Katelyn Beaty's "Celebrities for Jesus"
The problem of power without proximity
I’m taking a short break from the series format I’ve been using since early July. Instead, I’ll be writing this week on books I’ve recently read that will stay with me for some time.
I was pleased to be part of Katelyn Beaty’s launch team for her new book, Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits Are Hurting the Church. As the official release date is tomorrow, I wanted to tackle her book first.
I’ve followed Katelyn for years. We interacted around a book project I was pitching, first when she worked as an acquisitions editor at InterVarsity Press and later when she moved to Brazos (an imprint of Baker).1 I’m a fairly faithful listener to the Saved By The City podcast, sponsored by Religion News Service, that Katelyn cohosts with Roxanne Stone.
And so I was particularly interested to hear that she was working on a book on Christian (mostly evangelical) celebrities. I was curious to see how someone who worked at Christianity Today, IVP, and Brazos and was regularly attuned to the religion news world would tackle the topic. As a sociologist of religion, I have my own perspectives on the topic of how charismatic authority,2 platform, conferencing, videos, and books combine to separate the Celebrities from the thousands and thousands of pastors who care for their flocks and manage a decent sermon once or twice a week.
Katelyn’s analysis doesn’t hold anything back and is an important read for anyone attempting to understand modern evangelicalism.3 She begins with an operational definition of celebrity: “social power without proximity.” This definition works well in our broad context of our social lives. I’m interested in what Chris Hayes has to say about the news but have never met him or even interacted on Twitter (he’s never replied to my comments!). We’re attracted to sports stars and their lives even if we only see them on television or, if we’re lucky, from the nosebleed seats in the arena. She writes:
The decline of religion in the West means emptier churches. But the hunger for transcendence is as strong as ever. What humans of the past have found in traditional worship, fraternal organizations, and family and local community, we now seek in part by consuming images of people we don’t and can’t know.4
After reflecting on stories of pastors who “fell”, she argues that they had all missed out on “knowing and being known”, preferring the limelight. She concludes this section:
Over time, a chasm grew between who they were behind closed doors and who they were on stage or in their own sermons and anecdotes. They had started to believe their own hype. And adoring churchgoers, staff members, book publishers, and social media fans were at the ready to feed the hype, because they derived their own meaning and identity from a simulated connection to the celebrity Christian.
She then explores the development of the celebrity pastor model. Ranging from D.L. Moody to Billy Sunday to Billy Graham to Robert Schuller, she shows how the success motif of bringing the big crowds connects to personal power of the speaker/evangelist. Jumping closer to the present day, she analyzes the leadership of Bill Hybels, and Willow Creek Community Church, and the Willow Creek Association.5 Based on interviews and mass media reporting following Hybels' scandal and subsequent resignation, she explores all the ways in which celebrity was maintained. And how that celebrity status largely avoided any corrective action being taken.6 Here's how she describes the conditions before the scandal is exposed.
The institution’s identity becomes enmeshed with the pastor’s; his public persona serves to draw fame and renown to the church. Having a celebrity pastor is seen as benefiting the church; all the better if you can get actual celebrities to start attending. Over time, a pernicious belief can set in: that the church wouldn’t go on without the lead pastor at the helm. Almost as if God depends on the celebrity pastor to accomplish God’s purposes. Almost as if the pastor is God himself.7
Another chapter deals with other ministry crises: financial, sexual, emotional abuse. There are important safeguards to mitigate against these issues, but in celebrity culture they tend not to operate until after the crisis has become visible.
Given Katelyn’s professional background, I was really looking forward to the chapter on Christian publishing. There are certain advantages held by celebrity pastors: name recognition, Twitter followers, research assistants, multiple staff to handle the non-preaching ministries. Many of these pastors enjoy constructing a series of sermons which then are transcribed, edited, and marketed as a book.8 The downside of the celebrity author is that their ideas don’t meet the rigor one would expect from a reputable publisher. Katelyn writes:
All the while, many readers are led to believe that authors are vetted for maturity, credibility, or theological acumen, when sometimes their book deal is the result of a social media team that knew how to crack an algorithm.
That’s not even considering the occasions when celebrity authors and their teams have gamed the system through bulk purchases that get them on best seller’s lists. Or the ever-present problem of plagiarism which, she says, can be easily blamed on “careless assistants” supporting the celebrity’s Very Busy Schedule.
Another chapter is somewhat sympathetic to the celebrity leader. It explores the ways in which the celebrity is isolated from being known. So while the celebrity presents an image of superstar, the real person has few real connections. This disconnect can actual lead to the abuses described in earlier chapters.
The last chapter attempts to provide a direction forward given the thesis of the entire book. Looking at the ministry of Jesus and early church leaders provides a contrast to our celebrity driven modes of today. Drawing on a conversation with Andy Crouch9, Katelyn explores the Acts story of Simon the Magician. She writes:
Perhaps large swaths of the American church prefer our Simons over Philips because we don’t believe that the gospel, lived out daily in ordinary, embedded community, will be enough to captivate our neighbors, especially in a time when many of them have walked away from the church or simply don’t see it as relevant to their lives. Perhaps we’re anxious that, unless we play by the world’s rules for what counts as success, we’ll lose.
[clip]
But if we keep leaning on these strategies and techniques that simply mimic the worlds of entertainment and celebrity worship, we shouldn’t be surprised that we draw crowds who are more interested in the celebrity than the Christ to whom they’re trying to point.
Overall, I found it to be an excellent and insightful book. Not only does it highlight the numerous challenges with celebrities in the religious realm, it also sets the stage for two other factors that have shaped modern religion.
First, the rise of social media and streaming services means that people we wouldn’t (and maybe shouldn’t) have known anything about are visible. It gives the most virulent speaker the biggest social media interactions. Second, celebrity pastors have contributed greatly to the demise of denominational identity in modern American religion. People don’t know the theology of their sponsoring church, but they are all about the latest tome by David Jeremiah or John MacArthur or John Piper.
I remember back in the early 2000s when the religious world was agog at The Purpose Driven Live by Rick Warren. My local Nazarene church participated in a video series put out by Saddleback (which, incidentally, resulted in our church buying every member a copy of PDL). I tried to point out to the pastor that our Wesleyan/Holiness didn’t align with Warren’s reformed Baptist theology but nobody seemed to care.
It was a Popular and Important Book and so we read it for small group meetings. This is how celebrity works. Thanks to Katelyn for the analysis.
We agreed that it didn’t fit the Brazos niche. My project was subsequently shelved after the disruptions in the evangelical world over the last three years marginalized my argument.
This is the Max Weber notion of charismatic, meaning a person holding exceptional personal characteristics, and not the glossolalia version of charismatic (although they often overlap).
It pairs very nicely with A Church Called Tov by Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer. The first half of Tov is also about power and abuse while it’s second half describes what a healthy church culture should look like.
I read this on my Kindle, so all I have to properly cite the quotes I’ve used are those weird location tags. This is location 238, for what it’s worth.
Also a major focus of the McKnight/Barringer Tov book.
It took the Chicago Tribune to break the story that eventually led to accountability for the pastor, the elders, and the entire community.
One of my pet peeves is when people in an evangelical church say “I just love Pastor Bill’s teachings”. Because Pastor Bill is to be preaching the Gospel and the “teachings” shouldn’t accrue to him.
Back when I was younger, you could trace a sermon series by Chuck Swindoll directly into his next book about a year later.
I used Crouch’s Playing God for years in class, which students really liked.