The Trouble with Paris (pt. II)
Why Your Faith Does Not Work: (Excepts from The Trouble with Paris)
She looked like a girl who had it all. She was strikingly beautiful, confident, and hip. Half the guys in the room were looking at her, and all the girls in the room wanted to be her. She had ticked all the boxes: she was deeply involved in her church, had a high-paying job, travelled all over the world, and had a social life most of us would be jealous of with a bevy of male suitors. Yet for her this meant nothing.
She looked me square in the eye with pain in her face and told me, “I was promised an awesome life!” I was immediately thrown. This girl had everything that society tells us will make us happy. Yet as I listened to the reality of her life, I realized nothing could be further from the truth. Behind the glamorous exterior was a person who was struggling, who was unsure of who she was, who struggled with feelings of depression and with the dissatisfaction of constantly feeling as if she needed more. Her life was in limbo, and she was constantly waiting for this awesome life to turn up, yet it never came. She had finally come to the realization that she was miserable, and she felt very, very, ripped off.
This is a story that can be heard among those who have left the Christian faith because it didn’t deliver them the perfect life they believed they were promised. It can also be heard in the dissatisfaction and frustrations of those who still have faith. And finally, it can be heard in those who never have had faith yet have invested all of their hope in the fact that one day the perfect future will arrive. If we are to live lives of meaning, satisfaction, and happiness, it is essential that we understand what effects our culture has on our quality of life and quality of faith. Let’s begin with faith.
Something Is Eating Your Faith
Throughout the developed Western world, a corrosive epidemic is eating away at the faith lives of Christians. It assails us in our darkest moments; it comes to us at three o’clock in the morning when we can’t sleep. It confronts us at every corner, three to ten thousand times a day. It whispers to our hearts that “we’ve got it wrong,” that our faith should not be in Jesus Christ of Nazareth but in something else. In this context your faith is getting torn apart and most likely will not survive. Contrary to popular belief, you and your friends probably won’t lose your faith because of sex, drugs, or doubt but for a much more insidious reason. Sure, you can fight it, you can think, It won’t be me, but how do you fight an enemy you can’t name, an opponent you can’t see?
The thing that will eat away at your faith, make it impotent, and finally kill it off cannot easily be named. It is a framework, a formation system, an entire worldview. It tells us how to live and how to act. It speaks to our sense of identity. It shapes our personality. It tells us what to love, what to commit to, and what to have hope in. It is a virus that eats our faith from the inside out. This virus is the allure of the hyperreal world.
If you want to blame someone or something for your life not ending up as wonderfully as you were led to believe it would, a good place to start is the cultural phenomenon called hyperreality. The combination of a hyper consumer culture, mass media, and rampant individualism has created a world of hyperreality. What is hyperreality? It’s a term I learned from a French guy named Jean Baudrillard. He was a twentieth-century philosopher who took a trip across America, visiting places like Las Vegas and Disneyland. He said that our culture had become hyperreal, meaning that we could now have things that were even better than the real thing. The media-drenched world in which we live has overextended our expectations of life.
Following are some examples of hyperreality:
- A fairly pretty girl works as a model to support her studies. She does a photo shoot for a fashion magazine. The photographer skillfully uses wardrobe, lighting, and makeup during the shoot. After the shoot, computers are used to take away the model’s imperfections and to improve her overall look. The magazine hits the newsstands, and through the magic of technology, a fairly pretty girl has been turned into a stunningly beautiful cover star. Thousands of women buy the magazine and wonder why they cannot be as beautiful and glamorous as the model on the cover, not realizing that if they walked past the actual model in the street, they would not even notice her.
- A man drives to work every day past a billboard advertising vacations on an idyllic Pacific island. As he works in his stressful office job, he fantasizes about relaxing on the white beaches under the palm trees of the beautiful Pacific paradise he sees on the billboard. The man purchases a two-week vacation on the island. Upon arrival the man discovers that for most of the year it rains. He tries swimming only to find that the coral cuts up his feet and that he has to be careful not to contract malaria from the mosquitoes on the island. The man spends most of his vacation watching satellite TV in his resort room.
- A group of friends share a house. Each week they watch a situation comedy about a group of friends who share a house as well. As they watch, each person wonders to why they cannot be as close and as happy as the characters in the sitcom. In real life the cast of actors cannot stand each other.
