For many years I've often thought about someone like Garrison
Keillor, host of the radio show 'A Prairie Home Companion'. He's retiring this
year and has recently been making the news. Many people mistake him for being a
Lutheran as his show based on a fictional town in Minnesota often pokes fun at Upper-Midwestern
Christian and thus Lutheran culture. But Keillor was raised Plymouth Brethren
and he's mentioned it many times in the show and done pieces about how his
family didn't celebrate Christmas etc...
I remember turning on his show back in the 1990s and a lot of
people, even a lot of Christians I knew seemed to appreciate it. Even Thrivent
Financial for Lutherans would advertise on the show. I could say a great many
things about that but I will refrain.
And yet listening to the show I found it unpalatable. There
was plenty of good music and genuine humour. His 'News from Lake Wobegon' was
often very amusing. Keillor gives people that good ol' down home kind of
feeling. He transports you to small town life, simpler times and folk memory.
If you live in small town the humour resonates. Keillor both loves it and
absolutely despises it.
The show is actually making fun of it all. He's like many
people who revisit their small town after living in the city. They love coming
back and remembering but at the same time they are so glad they don't live
there anymore and can't wait to get away from it. In that sense he captures a
certain restlessness that many people feel in this culture and its changing
demographic situations. His post-war upbringing and generation feels it acutely.
And yet, there's a real bitterness in his poking fun at Christianity.
He plainly despises it (at least its Biblical form) and his skits quickly
degenerate into sacrilege and blasphemy. I turned his show off long ago.
Occasionally if we were in the car on a Saturday evening I'd turn it on but
usually we wouldn't last more than a few minutes. Our kids were young and
couldn't have understood it anyway. Today if I was to listen to it, it would be
pure polemics. I would be turning it off to explain to my kids what they just
heard and asking them questions, challenging them to think it through.
Keillor hates Christianity and hates all the varieties of
'Bible Belt' culture. I will grant from my vantage point there's much to
dislike about the nominal quasi-Christian culture that comes with Sacralism. I
didn't enjoy living in the Bible Belt either and heartily reject politically
conservative, militaristic, patriotic American Christian culture. His parents
could have told him that and in fact tried to. Keillor rejected it all and has
now made a career as something of a fraud. People associate him with the
celebration of the 'Down-home' the good old days of American culture,
Christianity and all... as long as none of it taken too seriously. He's made a
career and a great deal of money mocking and destroying the very thing he's
associated with. He's an absolute enemy of the culture he purports to
celebrate. Personally I cannot stand him. His voice, his whole mannerism smacks
of fraud and hypocrisy. Even 'The Writer's Almanac' an often informative five
minute daily on many NPR stations is interesting to be sure but at the same
time Keillor almost gleefully celebrates the apostasy and wickedness of many authors
and literati.
I suppose he could be classified along with many others who
wish to celebrate American history and culture but they wish to commemorate it
by looking at through a rear-view mirror. It's gone and they do not wish to
return or grant any validity to past intellectual or cultural frameworks. If
reconstituted in today's setting (like on a radio show) it cannot be taken
seriously but is instead an object of sentimentality, pity, humour and often scorn.
I often wonder if he's burdened by what he has done. He was
spent his adult life 'cashing in' on portraying himself as something he's not.
He's spent his adult life working to mock and destroy the world of his youth.
I'm sure he loves aspects of it but he turned his back on it and now it's more
like an anthropological experiment for him. I think of Keillor whenever I'm at
a folk event and you see those kinds of wealthy academic and intellectual types
in attendance. They get all into the music or folk art but at the same time
completely reject the values and lifestyle that went with it and generated it.
For them it's like an exercise in anthropology. They'll even dress up, learn to
play the dulcimer etc... but they don't get it. They're flannel shirted fiddlers
driving away in a Lexus. They're in a wholly alien environment and actually
hostile to it. That's Garrison Keillor.
But it wasn't nominal worldly Lutheranism that produced him. The
inherently weak doctrine of antithesis in cultural Lutheranism (even
conservative Lutheranism) would have never produced a Keillor. It was the
hostility generated by his apostasy from the Plymouth Brethren.
Breakpoint recently produced an episode on Keillor and
Prairie Home Companion. I thought, 'Oh, maybe someone will call him out at
last.' No, that wasn't the case. You can always count on the Colsonites to get
virtually every issue wrong. They seemed pleased that his show was of the
highest production value and that even though it poked a little fun, it was
actually comfortable mentioning Christianity. This was something to celebrate
much in the same way that Christians seem to get excited because a family prays
around the dinner table in a movie. This is somehow perceived as some kind of
cultural victory. It's missing the forest through the trees, straining at a
gnat and swallowing a camel.
Apparently they missed that Keillor's primary goal seems to
be the mocking of Christianity and the values of 'Christendom'. Of course,
that's where it gets confusing. These values need criticism but not from
Keillor's standpoint or motivation.
I suppose for the Colsonites when the 'gospel' is little more
than hard work, worldly success and the building of culture with a Christian
veneer, it would seem they don't have any real objections to Keillor and what
he produced.
Or they're simply too blind to understand what Keillor is
really all about.
I also think of the author Ken Follett. He was raised in the
Plymouth Brethren. I cannot recommend his books as they are filled with a great
deal of smut and immorality. That said, his tales are interesting and he writes
a good popular novel. Christianity doesn't come out looking very good but as
usual what is being attacked as Christianity is often the Sacralist
counterfeit.
