Category: Theological Rant
The Latest “Sightings”
American Idolatry: The King James Version
— M. Cooper Harriss | July 15, 2010
Americans have “a thing” for the Decalogue, displaying it publicly – wherever a court injunction for its removal might be evaded – alongside American flags and presidential portraits. Early in these ten commandments, we learn that YHWH forbids idolatry: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them” (Exodus 20:4-5). The foregoing translation comes from the “Authorized” or “King James” version of the Bible. This week another “King James” looms large: LeBron James, the American basketball player who last week announced his intentions to leave his “hometown” Cleveland Cavaliers (James is an Akron, Ohio native) to sign with the Miami Heat in the most scrutinized and hyperbolized free agent signing in American sporting history.
The ordeal that came to be known as “LeBronikah” serves as a broad critical accounting of our days and our distractions, and simultaneously offers an intriguing opportunity for exploring the religious valences of this profane festival of highlights. James’s nicknames – the biblically evocative “King James” and the Messianic “Chosen One” – carry heavy religious inflections. Nike, who pays James more than he’ll ever make playing basketball to wear and hawk its paraphernalia, advertises that “We are all witnesses” to James’s miracles, though they fall short of encouraging us to tell no one of what we have seen.
More fascinating is the willingness of other actors to play along. Shortly after the announcement, Dan Gilbert, majority owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, posted an incensed open letter on the team’s website, mocking James’s authenticity to the point of demythologization (he places “King,” “witnessed,” and other adulatory language in scare quotes) and offering a soteriological critique of his former employee (“Some people think they should go to heaven but NOT have to die to get there”) before weighing in on the blessing and the curse of the entire situation:
But the good news is that this heartless and callous action can only serve as the antidote to the so-called “curse” on Cleveland, Ohio.
The self-declared former “King” will be taking the “curse” with him down south. And until he does “right” by Cleveland and Ohio, James (and the town where he plays) will unfortunately own this dreaded spell and bad karma.
Curses, atonement, scapegoating, and even karma appear in the theological buckshot of Gilbert’s remarks. Such harsh words might prove gratifying were they not also the calculated attempt of a man who has profited immeasurably from James’s popularity and success over the past seven years to capitalize upon public outrage in his team’s favor. His demythologization, arriving in the wake of a free agent’s freely-made decision to depart, not only rings hollow but becomes doubly problematic when one considers that he, James’s “owner” in a system frequently compared to antebellum plantations, was more than willing to reap riches from his metaphysical “baller” for the better part of a decade, and hoped to continue doing so for the foreseeable future.
James became the new scapegoat for Cleveland and Ohio, a suffering region that, the pundits say, has seen better days and sorely needs the hope that James represented. Appropriately, the decision initiated rites of sacrifice as fans burned number 23 James jerseys to purify themselves of the betrayal. The Internet plays an interesting role in this ritualization of grief. The sports website Deadspin compiled more than a dozen videos from YouTube of fans burning James’s jersey. Gawker, Deadspin’s sister site, noted a growing trend of homemade videos in which fans filmed their (distraught) reactions to James’s decision as the announcement happened, bringing the proverbial sackcloth and ashes to YouTube’s mandate to “broadcast yourself” in almost real time – an interesting twenty-first century revision of traditionally conceived modes of public outcry and communal mourning.
What, finally, does the LeBron James decision say about our present cultural occasion? It reveals idolatry, to be sure, in how we find distraction in less-than-ultimate concerns and delude ourselves into believing that the idol is without fracture; that money, agility, and fame matter more in the grander scheme of justice than compassion, humanity, and love. But, while true, such diagnoses avoid the more trenchant valences of this occasion. Sightings periodically turns to sporting events because they reflect something profound about peoples’ cultural imaginations. Christian Sheppard’s observations about baseball and American football, and Joseph Price’s reflections upon the Super Bowl, for instance, suggest that the highest levels of athletic competition reveal something transcendent in human striving – virtue, courage, the sanctification of national identity. Following their examples, then, we are left to measure what this all means: the manufactured outrage over disloyalty, our marketplace of allegiances as fans, idols, and saviors. What do such properties convey about the social order we inhabit, which we reflect in the myths we create, and destroy, together? Nike has this much right: We are all witnesses. Accordingly, may we neither bear such witness falsely nor overlook the insights that these myths reveal.
