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by
Andy Crouch and Nate Barksdale
Dream
with us of an America transformed. At a sold-out concert
at the Las Vegas House of Blues, hundreds of fans of the hottest
pop sensation of the year sing along to lyrics that unabashedly
proclaim dependence on God. On national television, an innovative
and much-lauded musical artist reads from Scripture. The major
media, no longer bastions of anti-Christian prejudice, take
faith seriously, and novels written by Christian authors and
dealing with explicitly Christian themes hold several slots
on The New York Times best-seller lists. Meanwhile,
the nation's highest political leader repeatedly and publicly
acknowledges his need for God and his reliance on faith. This
is a world in which Christians are no longer second-class
hangers-on in a secular culture. It is a world in which the
gospel is presented on MTV, ABC, ESPN, and the highest-profile
Internet sites. It is a world in which believers no longer
feel ashamed.
Sound
like an impossible dream? Wrong. It's the United States of
America, circa 2000 A.D.
Thanks
to (in order of appearance) Moby, Lauryn Hill, John Grisham,
Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, President Clinton, and innumerable
other prominent figures who weave the language and beliefs
of Christianity into their public life, we're at a truly weird
moment in modern American history. Much to the frustration
of secularists, America is awash in professions of faith.
And though neo-Buddhist health gurus and Harry Potteremboldened
proto-pagans (not to mention Joe Lieberman) are certainly
getting air time, good old fashioned Christians—the kind
who talk a lot about Jesus—dominate the scene.
With uncanny
timing, a moderately obscure book written for the Christian
market in 1993 has resurfaced and, with the aid of a heavily
promoted commemorative CD, started to shape the consciousness
of evangelicals, especially young ones with the talent and
ambition to aspire to the pop charts and executive suites.
Roaring Lambs may not quite have been this year's WWJD,
but with a well-crafted publicity campaign, cover stories
in several prominent Christian-market magazines, and even
a promotional event in the nation's capital, it made a fair
bid for that spot. The message of Roaring Lambs the
book and the CD: Christians should get out of their ghettos
and start, as the movement's tagline goes, "affecting culture
by being a part of it."
Bob Briner,
the author of Roaring Lambs, was a well-known figure
in the world of professional sports before his untimely death
in 1999. As an agent, he worked with tennis star Arthur Ashe,
among others; as a producer, he won sports television Emmys.
A child of post-fundamentalist, world-wary evangelicalism
and a product of its Christian colleges, Briner wrote Roaring
Lambs to urge his fellow evangelicals to follow Jesus'
call to be "salt and light" and to abandon religiously sanctioned,
separatist mediocrity. After the book's debut, Briner commissioned
a follow-up volume and started a radio program to feature
other notable "roaring lambs," even as he poured his considerable
personal charm and energy into encouraging young believers
who had musical talent to break out of Contemporary Christian
Music's suffocating embrace. Some of those who were directly
or indirectly encouraged by Briner are represented on Roaring
Lambs, the CD, released this past June. Pop charttoppers
Sixpence None the Richer and Jars of Clay both cite Briner
and his book as instrumental in encouraging them toward mainstream
careers when they could have played to the increasingly lucrative
Christian choir. Other artists on the CD are less well known,
but all have ostensibly "crossed over" to some extent, from
Vigilantes of Love's relentless touring on the club circuit
to Michael W. Smith's occasional pop breakthroughs like Go
West Young Man. While the Roaring Lambs CD was
released solely for the Christian market and thus was something
of a contradiction in terms—some critics derided it as
crossover artists crossing back to safety—it is an earnest
attempt to mobilize a new generation to read and heed Briner's
call.
The resonances
between Briner's vision of roaring lambs and re:generation
quarterly's own vision of cultural transformation are
deep. A full disclosure of the intricate links between RQ
and the various artists, writers, and producers behind the
re-launch of Roaring Lambs would consume the rest of
this article. But readers can find unabashed celebrations
of Briner's vision elsewhere. Here are a few uncomfortable
questions for the next generation of would-be transformers
of culture.
Mention
Moby, Lauryn Hill, and their ilk to the Roaring Lambs
crowd and you get some conflicted responses. These
are, after all, incredibly influential public figures, ones
who make even the considerable success of a band like Jars
of Clay look minor. And they talk about Jesus. A lot. Moby
devotes a whole page of his platinum CD Play's liner
notes to an enthusiastic tribute to Jesus. It was a Moby concert
that brought the Las Vegas crowd to their feet in what—in
another context—could have been an evangelical worship
service, ecstatically singing along with the techno-enhanced
lyrics of an African-American spiritual, "Don't nobody know
my troubles but God."
"When
Lauryn Hill read from the Psalms at the Grammys, it was electric,"
recalls Steve Taylor, the Christian musician-turned-maven
who produced the Roaring Lambs CD and was at the ceremony
with his own label's band Sixpence None the Richer.
But ask
Taylor whether he would sooner nominate Lauryn Hill or Christian
pop star Amy Grant (notably absent from the Roaring Lambs
CD) for a place in Briner's imaginary Roaring Lambs
Hall of Fame, and he says, "You don't really expect me to
answer that, do you?" After all, Lauryn Hill has had children
out of wedlock, while Amy Grant and her ex-husband have each
speedily remarried after a lengthy separation and divorce.
Moby's proselytizing for Jesus coexists comfortably—for
him—with his vegetarianism (which also gets a full page
in the Play booklet) and his interest in the aesthetics
of pornography.
