise people’s attention via our own outrage? Are we culpable for never moving beyond the default settings? For not looking beyond our backyard, and paying attention to those in our neighbourhood, or around the globe? Where do we draw a line?

Karen Swallow Prior wrote this helpful opinion piece, Is Cecil the lion more devastating than the Planned Parenthood videos?, for the Washington Post, asking this sort of question about the relationship between ignorance and culpability. She particularly emphasised wilful ignorance, but what about algorithmic or default ignorance?

On social media, many have connected the two stories through mutual finger-pointing at the perceived lack of outrage for one story or the other. But there is a stronger connection between the two events.

While elective abortion and trophy hunting are different issues surrounded by different ethical and political questions, both news stories offer — regardless of one’s views on either issue — an opportunity to consider the moral responsibility that comes with knowledge — and the moral responsibility that comes with willful ignorance…

…So perhaps the more important question is, when does one become morally culpable for ignorance?

… We readily accept that with knowledge comes responsibility. But both the Planned Parenthood and the lion slaying controversies show that at some point, even our willful ignorance confers the weight of moral responsibility.

How do ignorance, and the alternative, loving attention, work in terms of morality and ethics in a new media world? Do we need to deliberately seek knowledge, seek to pay attention to things, beyond a dead squirrel to be acting with virtue? Our eyes have the capacity to be more globally connected than ever before thanks to the Internet, but our hearts and minds are still as self-interested as ever. Does outrage serve some sort of ethical purpose in that it forces us, and others, to pay attention to things beyond ourselves, or is it simply an expression of selfishness, a knee-jerk defence when something attacks what we hold to be sacred, what we have chosen to worship with our attention?

Outrage seems to be one of the natural responses to paying attention to the disorder in our world. Just what can we give our attention to? Just how much attention do we have to go around?

August 4, 2015