Christianity and the Culture Machine

Media and Theology in the Age of Late Secularism

Rocchio

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498209809
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Christianity and the Culture Machine is a precedent-shattering approach to combining theories of media and culture with theology. In this intensive examination of Christianity's role in the cultural marketplace, the author argues that Christianity's inability to effectively contest the ideology of secular humanism is not a theological shortcoming, but rather a communications problem: the institutional church is too wedded to an outmoded aesthetic of Christianity to communicate effectively. Privileging authority and obedience over the egalitarian and transformative goal of Christianity, the church fails to recognize how it undermines the vitality of the Christian narrative and message. In the absence of a more compelling vision offered by the official church, a new aesthetic can be found forming within the margins of popular culture texts. Despite its past failures in representing the Bible in mainstream film and television, the culture industry now offers more compelling versions of core Christian theology without even realizing it--within the margins of the main storylines. This book analyzes the aesthetic principles employed by these appropriations and articulations of Christian discourse as a means of theorizing what a new aesthetic of Christianity might look like.

1

Introduction

On March 13, 2013, the Vatican greeted the entire world with its traditional phrase “Habemus papam,” little realizing the ironies that would soon be in play when Jorge Mario Bergolio emerged on the balcony. Dressed in a simple white cassock, the new Pope conducted an unprecedented move, bowing down and asking the crowd to pray over him. The gesture of personal humility was such a dramatic departure from the usual Vatican pomp that journalists reported being able to “hear a pin drop,” despite the overflow crowd packing the piazza.1 The newly elected pontiff deftly used his introduction to signal the end of the imperial papacy and the beginning of a new direction for the Roman Catholic church. Although reluctant to assume the papacy, once he did, Pope Francis immediately began using the office to transform it.

The immediacy with which Francis began instituting change belies a tension within the Roman Catholic Church. The last two popes privileged orthodoxy as a means for the church to maintain its identity and viability in an increasingly dehumanizing and secular world. Pope Benedict XVI saw orthodoxy as a means to “purify” the church, caring little that it made the church seem backward-looking and aloof, especially in light of a worldwide clergy sex abuse crisis and a continually eroding base in the developed countries. With purification as his goal, Pope Benedict was concerned neither that the Roman Catholic Church continued to shrink, nor that the emphasis on orthodoxy had a polarizing effect: dividing the church between progressive Catholics who are oriented towards social justice, and more inward looking conservatives for whom obedience to the church and its Magisterium is tantamount.

In repositioning the focus of the church on the poor, Pope Francis ushered in a seismic paradigm shift that deftly got out from under the temporal dualism that divides Catholics—substituting instead a vision of church deeply rooted in Scripture that all could embrace. From the very beginning of his papacy, Pope Francis acted through and reemphasized the concept of “servant leadership” as fundamental to the church, following the example of Pope John Paul II, but taking it in new directions: he accepted the congratulations of his fellow cardinals by standing (as opposed to sitting on the papal throne), rode the bus back to his hotel with his fellow cardinals, and paid the bill at the hotel out of his own pocket. He continues to live in a guest house rather than the palatial Vatican apartments, and is known to drive his own modest car around Vatican City rather than be driven in a papal limousine.

The significance of Pope Francis’s leadership for this book is twofold. First, as the leader of the world’s largest Christian denomination, his attempts at reforming the Catholic Church will have profound implications for the rest of the Christian world, which will respond in one way or another to his attempt to reinvigorate Christian theology. Second, and most importantly, the vision and direction Pope Francis is charting for the Roman Catholic Church recognizes that the image of the church—based largely on its conduct—plays a determining role in the church’s ability to communicate Christian theology, not to mention a fundamental role in people’s relationship to the church. The Pope’s privileging of the relationship between theology and communication makes critical communications theory more important than ever.

