The Church and Postmodern Irony

You have to watch the video, even if you’ve seen it before. It’s funny. It’s so funny I posted here a while back … just because it’s funny. I appreciate and enjoy the humor. I do.

This is an example of ironic, Postmodern humor. It’s very hip, and just the kind of humor that young people respond to. Kids who are college age grew up watching The Simpsons and Family Guy, and they developed a taste for humor that mocks convention or — in clichéd Postmodern terms (see how I ironically mock Postmodernism?) — deconstruct convention, especially authority figures.

While changing channels the other day, I saw the briefest excerpt from Family Guy. The dad had taken his family to a 50s themed restaurant. One waiter was dressed like Elvis. A waitress was dressed like Marilyn Monroe. And then a waiter came by appearing to have polio. The dad’s kids asked, “What’s polio?” The dad answered, “It’s like the 50s version of AIDS, only people with polio got to go to heaven.”

In an insightful essay, “nav” writes in the Scawled in Wax blog, “Lady Gaga, Community and The Thing that Comes After Postmodernism,”

As Linda Hutcheon points out, what postmodern pastiche and irony do is ‘foreground the politics of representation’; they say “look, we’re not just showing you these ideas, but how they’re constructed and reinforced through art – now you have to think about them, right?”. …

Postmodernism, the line goes, isn’t the age in which we simply reveled in aesthetics or that critical thinking died; it was the era in which it thrived by putting everything right there in your face and making it so that you could never look at them neutrally again.

The joke, of course, is to mock those Christians who deny that homosexuals are saved. The deeper, ironic joke is to mock the notion of heaven altogether. That’s the inside joke — the joke within a joke. That’s the joke that only the hip viewers will get. Those who preach about heaven create a constructed (false) reality. It’s easily deconstructed by showing how inconsistently those same people treat AIDS sufferers. (I never said postmodern irony has to be fair!)

The video “Sunday’s Coming” is the same kind of humor, not because it mocks the church, but because the humor also deconstructs the church, that is, it exposes the pretensions of church so the viewer can laugh at it. You can’t be funny to kids by using their irony without suffering the critique of irony.

Now, in all seriousness, imagine that you are the worship leader who has to convince the congregation to worship God with reverence and awe — the very opposite of irony — immediately after that video is shown. The purpose behind the clip — produced by Christians for Christians — is to show how very hip the worship leaders are. They are willing to laugh at themselves and let the filmmakers make fun of them. They are cool. And they are even willing to laugh at their own coolness. The kids love this!

But what is the price of building themselves up as cool, hip guys? What happens when we deconstruct worship? Indeed, what is the joke within the joke? What is the joke that only the cool church members get? I think it’s that the worship leaders don’t take worship seriously, but see themselves as manipulators. (Hardly a hidden joke, really. The “joke” is that what the leaders say is actually true, even though they don’t think so!) The appearance of religiosity and reverence is but the surface. The underlying reality is manipulation.

I’m sure that’s not really the leaders’ perspective. I dare say it’s likely the filmmaker’s perspective. It certainly appears to be the point of the film — viewed in a postmodern light. You see, if you want postmodern humor, you get postmodern results. Indeed, the irony is that the truth likely is that these guys aren’t hip, cool, ironic postmodern guys at all. Rather, the film is a manipulation to persuade the audience that very uncool, very un-postmodern guys are hip. And so, yes, there is a fraud, just not the fraud being presented. Ironic, isn’t it? Cool.

And all that means the video is the very opposite of worship. Rather than building up God and his kingdom, it tears down his servants and the worship of his followers as the mere product of clever manipulation by professional worship leaders. It encourages the membership to view themselves, their church, and their worship through ironic eyes. And as a result, when the worship leader leads a song from the radio, the audience thinks, “Oh, yeah! This is the ‘song everyone knows’ — and they laugh. They laugh at a song like Chris Tomlin’s “Our God” because they’ve been told by their worship leaders to do so. They’re being manipulated — but to an un-Christian purpose. Not cool.

Christianity Today has just published a series of articles on “hipster” Christianity. They are good reading. “Hipster” refers to the postmodern culture as found in urban elites. In “The Tricky H-Word,” Ted Olson explains that “hipsters” are young intellectual elites who find postmodern irony cool.

[I]rony is the hipster’s core value. (Remember the “end of irony” memes that circulated after 9/11 and Obama’s election?) … Today’s hipsters appropriate other cultural artifacts (especially outdated rural white culture: mustaches, trucker hats, V-necks, and so on) to distance and mock the originators.

And that’s largely why the Christian hipsters described in this month’s cover story (“Hipster Faith,” page 24) will never quite mesh with their secular counterparts. They may wear skinny jeans and unnecessary scarves, but they lack the utterly nihilistic detachment of their neighbors.

Christians can’t truly be hip because they can’t truly be postmodern in this sense. They can dress the part, but Christians, by definition, aren’t nihilists.

