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“Does Britney Matter?” a sermon by Rev. Brian J. Kiely
Unitarian Church of Edmonton November 18, 2007
I want to begin my remarks today, not with Britney Spears, but with a welcome to any guests visiting today. It’s not easy walking into a new church, even when you are with a friend. It’s always a bit intimidating to enter a new community where most folks know each other’s faces and ways, where we all understand the unspoken rules and you don’t. So thank you for taking a chance. I promise that no one here will set you up to fail or tag you with a “Kick me, I’m new!” sign at coffee hour. Usually they save that for the minister... We are genuinely glad you decided to come today.
In a way the subject of this sermon is the familiarity of faces and how we relate to them, for celebrity faces are indeed familiar, but I also hope to use the topic to delve a little more deeply into some of the Principles of Unitarianism we just shared. I have been fascinated by the astonishing rise of the cult of celebrity in the past 20 years or so. There have always been fan magazines and adoring crowds, of course, but in the last two decades these formerly fawning forms of media have turned decidedly nasty. One day someone discovered that trash sells more than adulation. One can almost see entertainment editors looking at each new crop of stars and assessing them not for their talent (though always for their beauty), but for future shocking headline potential when they trip and fall. The ones with the best potential are pumped up. They seem to get the most coverage at first, but if they fail to deliver, i.e. they handle fame well and live sane lives, they quickly get dropped in favour of the outrageous and the flamboyant. Why is that?
Carlin Flora writing in Psychology Today a few years ago offered some insights:
Why should I care? For that matter, why should any of us? Celebrities are fascinating because they live in a parallel universe—one that looks and feels just like ours yet is light-years beyond our reach. Stars cry to Diane Sawyer about their problems—failed marriages, hardscrabble upbringings, bad career decisions—and we can relate. The paparazzi catch them in wet hair and a stained T-shirt, and we’re thrilled. They’re ordinary folks, just like us. And yet…
Stars live in another world entirely, one that makes our lives seem woefully dull by comparison. The teary chat with Diane quickly turns to the subject of a recent $10 million film fee and honorary United Nations ambassadorship. The magazines that specialize in gotcha snapshots of schleppy-looking celebs also feature Cameron Diaz wrapped in a $15,000 couture gown and glowing with youth, money and star power. We’re left hanging—and we want more.
It’s easy to blame the media for this cognitive whiplash. But the real celebrity spinmeister is our own mind, which tricks us into believing the stars are our lovers and our social intimates. Celebrity culture plays to all of our innate tendencies: We’re built to view anyone we recognize as an acquaintance ripe for gossip or for romance...
Celebrities tap into powerful motivational systems designed to foster romantic love and to urge us to find a mate. Stars summon our most human yearnings: to love, admire, copy and, of course, to gossip and to jeer. It’s only natural that we get pulled into their gravitational field...
In our global village, the best targets for gossip are the faces we all know. We are born to dish dirt, evolutionary psychologists agree; it’s the most efficient way to navigate society and to determine who is trustworthy. They also point out that when our brains evolved, anybody with a familiar face was an “in-group” member, a person whose alliances and enmities were important to keep track of.
That’s fascinating stuff. People Magazine and Entertainment Tonight exist in part therefore, because of the way our brains are wired. Both the lionizing and admiration, as well as the blood lust incited by personal failure and tragedy are part of our human social make-up. That’s just scary, but it does explain a lot about human behaviour. And I don’t think we can ignore the influence of a couple of those tempting ‘seven deadly sins’ either. The stars fascinate us because many of us envy them their success. We want what they got, and when they start to lose it, well it feels like they are being brought back down to our level.
Well, not all of us. I am sure many here today are untouched and unmoved by the rising and falling of the stars in the celebrity firmament. Mostly I am pretty disengaged from it, but some of it is hard to avoid. When I log on to my e-mail account, they post a news service on the welcoming page. Typically it has five stories, one or two about some disaster around the world, two more about celebrities and one pseudo-health story. Given that exposure, it’s hard to not at least read the headlines about Britney or Lindsay or Brangelina no matter what my level of interest. And yes, I confess, I do sometimes read the story when some novel excess gets reported...but it’s purely an academic interest on my part...just research for future sermons, of course.
But mostly the peering into publicly private lives does leave me untouched, and that makes me wonder why?
Carlin Flora suggests that it may because I am involved with the world of religion.