Hyperreality means that often we cannot tell the difference between what advertising tells us about products, places, and people and what they are like in the real world. In the rush to sell us things, corporations have sacrificed reality; truth telling is gone. Sociologist Krishan Kumar explains :
“Our world has become so saturated with images and symbols that a new “electronic reality” has been created, whose effect is to obliterate any sense of an objective reality lying behind the images and symbols. In this “simulated” world, images become objects, rather than reflecting them; reality becomes hyper-reality. In hyper-reality it is no longer possible to distinguish the imaginary from the real . . . the true from the false.1”
An ad by the New York tourism board is not going to tell us about the street crime, high prices, pollution, and poverty we would find in the city. Rather, they are going to show us the New York we know from countless movies and TV shows like Seinfeld, Sex in the City, and Friends. And if they are smart, they will use the Frank Sinatra song “New York, New York” to top it all off. After seeing an advertisement for New York and experiencing New York, we would be left scratching our heads and asking, “Which is the real New York-the metropolis we know from our years of watching popular culture or the actual city situated on the East Coast?” We would have confused the symbol (the popular culture imagined New York) with the real city. Of course, the popular Hollywood version of New York would be the more attractive one. This is hyperreality. It gives us a world of symbols that are detached from the reality of what they are supposed to be symbolizing and appear more attractive than the original objects they are representing.
From The Trouble With Paris: Following Jesus in a World of Plastic Promises. Mark Sayers. Thomas Nelson. 2008
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Alan,
I must be really odd? As far back as I can remember this world has always seemed fake. It’s become more so since being found by Christ. This post just supports that but it also makes me think of how real the battle is. Weird but everything I see in this world always reminds me of a reflection of what’s going on in the spiritual realm.
Hyperreality, seems like a term for advanced mystisim. If that makes sense?
Interesting Penney. Certainty hyperreaity is a very real phenomenon brought about by the sheer overwhelming convergence of mass media and advertising in an over-entertained culture. But to some degree, the world will always be unreal in relation to Heaven (reflections of CS Lewis here.)
I see as a replica, mask, of what’s going on in the spiritual realm.
Our world has become so saturated with images and symbols that a new “electronic reality” has been created, whose effect is to obliterate any sense of an objective reality lying behind the images and symbols.
Many christians have begun to see the spiritual awakening that has begun. The complacent, sleeper attitude, of the previous generation, is like the calm before the storm. When people awaken, they are like babies, nothing more than a bundle of desire’s ready for whatever teacher comes along. The new age or the movement always brings about a move from the other side.
It’s like a poker game. Yahweeh stands on the watch tower, He know’s the player, we begin to come to the table, the player try’s to bluff everyone into throwing in their chips, the game dosen’t pay off, your broke and broken when the morning Son comes out. Yahweeh is still on the watchtower, He know’s the players game. The player is a chump, but Yahweeh always uses his game against him. Why? Because when people come to that realization that they are broken they begin to confess another way.
I don’t see the world to some degree being unreal, it simply is a veil, in reality I don’t see New York, I see Zion which is and always will be. Now that I really sound like a freak! Our reality as believers is kind of like looking at the Matrix. They are plugged in, but underneath a battle is raging, the true reality.
I like the post because I see opportunity. Of course I also love battle too much, that’s not always a good thing.
Hey, Penney, I’m with you (i.e. without trying to sound too freaky)! Interstingly enough, Week 7 of Mark Sayers’ group Reading guide for The Trouble with Paris asks the study group to compile a list of “all the glimpses of heaven that you have seen breaking into our reality this week” and to give thanks for “these touches of God’s future”.
I wonder if you have read any Brueggemann lately? He talks about Jerusalem. I actually danced spontaneously at sunset with a group of prayer-dancers on Mt Zion back in 1991… a Jewish man asked if he could join us… what a great picture of what is to come!
To quote Waleter Breuggemann (Mandate to Difference: an invitation to the contemporary church, 2007)
“… artistic acts that witness to the depth and complexity of the city in ways that affirm and question, celebrate and subvert, and keep the city open for possibility. That witness continues until the poets weep, but in weeping laugh and dance and sing and wait for new Jerusalem, a newness that moves in and with and under all technological monopoly and all concentration of power…. we in the church have a peculiar task today and every day: to weave together an honest, complex, narrative account of the city – narrative because the city is still under way and the story remains to be constructed; complex because the city consists in many competing, conflicted voices that will not be readily harmonized; and honest because we are adherents to the God of all truth.”!!!!
May many of us be just regular folks living out and looking out for signs of our promised future…
weeping, laughing, dancing and singing (another Brueggemann train of thought)in anticipation of the good things of God that are to come…
Lucy J
Hyper-reality is making us truly sick… consider the rates of depression and mental illness and stress-related disease and eating disorders and burnout (etc.) in the West.
It’s making us SO sick I think we may find increasing numbers of “ears to hear” an alternative dream.
(But I’m a chronic optimist)
Hey all, we are allowed to post late on these?
I had a thought last night that I couldn’t pare down to something smaller than about three paragraphs. So, here’s the smaller version:
Might taking time to get away from all of the advertisement and technology help to refocus in the midst of hyperreality? For me, when I could access it, surfing allowed for that. The exhilaration of being in the water, mixed with the dangers which brought humility, always helped to refresh me when I had to go back into the real (or hyperreal) world. I have friends who garden in order to find refreshment; others who hike, camp, and/or hunt.
Just a thought. Peace. Dan