Charlie offers this, in a nutshell, from a post earlier this week:
Christians are obsessed with celebrity. We bow at the cult of celebrity with the rest of our VH1 viewing countrymen.
He was also the second to mention, in the space of three days, the book Wild at Heart, which I had never heard a word about until Sunday, when it got mention in Jeff Sharlet’s Harpers article to which Jamie Smith pointed and I blogged a little
Apparently, this book has attained a bit of celebrity status of its own. It has captured the admiration of more than a few “Christian Men” and probably helped “W” the War president sell more W stickers for the cars of those “Wild at Heart”. It’s the “celebrity” of ones who embody something (maybe even anything) of the “way we are”, and so “W”, with his aside mention that “he appeals to a Higher Father”, qualifies as the “celebrity extraordinary”, receiving blank check approval status from thousands of confessing Christians , because that need/desire/obsession with celebrity apparently makes it necessary for all his faults to be invisible (but the Gospel According to Eldredge message will cover a multitude of sins; yea even turn them into virtues. The “war president” fits right in.
Celebrity allows us to live vicariously the status of others.
As I wrote the above line, a further thought was recalled ; I remember a friend of mine, when I asked why he thought Tony Campolo was so popular as a speaker at many “status -quo” mainline churches, he replied that people are glad to just let what Campolo is saying BE their “observance” of these radical ideas.
And then here I sit, un-attached, without a body of believers with whom to seek out and discern where God would be calling me to minister, reading and reading the likes of Stanley Hauerwas, James KA Smith, Radical Orthodoxy this and that, and effectively letting all that BE this for me. I realize this , often very consciously AS I READ, and every now and then the question is asked “Where is such a church?” “Does such a church exist?” The longer I go outside of such a community, the harder it is for me imagine how to take initiative to find an “enclave” of those similarly distressed with the lack of such embodiments. The longer I complain about this , the more I begin to feel that I’m the reason. That there is something about me that is personally unattractive as a potential fellow-member. I fluctuate between anger at the state of the institution, to self-loathing, to self-pity, to impatience (I”ve been searching for this for TOO long). Periodically, in spurts, we go “out on the town” again trying this church or that for a few weeks, then back to “home-churching” (which is sort of inherently self-defeating if we are looking for the extended family which is the church). But there is so little offered outside the typical “therapeutic-type” sermon, to help us feel better about ourselves for another week on some particular issue. Never is there reflection or stated intention OR interest in figuring out how we become THE community that matters at the center of our universe. The kind of community that we hold in such central concern that our jobs and our station in life revolves around it; around this “polis” rather than the other way around, where the church is a series of “events” that we “schedule in”.
And for this I also say “How long, Lord?”
Source: chuckp3
