Hollow Faith 5 - Meism

I felt a lot of sympathy for Justice and Taylor Swift when their MTV Awards wins were interrupted by Kanye West's impromptu rants designed to upstage their acceptance speeches in 2006 and 2009, respectively.  How rude.  How utterly narcissistic.  My sympathy was somewhat tempered when, in 2014, Swift's "Blank Space" landed on the Rolling Stone's list of "Most Narcissistic Songs of All Time."  Dr. Nathan DeWall, in his paper Tuning in to Psychological Change (2011), says that narcissism is on the rise in popular music.  However, unlike the PMRC, who attribute the noticeable trends in youth to the influence of popular music, DeWall thinks it's the other way round; that popular music doesn't cause cultural trends in youth but reflects them.

Would someone please tell me who the heck Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, and Kim Kardashian actually are?  These three women are apparently wildly famous for being wildly famous.  None of them sing, dance, act, own businesses, hold office, or do anything to warrant their fame.  They simply are.  They merely exist, and their very existence is celebrated, cataloged, and recorded.  As Ingram says in Hollow Faith, "We have celebratized the mundane, the ordinary, the truly uninteresting."

I remember, not long after the launch of Facebook in 2004, both of my children, who had Facebook profiles at the time, told me repeatedly that I should start an account.  I held out, wondering aloud what the point of it all was.  I told my kids that I was neither a voyeur nor an exhibitionist, so what else was Facebook for?  With smirks on their faces, they admitted that, no, that was it; that's what Facebook does.  So, what's the point?  "Why would people care what my 'status' is; and by the way, what is a status anyway?"  Still, it didn't take long for people to catch on.

It happened again when Twitter became mainstream.  "What's a tweet?"  "Are you my tweep?"  "What does it mean to twit?"  Then came Instagram, and we all wondered how a pound sign had suddenly become a hashtag, and what did that even mean?  Again, we figured it out pretty quickly.

"In the Pew Research Center Study 'Teens, Social Media & Technology 2015,' it is clear just how well we figured it out.

92% of teens go online daily.

25% go online 'constantly.'

75% of teenagers have access to smartphones.

71% are on Facebook

52% on Instagram

41% on Snapchat."

The last 25 years have added such narcissistic words to our lexicon as "selfie," "followership," and "influencer." However, even though "Facebook has made our lives the focal point of the universe...Twitter brought our most mundane actions and thoughts to the center of the arena, and...YouTube allowed us to 'Broadcast Ourselves,' " I still think that the media are not the problem, they are but a symptom.  They are a reflection of who we are as a society.

Everyone Gets a Trophy

When I was in fifth grade, the boys in my class always wanted to play kickball at recess (basically baseball with a soccer ball). I stunk at it.  Couldn't kick, couldn't run, couldn't throw.  Always the last kid picked for the team.  Guess what my mom said when I came home dejected?  "That's okay, son.  You're good at other things.  You don't have to be good at sports."  Somehow she just didn't know what it meant to a 10-year-old to have nobody want him on their team. 

Fast-forward 25 years and my son is in Cub Scouts.  I refused to design or build his Pinewood Derby car for him beyond handling the parts of construction that required power tools and offering the occasional advice on weight, drag and aerodynamics.  He did the bulk of the work himself.  Guess what?  He lost.  Badly.  Guess what happened next?  He got a trophy anyway.  Everybody got a trophy!  On my mantle right now are Pinewood Derby trophies won by my son for "Best Shape" and "Most Colorful."

Several years ago, I was sitting in on a seminar for teachers in Catholic schools.  The keynote speaker was a bishop who supervised the largest diocese of schools in America.  His speech fascinated me.  It was just the opposite message I would have expected, and likely the opposite of the teachers' expectations as well.  He talked at length about our students' self-esteem.  After citing a number of statistics and studies, he paused and fixed the audience with an icy glare.  He took a pregnant breath and said, "Let me explain something to you.  Self-esteem is the result of succeeding, and succeeding is a result of having done something in the first place.  We're spending all our time worrying over the self-esteem of a bunch of six-year-olds who haven't learned how to do anything yet besides convert oxygen to carbon dioxide! Teach them how to do something, and they'll have all the self-esteem they'll ever need."

Now, I get it.  I really do.  Winning builds confidence.  But losing "builds character, inspires perseverance, and causes us to strive even harder."  And how are all those "winning" kids adapting to adult life?  I recently had to ask my daughter what the new social media word "adulting" means.  She explained that "adulting" means doing responsible things, even if you don't like it.  I disagreed.  I told her that, as far as I am concerned, "adulting" should mean doing whatever needs to be done to benefit family, friends and neighbors, and the question of liking it - or not - doesn't even enter one's consciousness.  The first denotes a spirit of begrudgement, the second a spirit of joyfulness.  When I explained all this to the young orphan that I house, he could not grasp the concept.  I really hate to admit this, but as I sit typing this sentence, I can't think of anyone I personally know under the age of 40 whom I would consider an adult by our present definition of the word.  We live in an age in which adolescence is stretching into middle age!  That's where all of our concern for self-esteem has gotten us!

Helicopter Parents

When I was 34 years old, I had just completed my first year with a particular company.  At the annual All Employee Meeting that year, I was given recognition and a certificate for "perfect attendance."  As I went toward the stage to accept my award, all I could think was "God, I haven't gotten one of these since I was in third grade."  I had come to assume that perfect attendance was among the normal expectations for any serious student or worker.  I saw no need to be awarded for mediocrity (still don't, frankly).

