At Home Ed 123-127
In the Closet: Death by Personality
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In the Closet: Keeping Secrets with God in a not-so-secret world
Essay 9: Death by Personality
The Christian is to resist the spirit of the world. But when we say this we must understand that the world-spirit does not always take the same form. So the Christian must resist the spirit of the world in the form it takes in his own generation. If he does not do this he is not resisting the spirit of the world at all. This is especially so for our generation, as the forces at work against us are of such a total nature.
Francis Shaeffer, The God Who is There
Once upon a time in our own country, virtuous, upright living was seen as a noble goal. The quiet life was a grand ambition, free of fetters. One’s highest hope, two-hundred some years ago, was to stake out a tranquil future of domesticity, raising children and putting food on the table.
Our forefathers were not agreeable on many terms of governing, but they did agree on one thing: an American has the birthright to make his own choices. Living peaceably and morally upright (there were plenty of Puritans on those ships, after all)–that quiet life–was high on their list of priorities.
The first coins put into circulation in our nascent country, the fugio cent, was designed by Ben Franklin. At the bottom was stamped the phrase, Mind Your Business.
How American! And how ironically funny, since there are many folk today who would like to banish our current motto of In God We Trust. However, who in this present day, who has the gumption to return to the days of Mind Your Business? How in the world have we made the leap from mind your business to mind everyone’s business?
In her book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain cites Warren Susman’s idea of cultural evolution over the last hundred years or so. Prior to the change, our society could be labeled a “Culture of Character”. According to Susman, we have shifted to a “Culture of Personality”.
Cain says,
“In the Culture of Character, the ideal self was serious, disciplined, and honorable. What counted was not so much the impression one made in public as how one behaved in private. The word personality didn’t exist in English until the eighteenth century, and the idea of “having a good personality” was not widespread until the twentieth.
But when they embraced the Culture of Personality, Americans started to focus on how others perceived them. They became captivated by people who were bold and entertaining. “The social role demanded of all in the new Culture of Personality was that of a performer,” Susman famously wrote. “Every American was to become a performing self.”
Somewhere around the time of Dale Carnegie and his suave book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, our nation began to lose integrity, bit by bit. Indeed, it is important to watch closely the things we say and how we say them, but did Carnegie foresee an age, ninety years post-publishing, where every respectful boundary in communication would be shamelessly torn down on something called the “internet”?
I think not.
Is it possible he caused more damage in the long run by preaching this gospel:
Say to yourself over and over: “My popularity, my happiness and sense of worth depend to no small extent upon my skill in dealing with people.” ?
He is half right, of course, but he is also a hundred percent wrong. We actually weren’t made to live lives dependent on our charming manipulations, only to satisfy our own desires. Carnegie promoted this preliminary notion of self-help to a nation mid-Great Depression. And like a child in front of a bowl of candy, the American people snatched it up without once considering what effect it might have down the line.
Today, the stakes are even higher. Our eyes are trained to read a crowd, to know our audience, to put our best foot forward. Cal Newport, author of Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World describes “how tech companies encourage behavioural addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.” We’ve taken Grandpa Carnegie’s words and embroidered them to our heart; a pulsing, pounding rhythm–our lifeblood, dependent on the performing self.
We are surrounded by folks who cannot put their phones down. We cannot pass up a photo opportunity, we cannot pass up the chance to bring up our kids, our vacation, our job perks, our feelings, our leanings.
To win friends and influence people. It is difficult to tease out what exactly smells fishy–because it honestly doesn’t sound too bad, or even wrong.
Over time, our American M.O. has become less and less about living a noble life and more and more about selling ourselves as the ideal human, as attractive and magnetic as possible. I think it might horrify our predecessors, who sat down two hundred some years ago to “ensure domestic tranquility”. What could this possibly mean for our future, if our fundamental goal is no longer virtuous living, but looking pretty? How can we even be honest with ourselves when climbing a social ladder is basically an addiction to virtual reality?
In Quiet, Cain speaks of high schoolers who
“Inhabit a world in which status, income, and self-esteem depend more than ever on the ability to meet the demands of the Culture of Personality. The pressure to entertain, to sell ourselves, and never to be visibly anxious keeps ratcheting up.”
