I love Sunday mornings. My husband and I devote a few hours to quality time with our miniature schnauzer and our dvr. We throw our dog’s football across the living room and catch up on our favorite reality shows. Sadly, today, we had to cut that time a little short. After a brief episode of The Soup, we switched to, gasp, live television. Just in time to see Joel Osteen.
Disclosures:
1) I am not a big fan of Joel Osteen.
2) We watched about three minutes of Joel Osteen. So, I am admittedly about to take his comments entirely out of context.
Joel stood center stage in a blueberry suit, surrounded by a massive audience and perfect studio lighting. His message, delivered straight to camera, was direct: Joel thinks I am important. We are all important. You and you and you. How does Joel know? He knows. He told a story about a woman who asked God for a rainbow and, snap!, got one (Joel didn’t describe the other meteorological conditions that day…details!). How, I might wonder, did God have time to make a rainbow just for that woman? Because at that moment in time, she was the most important person to God in the whole world. And I can be, too.
After a few minutes of that, and then one minute more than I could really handle, we switched over to Meet the Press, just in time to hear an increasingly orange John Boehner talk about why the Republicans are going to take back Congress.
Disclosures:
1) I think John Boehner is mostly tolerable.
2) We watched about three minutes of Meet the Press, so I am admittedly about to take John’s comments completely out of context.
3) I actually googled “why is John Boehner so orange?” and suggest you do the same in your free time.
John’s message, delivered straight to camera, was direct: John thinks I am important. John thinks I am so important that he’d like me to go to a website right now and vote! on issues and vote! on the opinions expressed by other important people. I can rank! things and be parts of graphs! John and his colleagues are going to take back Congress because they, unlike the other guys, understand how important I am. And how important you and you and you are.
At the risk of coming down too hard on Joel and John and their respective assessments of my importance, I was beyond annoyed. I know that Joel and John are both just representatives of their movements. There are a ton of Joels and Johns and Bills and Toms and even Sarahs from both sides of the aisle and all walks of faith, anxious to talk to me about how important I am so they can sell me on how important they are.
After all this, do you know what Ms. Important did? I folded some clothes. I worked on a brief for my job. I took a nap.
The truth is: nothing about my life would make me significant in any way to Joel or John. If I sat down with Joel to chat about organized religion, I’m pretty sure we would not be on the same page. I don’t know that John would be impressed if I started in on how limited government should mean both fiscal conservatism and respect for civil liberties, and can we get some ideological consistency, puh-lease? These guys, I know, are just doing their thing on a Sunday morning, but I desperately want them to use their forums to inspire me to…I don’t know…act.
Empower me as a person of faith by showing me how I can make other people feel more important. Empower me as a voter by showing me what the legislative process can accomplish when the folks I help elect really go to work. Use your verbs, Joel and John. Do something and ask me to do something. In fact, tell me that I am only as important as what I do. And acknowledge, please, that you, too, are only as important as what you do.
I don’t want to be led, spiritually or politically, by someone who is so sure of his own importance that he feels free to throw me a bone and tell me that I’m important, too. I don’t want to be part of a parish or a voting public that needs to hear how important we are to be engaged in the cause. Sure, it’s fine for a minister to remind her congregation that they are loved by their creator and have a purpose in the universe. It’s fine for a politician to remind voters that their participation is fundamental to democracy. But I worry about any ideology that requires constant ego-stroking.
If I want ego, I’ll go back to my dvr. I have reality television for that.
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Beth Silvers is a business restructuring lawyer by day. By night and weekend, she's a lover of reality television, watermelon, her family, cooking, and writing. You can learn more than you ever wanted to know about Beth at www.bethon.com.
Beth,
I have nothing to add to this except that I really enjoyed this piece. I have to ask, do you worship anywhere?
-Lou
Well, I try to worship everywhere. But if you mean, do I attend church regularly? no. I was raised as a Southern Baptist, and for a lot of reasons, it’s been several years since I have attended church consistently.
I love that Obama called Boehner a “man of color”.
I also really enjoyed reading this post. Thanks for contributing.
Living in Texas, you see lots of scars from the Southern Baptist Convention. It’s something that I had no knowledge of until recently.
Beth, it sounds like you have an interesting perspective. I’ve been delaying writing a piece on anything theological for quite some time. I found your entry to be especially intriguing though and it make me wonder what kind of audience we have on such issues.
Ideas?
I could talk/write/think about faith and religion all day every day. I would love to see that kind of discussion happening on this site. As far as an audience goes, I just don’t know. I discussed with Tim–I mean, Tem–the idea of reposting an entry on faith from my personal blog here, but I just wasn’t sure how it would be received.
By all means, post away, Beth. And that’s okay if you called me Tim by mistake. I get that a lot.
(Oh, and I’d also like to see more thoughtful discussions on theology and faith on this site.)
I would love to see that kind of religious content/discussion.
I was reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (an extraordinary book) and I ran across this quote:
“You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten. I do wonder where it will end.”
I thought you might appreciate that.