Pope Francis demonstrates a belief that the crisis of Christianity—its continued erosion in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century—is not a theological failure, but an aesthetic problem. For Francis, the core theology of Christianity is not what people have turned away from, but rather, how theology is enacted and communicated—which, in his view, is not very well at all. In a subtle critique of his predecessors, Francis commented, “The church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules.”2 Rather than a church in need of a more obedient faithful, Francis sees a church that needs to be more faithful to theology and less concerned with dogma, stating,

We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods . . . . [I]t is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently . . . . We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards . . . .3

What Francis clearly recognizes is that church is failing to effectively communicate the vitality of its theology—“the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel.”4

For Pope Francis then, the vitality of Christian theology is being choked off by the message and conduct of the church itself. His vision of reform is a church that can respond to an aesthetic crisis by communicating the ethos of Christianity more compellingly—and the primary way it accomplishes that task is by embodying that ethos more authentically. “I prefer a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security,” writes Pope Francis.5 The vivid imagery Pope Francis consistently employs when speaking about the church belies the aesthetic impulse Francis brings to the task of reform.

Francis himself speaks about the image of the church, but not aesthetics, and with good reason. Francis has shown himself to be a practical leader concerned with reforming how the church conducts itself, and aesthetics is a slippery term at best. Although it may be difficult to define, aesthetics is anything but an esoteric concept unconcerned with the practicalities of conduct. Rather, as the terms image, vision, emphasis, and leadership style attest, aesthetics is at the heart of some of the fundamental framework(s) by which Christianity is conceptualized. Traditional concepts of aesthetics, from both theology and art history, are helpful, but have distinct limitations. Theology, for example, has an expansive view on locating aesthetics—it is a matter for all of creation—but limits the concept to a theological concern with beauty and its relationship to the Divine. Following the work of Avery Dulles, Cecilia Gonzalez-Andrieu demonstrates that the importance of theological aesthetics is its focus on “the depth and power of ‘the revelatory symbol’”—the signs, whether natural occurrences or produced through artistic virtuosity, which evidence the transcendent.6 Gonzalez-Andrieu’s work makes clear that aesthetics must encompass the world of art and creativity as further ground for theological explication, but art and art history have their own limitations for the concept. Art history, for example, opens out the concept of aesthetics to include concepts of style and stylistic operations. Media studies has built upon that framework, adding the idea that style itself functions as a discourse—a concept that is now foundational in media theory. The problem with an art history and/or media studies approach is the tendency to reduce aesthetics to only a matter of the mind—whether it be the creative mind and its ability to construct artistic arrangements, or the critical mind and its ability to discern the message of the work and its relationship to broader ideological and hegemonic operations.

Some contemporary theorists explore the concept of aesthetics through the affective dimension, analyzing how art, beauty, and for that matter meaning itself, moves an audience. Metaphors abound to describe this level of audience engagement: gripping, tear-jerker, knee-slapper, gut-wrenching, or shaken to the core—all of which point to the body. Here, I am following the lead of Michael Shapiro, but also S. Brent Plate, whose work on theology and aesthetics restores the term to the body as a means of reestablishing all the physical relationships at stake in creative production and reception. Plate argues that, at its very basic level, aesthetics is regulated through perception, an activity that involves both body and mind. Moreover, Plate argues that “perception . . . links the inner world to the outer world, the body to the physical stuff around us, the body to the mind, and bodies to other bodies . . . .”7 My interest in restoring the body to the concept of aesthetics is twofold. First, reconceptualizing aesthetics to include the body brings focus to the social dimensions of aesthetics (what Plate describes as the relationship of bodies to other bodies). In addition, resituating the body within the concept of aesthetics ushers in those dimensions of aesthetic reception that transcend the mind—reasserting, for example, the relationship between the body and spirit. Gonzalez-Andrieu argues that “revelatory symbols unite spirit and matter”—they provide, if only for a moment—or a glimpse—evidence of the transcendent, an experience that incorporates mind, body, and spirit.8

As a concept, then, aesthetics must bring into analysis how discourse—or the discourse of art—relates to being: not just the mind, but rather, the lived experience of its audience. Here, Raymond Williams’s concept of a “structure of feeling” is particularly useful. For Williams, always wary of analysis being too reductionist, affective experience can neither be dismissed as too subjective, nor ignored as not having a relationship to the social field. In particular, Williams is interested in how generations or historical periods are defined by forms and styles that “exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and on action.”9 Williams, then, insists on a dialectical model where artistic forms and styles develop in relationship to both art itself and the social field through which it operates.10