We see it, we acknowledge the ruin and mental instability it causes, and yet we keep participating in this toxic culture of personality. We raise a glass to the challenge, we set our jaw and throw in our two cents to play. Then we press a weary palm to our forehead and declare we need to see a counselor or take some pills to reduce our anxiety and depression. Quit the game? Never. It doesn’t even occur to us. It’s the way we communicate, the way we advertise. We are enmeshed with our culture and we will receive the blows it offers, because we are still more comfortable playing the game than not.
It paints a sobering picture of the future; we know it isn’t manageable. We cannot ingest more. We cannot produce more. We are saturated and overwhelmed. We are miserable, but we still favor the flashy. Gaining friends and influencing people takes a massive toll. The cracks are beginning to show.
Edwin Arlington Robinson published a poem in 1897 titled, Richard Cory:
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good morning,”
And he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich–yes, richer than a king–
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
Trust me: If he can manage it, Satan will always, always lead us to the hole dug by our Culture of Personality. It will feel like the most natural of progressions, because there are people we love, wallowing in the mud, beckoning us to join them. We were born close to the pit, and the Carnegies of our world will tell us it is just fine to work the crowd.
But there are Richard Corys, too–the ones who glitter–and you’d never know it by their picture on Facebook. They suffer to the end; they never make it out alive.
Where do you stand, then, when it comes to winning friends and influencing people? How many more Richard Corys must there be? Can one help another out of the muddy hole if we all refuse to look for a ladder?
So the Christian must resist the spirit of the world in the form it takes in his own generation. If he does not do this he is not resisting the spirit of the world at all.
Francis Schaeffer
At Home Ed 119-122
In the Closet: Babylon
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In the Closet: Keeping Secrets with God in a not-so-secret world
Essay 8: Babylon
“The fact that our humanity was routed by these tools over the past decade should come as no surprise…We’ve been engaging in a lopsided arms race in which the technologies encroaching on our autonomy were preying with increasing precision on deep-seated vulnerabilities in our brains, while we still naively believed that we were just fiddling with fun gifts handed down from the nerd gods.”
Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
Digital Babylon is the term coined by David Kinnaman in his book, Faith for Exiles. Referring back to the Old Testament story of Daniel, Babylon was the city to which the youngest, brightest, most handsome exiles of the Jewish nation were brought. The famous king, Nebuchadnezzar, turned these young men into eunuchs and subjected them to severe training and academics. As the story goes, Daniel and his friends knew well to refuse the treatment, as much as it was up to them to decide. They came to the point of outright refusing to eat the rich fare of the palace, and proved to the king that their way of living was actually superior to the other exiles.
Daniel, in his bold purity, represents the man who stands for God and refutes godless living even in a godless land. He stands, throughout his life, as an example of what a person can prove by not falling into the habits and ways of the majority. A man of character in a culture of personality. A light in a dark world.
Kinnaman says,
“Digital Babylon is not a place. It is the pagan, but spiritual, hyperstimulated, multicultural, imperial crossroads that is the virtual home of every person with wi-fi, a data plan, or for most of us, both.”
We Christians, believers in a God who didn’t spare His Son but put Him to death for our sins, are not to ride the waves of a personality cultural revolution. We aren’t made for the palace fare and fellowship with our phones. We are to remember we are the captives in this story, brought to Babylon against our will and well aware of the dangers of assimilating. Yet we walk right into Digital Babylon and belly up to the bar, thrilled to dine on the food and chat up the crowd. We push in all our chips, like it is some sort of game: we are here to play, and we are here to win.
It doesn’t help that in Digital Babylon, the radio is always turned on.
I remember watching a documentary on North Korea. Each room in every house had a radio speaker which broadcasted, every minute of every day, governmental propaganda. There was no volume button to shut the darn thing off, and so people listened day and night to the words pipe into their kitchens and living rooms.
It sounds awful to be deprived of any sort of solitude, but such is the manner of folks who push propaganda. A constant stream of ideas and words that are not your own, steadily put in your ears until you see no way around it, no way to fight it or disagree.
We subject ourselves to this same droning, never an arm’s length away from our phones or computers. It is the prerogative of the companies that buy and sell our information, cell phones, media platforms–to make us feel important and engaged by asking what’s on your mind? And popping up little red circles and hearts on our screens.
The world will always encourage us to capitalize on our burgeoning popularity–to take our waxed, shiny personalities out for a spin and see who will buy it.