In “Hipster Faith,” Brett McCracken writes,

But what does this mean for Christian hipsters? When, in the name of rebellion and “freedom in Christ,” Christian hipsters begin to look and act just like their secular hipster counterparts, drinking and smoking all the same things, shouldn’t we raise a red flag?

Isn’t Christianity supposed to be distinguishable and set apart from the world? Christian hipsters are rebelling against a mainstream Christianity that they see as too indistinguishable from secular mainstream culture (i.e., consumerist, numbers-driven, Fox News—watching, immigrant-hating, SUV-driving), but their corrective may not turn out much better. Some hipster Christianity is as indistinguishable from its secular hipster counterpart as yesterday’s megachurch Christianity was indistinguishable from secular soccer-mom suburbia.

The challenge for hipster Christians is to figure out what it means, in their cultural context, to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness (Eph. 4:24).

…

As hipster Christianity grows, the temptation for church leaders will be to fashion themselves (and their churches) in the hipster mold. But in so doing, these churches will likely only reinforce a growing distinction between “authentic hipster” and “wannabe hip” churches. The former type is often simply an organic embodiment of an urban environment where hipsters live (and, thus, attend church). These churches are hip not because they self-consciously strive to be, but because they happen to exist in a hipster milieu (e.g., Resurrection Presbyterian in Brooklyn, or Grace Church in London’s Hackney neighborhood).

The latter type, on the other hand, appropriates what it perceives to be the prevailing hipster sensibilities in a utilitarian, “staying relevant” way. These wannabe hip churches—largely of the suburban, megachurch, and “contemporary evening service” variety—dress themselves in the accoutrements of hipsterdom not because they understand or value it, but because they are terrified of being excluded, left behind, or undesirable. They are playing catch up, frantically maneuvering to be in the inner rings of culture and fashion rather than the dreaded periphery.

Wannabe-hip churches are springing up everywhere these days, but what will it mean for the larger church? Will this sort of Christianity bring back the youth, or will it further alienate a younger generation fed up with being a target market? Will hipster Christianity repair Christianity’s PR problem? Or will it fizzle in a faddish wisp before anyone can say lectio divina?

So to return to the “Lady Gaga, Community and The Thing that Comes After Postmodernism” essay. It concludes,

So – and I really don’t know how literally I mean this anymore – Community, Arrested Development and other shows are signs of the transition period between postmodernism and the thing that comes after it because they are starting to exceed the limits of irony and self-reflexivity and the normative representational structures that underpinned their existence in popular culture.

* * * * *

So, to end, I’ll just say this: the ideal of the post-ironic post-postmodern is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: postmodern tropes, but in the service of a return to a knowing, wise, reformed sincerity. It actually believes in something. And has the guts to actually lay claim to it. And it – like Community, Arrested Development and other bits of culture – are doing the best they can between two historical epochs.

And so to return to Chris Turner: the future belongs to the sincere.

The sin that postmodern irony seeks to expose is insincerity — that is,  hypocrisy. We appeal to the postmodern world by being sincere, not by being manipulators and not by pretending to be someone we aren’t.

I therefore repent of posting the “Sunday’s Coming” video just because it’s funny. It really is funny. I found it hilarious. But the church of Jesus Christ has no business doing such things. Humor is not an end. Humor is a means. Jesus was funny. I try to be funny when I teach Bible class. Humor is a powerful, important means of communicating and persuading. But not all humor edifies. Some tears down. And that’s wrong.

CAVEATS —

I have to make clear what I’m NOT saying for those readers whose thinking has been molded by the writings of certain Church of Christ publications.

1. I’m NOT saying that all postmodernism is evil and Satanic. It’s not. Neither am I saying that all of postmodernism is good. Obviously.

2. I’m NOT against humor in church. I’m against nihilistic, postmodern humor that deconstructs (or mocks) the church or worship or Jesus or Christianity. We can’t be Christians unless we’re willing to hold certain things dear and treat them as actually authentic. We can’t yield to the premise that everything is constructed (false) and therefore properly mocked with ironic humor to show the falsity of it. Some jokes aren’t worth the price.

3. I’m NOT against ironic humor. Some things ARE constructions and fake and inauthentic. Make all the fun you want of them.

4. I’m NOT saying that postmodern humor isn’t funny. Well, some of it is too ugly to be funny to me. I don’t enjoy bestiality jokes in a cartoon put on during prime time, even though my kids are all grown up. Efforts to make humor out of such things are efforts to normalize such things: “See! Christian, Victorian morality is pointless and repressive!” Not funny.

I just think we need to be authentic, that is, not manipulators and not hypocrites. And while we should enjoy being the butt of the occasional joke, I don’t think it’s right for the church to make worship of God the object of postmodern irony. And one of the great ironies of irony is that there are no limits on what can be humorless mocked and deconstructed. Indeed, the more sacred the cow, the funnier the joke. We need to seriously consider what is actually sacred and therefore not to mocked.

You see, the church is charged with a message. We have to stay on message and not make fun of the message or ourselves for being bringers of the message. Fortunately, the world is pining for reality, authenticity, and sincerity. And that’s what we used to be very good at.