John Lennon infuriated the faithful when he said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, but he wasn’t the first to suggest that celebrity culture was taking the place of religion. With its myths, its rituals (the red carpet walk, the Super Bowl ring, the handprints outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater) and its ability to immortalize, it fills a similar cultural niche. In a secular society our need for ritualized idol worship can be displaced onto stars, speculates psychologist James Houran, formerly of the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine and now director of psychological studies for True Beginnings dating service. Nonreligious people tend to be more interested in celebrity culture, he’s found, and Houran speculates that for them, celebrity fills some of the same roles the church fills for believers, like the desire to admire the powerful and the drive to fit into a community of people with shared values. Leo Braudy, author of The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History, suggests that celebrities are more like Christian calendar saints than like spiritual authorities (Tiger Woods, patron saint of arriviste golfers; or Jimmy Carter, protector of down-home liberal farmers?). “Celebrities have their aura—a debased version of charisma” that stems from their all-powerful captivating presence, Braudy says.
Later, Fiora concludes that celebrity sightings become especially powerful because for a second the celebrities see us, that we become real to them, that these secular saints reach down and walk among us, and that leaves us feeling special.
Now for those of you who are visiting for the first or second time today, you might be wondering why I am even exploring this topic. Good question. One of the nice things about the Unitarian church is that we are not limited by doctrine or creed. We don’t have to build our service around a certain kind of worship plan, nor do we have to base all of our sermons on a predetermined set of readings.
What we do have is a mandate to examine how we choose to live our lives. It’s not my job to tell people how to do that, but to lift up options and questions and issues of the day and look at them from religious, ethical or moral points of view. What do our actions say about us as people? What is going in our society today? Do we want to be part of current trends or do we want to keep our distance? Last week I was interviewed on the religiously based cable program Top Story. The question was: Are social networking internet sites like Facebook good or are they destroying real community? It’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask, although any five minutes of call in radio programs demonstrate that a reasonable question is no guarantee of a reasonable answer. The influence of celebrity obsession in our society seems like another good area for exploration, because it reveals something about human nature. Anything that tells us a little more about ourselves deserves our attention. It is part of that direct experience of living mentioned in the Sources section of the Principles. A great many of our personal beliefs grow out of our experience of living. Like it or not, the obsession with celebrity is part of our experience in this post modern era. It is wise to try and make some sense of it and see how it fits with all of our other experience and with the wisdom we gather from our other Sources. For us, building our own theologies is a lifelong project. There are always new situations to consider, new trends to comprehend and new technologies to evaluate.
But how shall we do that evaluation? That’s where the first half of the Statement of Principles comes into play. You see, as Unitarians we are not bound, but we are guided by this set of democratically developed Principles. It’s my job to ask how this celebrity fascination fits with, say, our affirmation of the inherent worth and dignity of all persons. Are we giving these stars too much adulation? More than is good for them? Are we holding them to a different standard of behaviour? Do we take too much delight when the show their human frailties? That’s not really very respectful, is it?
It is my job to ask if the principle of justice, equity and compassion is being followed by court TV hounds like Nancy Grace who judges just about everyone guilty when the accusations against them hit the headlines, and then who conveniently takes the night off when they are acquitted of all charges. The rush to condemn and find guilt is out of control in much of the media. Fairness is passé, certainly when it comes to the rich and famous.
It is my job to ask if this trend in the media balances freedom with responsibility as our third principle suggests. Are the paparazzis and the privacy invading reporters being responsible in their quest to find the dirt or the revealing photo? It is also my job to ask if the celebrities who court and manipulate such reporters are being fair and responsible as well.
In truth there are times when I just want to turn it all off and call down a curse on all their houses, but perhaps that’s not very responsible or affirming of worth and dignity either.
Instead I step back and reflect again on Carlin Fiora’s observations. The cult of personality exists not because media giants profit from it, but because human beings want it. We want to study the lives and saints and sinners. We want icons we can aspire to emulate and we want sinners who can make us feel better about our own peccadillos. We have this ancient cave dweller need to identify members of the tribe and to judge our status through story and gossip about them. It might not be the prettiest fact about human nature, but I would rather be aware of it than not. If I am aware, if I can detect my own urge to celebrate or denigrate celebrity along with the mob, then I can try to apply higher principles and rise above it. And I can choose to gossip or not about my own acquaintances understanding now where that urge comes from. I can see if I can find compassion for a star with addiction difficulties, empathy for another marriage on the rocks, understanding for self-destructive behaviour. They may be stars, but they are still people, just like you and me. Maybe that thought will even help me be more generous towards those who populate my real life. We always have choice about how we will view and treat other people. Perhaps it’s unwise to let the cave dweller part of our brain dictate our response. We have choices. We have a responsibility to make good ones.
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