Читать книгу Salvation on the Small Screen? - Nadia Bolz-Weber - Страница 7

To say that Christian television is “not my thing” doesn’t even get close. Christian music, Christian bookstores, Christian television, pretty much any aspect of what some call “the Christian-Industrial Complex,” is “not my thing.” Meanwhile, I have a blog called Sarcastic Lutheran, I am married to a Lutheran pastor, am involved in the start of a new postmodern, urban Christian community and, God willing, will soon be ordained to the office of Word and Sacrament ministry in the Lutheran Church, all of which is to say, I’m pretty Christian.

I’m not alone. Simply stated, there are two Christianities in America. (There are countless more Christianities in America that do not fit into the following categories, but humor me.) Group A are Christian and typically still are part of the dominant culture. They read books from the New York Times bestseller list, watch the Simpsons, and listen to pop music. These folks are more likely to belong to the moderate-to-progressive “mainline” denominations. Group B are also Christian, and they read books and watch TV, but they read “Christian” books and watch “Christian” TV and listen to “Christian” pop; these folks are more likely to be found in the conservative evangelical, Pentecostal, or fundamentalist sector of the church. So what happens when you take someone from Group A and expose her to twenty-four hours of Group B in the form of an entire day and night of Trinity Broadcasting Network? That is the question Seabury Press asked me in the summer of 2007. A year later, this book is one answer to that question.

Honestly, my first reaction to the pitch from Seabury to watch twenty-four consecutive hours of TBN was “doesn’t the Geneva convention address that somewhere, like right after waterboarding?” But soon the idea grew on me, and I began to think of it like Theological Fear Factor or Religious Super Size Me, which made it sound kind of fun. So my first question was, naturally, “Can I invite my friends?”

A whole slew of other questions soon followed. Previous to the writing of this book the whole of my exposure to TBN was limited to hotel room channel surfing accompanied by an exclamation like “What in the world?” What little I knew about the world of Christian television I, to be honest, felt superior to. I also knew that while my first reaction to, well, almost everything, is sarcasm, the only thing that would make this project (or test of endurance, take your pick) interesting is if there were moments when I could move beyond snark and ask relevant questions of my subjects and myself. The questions gathering in my head as I prepared for my immersion experience began to take on a bit of an anthropological quality.

Actually, maybe pretending to be a professional would be the best approach. So what questions would famous primatologist Louis Leaky be asking? He’d be interested in mating, grooming, social structures, tool use, and food acquisition. Primatology is still the study of humans; we are primates after all. So in the end, what did I learn about myself as a Christian?

So in terms of mating and grooming: What messages about gender and beauty are given through the way in which the personalities are groomed and who gets to do and say what? Is there gender stratification? If so, what does it look like and can certain beliefs be extrapolated from this? Is sexuality addressed at all?

Social structures: What messages do I hear being proclaimed about wealth? Is there a discernible way in which class is being addressed? What is the connection between faith and wealth?

Tool use: How is the Bible used? Is there a consistent hermeneutic (interpretive lens) involved, or just simple prooftexting (using individual random Bible verses to back up your claim)? Even after years of theological training, did I learn something new? In what ways did the use or misuse of the biblical text make me wish to cause myself physical harm rather than keep watching. At any point did I find myself actually leaving my body, peacefully floating above the room watching myself watch TBN?

Food acquisition: Advertising. Who advertises? Is there continuity between the message of the advertisers and the message of TBN? In what ways does TBN encourage or discourage American consumer culture?

My own answers to some of these questions are found in the following pages, but others remained unanswered. Coming up with sarcastic remarks in response to the poor grammar (Creflo Dollar asking us to “stop living in unforgiveness”) and questionable theology (someone on PTL praying to “Our heavenly father Jesus Christ”) or both (Joel Osteen claiming that “God pleasures in prospering you”) was of course, effortless. Significantly less comfortable were the moments when that window into TBN became a mirror.