Not only do we have parents demanding that every kid on every team in the league take home a trophy at the end of the season; that would be bad enough.  But it doesn't end with sports.  Now we have parents demanding that teachers give their students tests without time limits, demanding their children be allowed to keep their cell phones handy at all times so the parents can always "check in on them" (when I was a kid, my mother was amazingly successful at finding me wherever I was when there was an emergency, even without the aid of cell phones), and completing tasks and homework assignments on their child's behalf.  As David Anderegg, child psychologist and professor of psychology at Bennington College says: "The kids know when you're cheating on their behalf, and it makes them feel terribly guilty.  Sometimes they arrange to fail to right the scales.  And when you cheat on their behalf, you completely undermine their sense of self-esteem.  They feel they didn't earn it on their own." ("A Nation of Wimps," Hara Estroff Marano, Psychology Today, Nov. 1, 2004) 

The Gospel of Me

In Christian parlance, meism has its roots in the Protestant Reformation. Not intentionally, I don't think, but still a precedent was set when Martin Luther, et al protested against, among other things, the priesthood of the clergy.  They preached the priesthood of all believers and, as a result, started the Protestant church on a path that would eventually lead us to the Gospel of Me.

Keep in mind that when Luther and friends started out, there were basically two sects of Christianity - the Catholics and the Orthodox.  And they were not trying to start a new church, but reform the existing one.  When that didn't work out, they ended up creating a number of more divisions within Christianity. This unintentional result set a dangerous precedent.  "When others further down the road disagreed with the way their own denomination was going, they had the precedent to split and form a sect of the original denomination.  This pattern has continued so that today we have thousands of Christian denominations in America.  Meism has taken something that was [unfortunately] necessary in the Reformation and turned it into a self-serving, consumer-driven way to make Church fit my needs."

"The gospel of me says this: 'Jesus died for my sins.' 'God loved me so much that he sent his only son to die for my sins.'  'When Jesus was on the cross, he was thinking about me.'  The problem with the gospel of me is that it is heretical, because it is all about me." 

What began as an effort to keep the power of the Pope in check has since created billions of little self-appointed papacies, each with his or her own ideas of what the gospel is all about.  We flit from one congregation to another because of how we feel about the music, the sermons, the Bible Study groups, and how each of them fit with our current perceptions of ourselves and our (often dubious) relationships to God.  "The church has found itself in a place where it is more concerned with feeding itself than with feeding the world.  We have become a spiritually obese and gluttonous people." 

Subverting the Cult of Me

Hope is not lost. There are some very basic things we can do to get out of the meistic mindset and return to our roots of neighborly love and concern.

1. Replace 'Me' with 'The World'

I have no firsthand experience, but I suspect carrying a cross is neither a fun nor fulfilling way to spend an afternoon.  I suspect it is dirty, tiring, burdensome, and completely undignified.  And I suspect that that's the point; no one would do so by their own choice or for their own benefit.  Taking up our crosses means letting go of 'me' and occupying ourselves with 'others.'  You know - adulting!

2. Become Mission Minded

Most of our church programs today are designed to be fun, accepting, educational and missionary, usually in that order.  But what if we were to change the priority?  What if, instead of missions being something we engage in from time to time, it was the primary focus of our programs?  What if fun and acceptance took a back seat - or were completely overlooked - in our programs?  What if we were expected to work in missionary endeavors at all times, not just on the weekends or quarterly or whenever a disaster strikes the area?  What if schedules, family obligations or hay fever weren't considered excuses for dismissal from our missionary obligations any more than they are excuses for dismissal from our occupational, scholastic or familial ones?

3. Redefine Social Media

Can you recall the late 70s and 80s when kids used to just hang out at the malls?  What did they do there?  Nothing, really; they just hung out.  The role of the mall is now being played by social media.  The big difference (to the kids) between TikTok and the mall is that there's no one screaming at them to "buy something or get out!" (They actually are, but too subtly for the kids to notice.)

Several years ago I read an article in the newspaper in which a psychologist had studied teen use of social media.  She had concluded that continuous scrolling causes the brain to release dopamine, ergo the kids had grown addicted to scrolling, ergo it wasn't exactly the kids' fault, ergo Mom and Dad needed to ease up about it.  I almost fell out of my chair laughing.  My wife, who was in the room with me, asked what was so funny, so I read the article to her.  We were now both laughing hysterically when my son entered the room and asked the same question.  When I read the article a third time, he failed to see the humor of it all.  Between guffaws, I explained to him that "a good, strong bowel movement will cause the brain to release dopamine, but rehab centers aren't filled with people addicted to Ex-Lax!"  To this day, I don't think he appreciates the joke.

The odd thing is that social media can be used for much good in the world, if we can just get over the meism of it all.  Who doesn't remember the days of the social media flash mob?  YouTube is still loaded with videos of people being gathered by the hundreds and thousands by social media to a specific time and place to sing or dance a particular tune together.  They're fun to watch and imagine we had also gotten the memo.  What if something similar could be done as a mission program?  What if we could use social media to create a small army to feed the hungry, clean the mosquito-infested vacant lot, or some other project that will put the needs of God's children ahead of 'me'?

4. Land the Chopper

If we are to change how this generation sees themselves, their relationships to God, and their obligations to others, we must first change how their parents parent.  We must help parents learn to back off.  There are so much data now on the developmental harm to kids of hovering parents and the subsequent benefit of letting those kids fail that it would be moot to quote any single citation.  I remember with a bit of wistfulness those occasions years ago when I was involved with Scouting and a parent would bring me a list of their son's preferred dietary ingredients prior to attending an outing.  I invariably smiled at the parent, thanked them for their input, and assured them that, irrespective of their son's finickiness, no boy ever starved to death on a weekend campout.  It was clearly time to land the chopper!  (Note: we are not here talking about known food allergies, merely persnicketiness.)

Let us all remember - and teach our children - that Jesus is not your boyfriend.  It's time to get a bit heretical against the Gospel of Me.

Pax