Follet talks about how he was totally deprived of an
appreciation for Church history and hence he later became fascinated with
cathedrals and the Middle Ages. This led to him writing 'The Pillars of the
Earth'. A few characters in the book, a Welsh monk and a stonemason are
supposed to be sympathetic in terms of their faith and values, but as a
Christian I did not find them to be. They were realistic in terms of the
Medieval Roman Catholic context but that made them all the more tragic. Roman
Catholicism was and is a tyranny of false Christianity. Whether he means to or
not Follett accurately displays the false values and misguided piety generated
by Sacralist theology.
I think it's a grave mistake to isolate our children from
history and culture. We have to be in the world but not of it. The Breakpoint
people have no sense of antithesis. Most Evangelicals don't. In fact American
Evangelicalism was in many ways from the outset a rejection of the antithesis
born of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy. But at the same time the
isolationist approach to Separatism can also prove harmful.
I would rather dive in (a bit) and help my kids learn how to
think and interpret. I teach them about evolution and Greek philosophy. We
wander around inside Roman Catholic edifices and I make sure they see (a bit)
of television, music videos and the like. And yet I also make it clear that
although we can enjoy a song or laugh at aspects of what is being shown or said
we cannot do so uncritically. Often there is a mix of good and bad in what
we're encountering, the trick is how to navigate it in our minds and hearts.
I don't want my kids to grow up feeling like something was
kept from them, or that they're wholly ignorant of how the world works or has
worked. I want them to understand and then also understand how and why we're
different. We can be simple concerning evil but at the same time we have
understand to a degree what it is that we're opposing. Often we are forged by
opposition, by being forced to work through an issue.
I think of Rebecca Stott, another author with Brethren roots
who has abandoned the faith of her parents. Her book 'The Coral Thief' was an
excellent read. I thoroughly enjoyed it and was captivated by the setting.
Paris in the days following Waterloo came alive and she painted an intriguing
portrait of the West on the cusp of great change. She promotes Evolution
(Pre-Darwin of course) through a story of wondrous settings and captivating
characters.
I am not an Evolutionist in any sense but as an Anti-Sacralist
I cannot help but rejoice in the toppling of Christendom. I believe Heaven
rejoices as well (Rev 18). Of course the strange new world that results from
its fall is equally perilous just on different terms. It is an era which will
make the antithesis more pronounced and thus increase the danger and yet in the
end make for a more vibrant Church and witness.
But Stott's own biography is a very sad story. Her characters
haunt the underground world of Paris, the realm of catacombs and back alleys.
They are social outcasts and rebels. I see that as more the world we as
Christians are supposed to inhabit, especially in the Industrial era. We are
the social pariahs, the societal heretics, not its masters. Stott is
iconoclastic and yet it's we (the Christians) who are supposed to be. Instead
the Church has so often sought to be respectable and part of the Establishment
order. We are Biblicists but that shouldn't make us social conservatives or bourgeois.
She labels her Brethren upbringing as that of a 'cult'. As an
unbeliever she's spiritually blind but I can't help but believe her church
failed her.
Of course as I read her story I also think of the Reveil, Haldane and the genesis of
Restorationist Christianity on the continent, which still survives today. The
Brethren Churches which Stott calls cults were birthed on the Continent during
this same period... a true light in the darkness.
Finally when it comes to apostasy from the Plymouth Brethren I
am also forced to think of Aleister Crowley, undoubtedly one of the more wicked
men to haunt the first half of the twentieth century.
What happened with Crowley I cannot say but his break with
the faith of his parents was so absolute and superlative as to boggle the mind.
He did not turn from theism to atheism, but from Christianity to the occult. He
ran headlong into a total and complete rebellion not just rejecting the Gospel
but with determination embracing spiritual darkness. It's a sad and tragic tale
and Crowley seemed to outstrip all others becoming known as the 'wickedest man
in the world'.
Again, I don't blame the Brethren per se. Rather I think it
points to the crisis generated in true Biblical antithesis. Those that break
with the Gospel, in this case they have a very clear mental grasp of what it is
and what it means, are left with no alternative. Their rejection (if reject it
they must) is total and final. Crowley understood that.
While we wish our children to persevere in the faith they
have been born into and raised with, we also must help them understand that
though they may never have a 'Damascus Road' experience, a total 'conversion',
they must still understand the antithesis.
Sadly those who embrace a deficient theology of conversion
often manipulate their children into having an 'experience' and yet all too
often this proves superficial. Children born in the faith are reckoned holy by
Scripture and reared in the covenant, in union with Christ. They need not
necessarily have a crisis-conversion. In fact I hope they don't. If they do,
then something went amiss that they 'stepped away' in order to 'feel' the need
to convert. I don't wish that and there's really no basis for it. I would
rather have them say they cannot remember a time in their lives that they did
not trust in Jesus Christ.
And yet they must understand that their Christianity cannot
be comfortable, it cannot be at peace with the world. We live on a razor's
edge, straight is the way and narrow is the gate. That's not a popular message
and to many they neither want to live under that paradigm nor impress it upon
their children but as strangers and pilgrims we are exhorted to abstain from
fleshly lusts, self-gratifying desires and covetous temptations. James 4 reminds
us that fleshly lusts are more than physical desire and adulterous thoughts.
James reminds us that friendship with the world is enmity with God.
END