We are welcomed into this culture on constant engagement and begin to perceive it as the realist possibility, the most possible reality. We stoically deny we are strangers in this land. The very pleasure sensors in our brains wait anxiously to light up. We are being noticed, we are being liked. We are addicted. Perhaps we were not captives. Perhaps we have always belonged.
We forget it is a form of slavery to enter these rhythms, to bow before other gods.
We assume we will be fine, dipping our toes in and out of the water, splashing here and there, not quite getting totally wet.
It isn’t that we refuse to acknowledge we live in Babylon–we do. But the believer refuses to align herself with the notion of becoming comfortable there. We refuse to make it our home, because our passport says it is elsewhere.
Paul frequently had to remind his beloved friends of this very notion–we don’t belong here. It is so, so easy to forget:
I have often told you before and now say again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ…
Philippians 3:18-20
John echoes Paul’s urgency:
Do not love the world, nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world…the world is passing away, and also its lusts, but the one who does the will of God abides forever.
1 John 2:15-17
You and I–we must wash ourselves again and again in this truth, because the world is so persuasive. Even our daily coffee habit seems to testify to our citizenship down here–our stomach, a god in and of itself. No one dares to deny me my morning java, my scrolling text messages at the traffic light, my anxiety over remote learning with kids during Covid. I have every right to express my disgust over politics–
I belong here.
It is the spirit of the world that pulls us into these cycles of lust, materialism, self-indulgence, shameless pride and flattery. The spin we put on Paul’s “becoming all things to all people” might just be a tricky way of justifying our leisure pursuits as Christians into Digital Babylon, if we care to be honest.
Don’t be fooled: if you love anything in this world, the love of the Father is not in you.
Maybe this is why Daniel found himself scooting to his room in Babylon three times a day to pray–it was a lifelong habit–from the time he was a teenager–of removing himself and reminding himself of his true home. He was pleading with God to help him remain devoted, unentangled by propaganda and culture.
Do not love the world. Do not love it, John pleads.
Leave it to the commoners in Babylon. Let them bow down to their idols from the “nerd gods”. Let them think they belong, let them be fools.
Our citizenship is in heaven.
In the Closet: Imperceptible Grind
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In the Closet: Keeping Secrets with God in a not-so-secret World
Essay 7: Imperceptible Grind
To the wicked, God says:
“What right have you to recite my laws or take my covenant on your lips? You hate my instruction and cast my words behind you. When you see a thief, you join with him; you throw in your lot with adulterers.
You use your mouth for evil and harness your tongue to deceit. You speak continually against your brother and slander your own mother’s son. These things you have done and I kept silent; you thought I was altogether like you.
But I will rebuke you and accuse you to your face.”
Psalm 50:16-21
I had a brown spot on my tooth, newly discovered while sitting on the couch one evening, a book in hand. My tongue ran over uneven enamel, a rough bump on the pearly whites. That night when I brushed my teeth, I examined it closely in the mirror. It could be a cavity, I supposed, but I brush and floss my teeth often, and I was sure I’d have seen it sooner if it looked decayed. It didn’t ache at all, but the next morning I scheduled a dentist appointment. It wouldn’t hurt to have it checked out.
The doctor poked around and asked me if I grind my teeth at night.
“Well,” I said thoughtfully, “my jaw does seem tense when I wake up in the mornings.”
“That’s it then, you’re a teeth grinder. See here, you chipped off a hunk of your tooth. The tooth behind it is also chipped, but you can’t see it. Here, let’s take some photos so you can see it better.”
He took pictures and quickly pulled them up on the computer.
“Look at the wear,” he pointed, showing an up close view of a mouthful of slightly damaged teeth.
Indeed, I had been clenching my teeth in my sleep. An imperceptible grinding was slowly wearing them away. The dentist prepared to fit my newest mistake with a partial crown. He talked about future dental care; he recommended an aligning treatment and, at the very least, a retainer to wear at night.
I left unsure of where to begin. It seemed an awful lot to take in for a person like me: one who took pride in her responsible dental care. It was like I’d been accused of drowning baby kittens when I thought I was a saint. Me, a flosser even! Now I was going to have to change my ways or face the music, a future void of pita chips and caramel corn.
Stick with me while I try to make an analogy.