I began to wonder what the TBN folks would think of me, a heavily tattooed Christian progressive from a liturgical denomination. How would people in their theological camp respond to my preaching? Would they think, as I do of them, that I misuse scripture? Would they be offended at the aesthetic in the community I serve? Would they dismiss my years of theological education as silly and unnecessary? When it comes right down to it, so many of my criticisms of TBN could go both ways, and if that’s true then could it also be true, despite us both, that God is at work in my community and in (gulp) TBN? Let me just say, this is the last thing I want to be true because I love — seriously, I adore — being right. If I were Julie Andrews, I would be sitting around with a bunch of similarly dressed children singing a song about “raindrops on roses and me being right, other people being wrong and warm woolen mittens, brown paper packages tied up with string, these are a few of my favorite things.” You get the idea.

Allowing for the possibility that God may be at work in both my community and TBN is not the same as conceding that TBN’s theology and methods are sound. When I realized this, it disturbed me, but I haven’t been able to shake the idea. I wrote once in a prayer, “Dear God, your work in the world is always done by sinners, or else it would never get done; help us to realize this and practice the grace and forgiveness you first gave us.” But when I was talking about sinners in that case, it was just the broken beautiful people like myself and the others in my community, not my theological “other.” Rather than fortifying my theological and ecclesiastical entrenchment, the experience of writing this book has strangely done the opposite. While maintaining that the prosperity gospel, the rapture, and Christian Zionism (all TBN fare) are up there with the selling of indulgences and the existence of purgatory as the stinkiest Christian ideas in history, I still must admit that God’s redeeming work in the world does not happen only when we get all the theology and method right. As much as I hate to admit it, our theology, even when it’s “good” theology (like mine, seriously it’s so good; just ask me) does not save me from myself. One of the unexpected results of this project for me personally is that, surprisingly enough, I have developed a new friendship with an evangelical pastor. If you told me a year ago that this would happen, I’d say it would only be a sign of the end times, but there you go. We do not see eye to eye theologically, and likely we never will, but that’s not the point. What my friend and I get by being in a relationship is an exposure to that which we do not get from our own traditions, and there is a lot missing on both ends. Sometimes the body of Christ is so busy trying to pretend that our particular form of Christianity is the most faithful, or the most biblical, or the most liberating (I include myself here) that we don’t bother taking advantage of each other’s traditions to help fill the inevitable holes in our own.

♦♦♦

Now might be a good time to explain something. I did this whole thing twice, not by choice but by necessity. On a Friday-Saturday last August I sat in my living room with about twenty-five of my friends (not all at once) and watched twenty-four hours of TBN (all at once) for this book. During the twenty-four hours I recorded the conversations onto my laptop and the twenty-four hours of TBN programming onto a digital video recorder in my cable box. (We actually had to get cable so I could do this project). Nine days later the hard drive on my DVR died. As in gone. Poof. Nothing. If you had come by my house that day you would likely have found me on the floor of my bedroom crying like a spanked child. After Kübler-Rossing my way through the stages of grief, denying the recording was gone, magically thinking maybe it had been erased due to a buildup of unconfessed sin on my part, and pleading with the cable company, my sweet editor suggested maybe I should just do it again. Some of my viewing friends from round one couldn’t do round two, but some new folks could. The new date: November 2, 2007. I would have loved to schedule it sooner, but at the time I was commuting from St. Paul, Minnesota, to my home in Denver and my options were limited.

Putting together the guest list proved easier than I anticipated; all of the guests from round one whose schedules allowed agreed to come back, God bless ‘em. I filled in the time slots with as random a mix of people as I could muster: Bible scholars, Lutheran pastors, a couple of Jews, a gay Episcopal priest, a lesbian Unitarian, a stand-up comic turned Methodist minister, my non-Christian ex-boyfriend, my evangelical parents, my old preaching professor, my eight-year-old daughter, and three people I had never met until they came to my house to watch some televangelism. Twenty-nine people in all. These are simply people in my life and do not even vaguely represent America, Christianity in general, the TBN audience, the Denver populace, or any other desirable cross-section. They are just my friends (well, except those three I’d never met before, but they’re friends now).

♦♦♦

The night before I try to think of all the details. I stock the house with snacks and beer, set up the DVR to record for twenty-four hours, talk my parents into providing a back-up recording, set my alarm, set up my computer and microphone, place the guest list next to the computer, recheck that I set my alarm, and then pray. Now all I need is a decent night’s sleep.