References:
Dan Gilbert’s open letter may be found here: http://www.nba.com/cavaliers/news/gilbert_letter_100708.html
For more on comparisons of the NBA’s division of labor to American slavery, please see Mark Anthony Neal’s Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).
http://deadspin.com/5583347/a-lebron+jersey+burning+video-roundup (Please note: Deadspin features satire that some readers may find crass or vulgar.)
http://gawker.com/5582924/here-are-people-overreacting-to-lebron-james-decision-to-join-the-miami-heat/gallery/
Read Christian Sheppard here: http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2005/0811.shtml
http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2006/0202.shtml
Read Joseph Price here: http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2005/0210.shtml
Sightings
Here is my re-post of the July 5th, Sightings.
Christianity Going South
— by Martin E. MartySightings authors often comment on religion in the United States rather than “the rest of the world,” but through the years have shown regularly how artificial or at least permeable such geographical distinctions are when it comes to religion. Philip Jenkins, Mark Noll, Lamin Sanneh, and others reveal the same, with important books on what Jenkins calls “The Next Christendom” and Noll describes as “The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith.” They see the Christian population “going South.” In American slang, “going south” means going down to an inferior position. But in demographic terms, the capital “S” signals going up, as the masses of Christians are doing, while Christian power slides from Europe and North America to Africa, Latin America, and other points South.
It is impossible to quarantine the diseases of the old North’s Christendom so that they do not also spread South. So the worst of the “prosperity Gospel,” with its guarantees of material prosperity to converts, has taken over and predominates in many movements, such as in Kenya. The homophobia that leads nations like Uganda and Kenya to debate whether to condemn homosexuals to death is richly related not only to old tribal taboos, but to new-style Pentecostal churches there. And the conflicts over gay issues in the American Episcopal church are heated up by interventions on the part of Ugandan and Kenyan Anglicans. The Lutheran World Federation, meeting this month, deals with Tanzanian Lutherans (who number one-third as many Lutherans after a few decades as there are Lutherans in the United States after three centuries of presence), as they say they will not accept funds or help (or prayers?) from Lutheran bodies that have different views of homosexuality than they do.
Exuberant therefore as many northern world historians may be over aspects of Christian growth in Africa – and I’ve also paid attention to these in my 2007 The Christian World – they and their compatriots often gasp when close-ups of practices in Africa get global publicity. This week the notices come from Nairobi, in balanced reporting by writers in The Economist who, quite naturally, notice the economic side of Pentecostal growth there. Borrowing “Prosperity Gospel” techniques from American evangelists and then re-exporting them in exaggerated form, African movements manifest bull market versions of competitive “market religion.” These have to be upbeat and aspirational. They help in some reform of business practices there, but “there is also plenty of hucksterism.”
The Economist tells of Bishop Margaret Wanjiru’s “Jesus is Alive Ministries,” where Ms. Wanjiru, a governmental official, draws 100,000 worshippers to meetings, but can see that number rise to 500,000 when a visiting evangelist also comes along. The editors comment that judgment from European and American critics often overlooks the fact that gross versions of “the Protestant Ethic” were imported from the northern churches. They also assess that these Pentecostalisms do better at inspiring personal wealth-seeking than at becoming clear political movements. We’ll wait and see.
Oh, and did we mention that The Economist reminds readers that many of these Pentecostal leaders promote “clear anti-Muslim sentiment” which “scares politicians who want to win the sizable Muslim vote.” Romanticizing New Christendom movements can be as dangerous as is the sneering done by those who look on and do not discern the good effects of much of these churchly endeavors in the lives of ordinary members.
References:
Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford, 1999).
Jenkins also treats the subject in “The Next Christianity,” in The Atlantic Monthly, October 2002: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2002/10/jenkins.htm.
Martin E. Marty, The Christian World: A Global History (Modern Library, 2007).
Mark Noll, The New Shape of World Christianity (IVP Academic, 2010).
Lamin Sanneh, Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity (Oxford, 2008).
“Slain by the Spirit: The rise of Christian fundamentalism in the Horn of Africa,” in The Economist, July 2010: http://www.economist.com/node/16488830?story_id=16488830.
For an earlier treatment of the prosperity gospel in Africa, see Isaac Phiri and Joe Maxwell, “Gospel Riches,” in The Christian Century online, July 2007: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/july/12.22.html.