For a long time I have been a podcast listener, eagerly awaiting weekly episodes to accompany my endless laundry basket hustle and evening dog walks. Podcasts are a cool way to fill in mindless work with a good mental chew, and I’m never without a list of options. One constant companion has been a well-known Christian group that puts out an hourly show regaling all things pop culture and current trends. The two hosts are delightful, funny, and quick-witted. Their references to music, television, movies, celebrities, and current events is amplified by their Christian worldview. I appreciate it, because I feel like they are speaking to me as a friend, someone familiar with my own upbringing. To put it plainly, I get what is funny because they explain it to me in words I can understand. On the side, they happen to have another podcast that focuses on stories from the Bible. Again, they drew me in with their humor and candor.
But I’ve been folding laundry with them for a long time now, and I’m detecting some things that are not the greatest signifiers to being “Christian” podcast celebrities. It is an inconsistency that wasn’t, in the beginning, a glaring red light warning, so I ignored it for a good while. But over time, the language got worse, the length the hosts were willing to go to get a laugh. I was unable to listen to the program with small children around. Finally, at the end of one of their shows, they put in a quick advertisement for a brand new project they were working on for paid subscribers. For a small monthly fee, folks would be able to access this new production where the hosts would break down every episode of Tiger King, just like they had done for Game of Thrones.
I guess the shock wore off quickly. Maybe it didn’t seem like a big deal. I hadn’t watched these shows because they weren’t accessible, and besides, they didn’t seem like my type. Without much consideration, I’d inoculated myself to this idea that other Christians willingly expose themselves to shows where vulgarity, sex, incest, abuse, coercement, indecency, and filth fill up their living rooms and minds on any given weekday night. Entertainment, we call it–nothing wrong with a little entertainment.
The more I considered it, though, the more I realized my beloved podcast hosts were falling into a common trap of the enemy: the lie that says this behavior will not destroy me.
It’s one of those nasties we sugarcoat with our boundless “freedom in Christ”, then end up completely off course, looking back and wondering where we took the fork in the road.
Psalm 19:12 says
But who can discern their own errors?
Forgive me of my hidden faults.
We are, on our own, pathetically unaware of our weaknesses. We give our flesh way too much credit for being good, when our very DNA denies it is possible.
I thought about my two beloved podcast hosts as my dentist filled the hole in my tooth and patiently explained to me the situation of grinding my teeth.
Their overall spiritual health was at risk because they didn’t recognize the disease, the grinding, the effect of their poor habits. It was negating their whole lives as Christ-followers.
Instead of coming off as funny and charming, the inconsistencies in their dialogue carried the scent of deceit. Sweet and cunning on the outside and foul and rotten once exposed. For a small price, followers could buy into this cattiness, this insincerity, and feel as if they were part of a community–Jesus-branded, but ultimately, pagan, godless Babylon.
To the wicked God says, “What right have you to tell of My statutes, and to take my covenant in your mouth? For you hate discipline, and you cast My words behind you…
You let your mouth loose in evil, and your tongue frames deceit…
You thought I was altogether like you. But I will rebuke you and accuse you to your face.
Psalm 50:16,17,19,21
The unknowing sin still causes damage, yet we are without excuse.
Just as in the case of my teeth, most of the irreparable damage is done unintentionally. It is simply a matter of falling unchecked into patterns that came as natural as sleep. Unaware, we keep up the grind. We retrace habits that chip away at our character. It is obvious upon closer look, like when my dentist showed me the pictures of the damage, but for the most part we go on our way, no wiser.
It doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. It is still my fault, when it comes down to it: I was the one responsible for the grinding. But if no one had brought attention to it, I would’ve never known any better.
No one is forcing any of us to consume terrible television every night before bedtime. No one is pressuring us to open the same windows, scroll the same feeds, ingest the same junk. Many people who are professed Christians find nothing wrong with a little worldliness. But unless someone points out the damage, or we feel some Spirit nudge, how exactly will we confront our sin?
We are woefully unaware of our lack of reverence. When we tear down the mirror of God’s word and replace it with a big screen TV, our attention is not only divided, it is completely skewed. We’ve moved our souls into a fun house, where the floor is pitched at a forty-five degree angle, the chairs are nailed to the ceiling, and gravity is an illusion.
But we are not clowns. This, then, is why we ultimately must leave the amusement park. We commit ourselves to living with the Potter, eating at His table, making our home in His house. His shelter is better, his foundation, unmoving. Our God is a master at uncovering our weakness, gently revealing it to us, and developing a treatment plan. His is discernment, to Him belongs discipline and order.
And maybe most surprisingly–in His house is delight.
At Home Ed 115-118