In analyzing contemporary Christianity through aesthetics, Williams’s concept focuses analysis on formal changes that signal a transition from one period to another. He argues: “The idea of a structure of feeling can be specifically related to the evidence of forms and conventions—semantic figures—which, in art and literature are often among the very first indications that such a new structure is forming.”11 The Catholic writer James Carroll describes that structure of feeling as having been resistant to change when it comes to the aesthetic of Christianity. He argues:

Though born near the middle of the twentieth century, I was initiated, like so many of my kind, into a way of thinking and believing that owed more to the Middle Ages than to modernity. I use myself as an example not because my case is special, but because it is not. My faith was grounded in a common teaching that shaped the views of most Catholics and many Christians. Fewer and fewer people in the contemporary age have experience of such a worldview, yet it was the decisive milieu in which every experience of Jesus could be had.12

The medieval concept or aesthetic that was at the heart of faith formation for Carroll, and for most Christians of the twentieth century, is the primary focus of Pope Francis’s reform efforts: aimed at moving Christianity from one concept—obedience and toeing the line on sinful acts—to a fundamentally different understanding—acting with mercy.

Moreover, Francis is clearly cognizant that the conduct of the church acts as a discourse. What Pope Francis (and for that matter, modern public relations) emphasizes is the overarching role that image exercises in determining perception, and subsequently, relationship. In this respect, aesthetics encompasses the role of the overarching image, concepts, vision, and discourses that operate to determine an audience’s perception of something. Aesthetics functions in the mode of a gestalt to help determine the overall meaning. This is not to downplay, however, the manner in which aesthetics also embodies the means through which overarching images or concepts are conveyed. Aesthetics is deeply involved in elements of style and structure, in the exchange of symbols and symbolic ritual, and with the signifying practices employed to communicate messages. Lastly, as the work of Williams, Plate, and Gonzalez-Andrieu demonstrate, aesthetics is goal driven: producing affect—the movement between perception and relationship.

Pope Francis’s efforts to create a new aesthetic for Christianity is, in this respect, a massive undertaking whose goal is nothing short of making Christianity vital again: to make Christian discourse speak in ways that manifest the Divine—that unite the mind, body, and spirit of its followers in the experience of the transcendent. Towards that end Gonzalez-Andrieu argues that art can be helpful to the work of theology “in its role as witness and producer of revelatory symbols, which speak eloquently of the veracity of a communicating mutuality with the Divine.”13 Here, the example of the Roman Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council is particularly instructive.

Vatican II created seismic shifts that reverberated throughout Christendom, creating a paradigm shift for Catholicism in its concept of the church. Whereas prior to Vatican II the church was identified with its clergy, Vatican II boldly asserted that the church was the people of God—a radical shift from a medieval concept of church as hierarchical leadership to a modern concept of the church as a collective—as the body of Christ. This new concept of church required a new aesthetic, but never really forged one. Because so much of the work of Vatican II concerned itself with reconciling the church with modernity, Modernism itself became the default aesthetic, ushered in as an important vehicle for communicating the new vision of church. With its fundamental focus on the relationship between the form of the art itself and the content expressed—the relationship between signifier and signified—modernism served, in general, as a poor aesthetic for communicating the veracity of mutuality with the Divine.

The vitality of Vatican II saw other aesthetic forms emerge as a means of expressing the new concept of church: guitar masses, street priests, nuns eschewing the habit for regular clothing. These all became ways of expressing a collective vision of church—of a church engaged in the world, not hiding from it. The social tumult that surrounded Vatican II—the Vietnam War, wars of liberation in Africa, the civil rights movement, student movements, women’s and gay rights movements—all challenged the hierarchical power of established social orders. Th...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Hollywood’s Hoary History of Biblical Representation
• Chapter 3: Mary Poppins and the Dialogic Imagination of Christianity
• Chapter 4: The West Wing and the Aesthetics of Hegemony
• Chapter 5: Sister Act, Bruce, and Evan Almighty
• Chapter 6: Life is Beautiful, Joyeux Noël, and the Question of Christian Nonviolence
• Chapter 7: Harry Potter and the Return of the Repressed Mystical
• Chapter 8: Epilogue
• Bibliography