Add the
thong-wearing, Bible-reading Britney Spears, and, what the
heck, throw in the rapper Eminem's frequent expressions of
thanks to God and Jesus (when he's not spouting vileness toward
gays, women, or his own mother). Meanwhile, "we have a Southern
Baptist in the White House," a prominent official of the Southern
Baptist Convention said ruefully this spring, "with the morals
of an alley cat." None of these spokespeople for Jesus are
likely to appear on Roaring Lambs II.
Evangelical
Protestants, of course, are adept at dealing with the problem
of professed Christians who don't measure up to Christian
ideals. When an evangelical says "Christian," he is actually
using code for something much more specific—such as "active,
church-going, born-again Christian," as Briner puts it at
one point. Hence Greenville College (Briner's alma mater)
is a "Christian" college, while Notre Dame is not. Michael
W. Smith is a "Christian" artist, while Lauryn Hill is not.
Is America awash in Christian voices? Well, not exactly, goes
the reply—we meant Bible-believing Christians.
Committed Christians. Real Christians. Christians
like us.
The dream
that shines through Briner's book at many points is one where
real Christians, good people, exert a positive moral
influence on a decaying society. And yet the Christians—using
that term in its broader sense—who actually make it into
positions of influence and popular power very often turn out
to be ... well, more complicated.
There
is at least one good reason for this. Call it the bleating
lions principle: power and popularity—which are largely
interchangeable in a democratic, let alone a consumer-oriented,
society—are bestowed on those who most effectively absorb,
articulate, and ever-so-slightly anticipate the dominant values
of society. Leadership and power are, ultimately, about submission
to these values. That is, to be a lion you have to learn how
to bleat.
This can
be hard for those who don't have power or popularity to grasp.
To the data analyst at the bottom rung of the corporate ladder,
the CEO, sweeping by on the way to the corporate jet, looks
like the epitome of power. Suppose the analyst is a Christian.
What can I do, he thinks, with my job to influence the world
for Christ? If only I were a CEO, I could really do something!
But from
the CEO's point of view, the situation is almost exactly reversed.
As she gets on that plane, her mind is spinning with the dozens
of constituencies she will need to serve today in order to
keep her job: The potential business partner on the other
end of the corporate jet trip. The shareholders punching up
the latest quarterly results on finance.yahoo.com. The customers,
with their constantly changing demands and tastes. Even her
own employees, like the analyst, who could easily defect to
one of her competitors' companies. Now, given the fungibility
of power and popularity—i.e., their ability to be turned
into cold, hard cash—it is possible that this CEO could,
Internet-billionaire style, achieve escape velocity from the
power/popularity game altogether. At least, it is possible
in principle—in practice, many who by all rights ought
to be able to stop serving the various gods that delivered
their success actually find it very difficult to do so (see
the recently published and profoundly disturbing biography
of Netscape impresario Jim Clark).
This is
not to say that the CEO is a weak person. She is, in fact,
a tremendously gifted and skilled person. But she has developed
her skills to be able to submit effectively. She knows
where, and when, and how to submit to the market, to the shareholders,
and to her employees in order to propel her business into
greater and greater opportunities to submit effectively to
the world that grants her power, popularity, and wealth in
the first place.
And the
same is true for pop artists. Few things are more irrelevant
in a high-speed culture than the idea of the artist laboring
for relatively little pay, letting her genius develop without
either censure or praise. Today the arts, like nearly everything
else, are very big business. Since the entertainment industry
produces completely superfluous products (no one ever died
for lack of a Britney Spears CD), it must be exquisitely responsive
to the demands of its public. Like it or not, a successful
artist today is balancing constituencies, managing image,
hoping to be in the right place at the right time every bit
as much as a corporate executive—which is why the same
teams of public relations, marketing, finance, and legal experts
that surround corporate offices now also surround successful
artists.
The same
phenomenon is repeated in our political system, where two
presidential candidates fall over one another to claim the
same middle ground. Meanwhile, true believers like Ralph Nader
make fools of themselves (and throw the election) by thinking
they can play the political game on principle alone.
True
believers. That derisive
phrase describes exactly what evangelical Christians, and
serious Christians of any sort, aspire to be. It describes—often
condescendingly—someone who is committed to something
that trumps more "realistic" considerations. If followers
of Jesus, whose lack of concern for realpolitik got him crucified,
aren't supposed to be true believers, who is? Bob Briner wants
to see true believers in positions of power and popularity,
writing winning screenplays and scoring touchdowns for the
glory of God. But what is unfortunately missing from Roaring
Lambs' vision of cultural transformation is awareness
that being in power more often than not transforms one into
a bleating lion. The pop universe (whether that's pop music,
pop writing, or pop politics) allots power on its own terms,
for its own purposes. This means, among other things, that
those "real Christians" who are given the most power and popularity
are not likely to be those who directly challenge the society's
dominant values—and in more or less subtle ways (ranging
from doctrinal creativity to lifestyle choices) they are likely
to reinforce those values, even while imparting a pleasant,
positive, religious—but above all tolerant—glow
to the proceedings.
The bleating
lions principle is alarmingly evident in the very first words
of Briner's book. "The Shah of Iran had summoned me to meet
with him during his international tennis tournament at the
sprawling Imperial Country Club on the outskirts of Tehran.
As I stood beside the U.S. ambassador awaiting the imminent
arrival of the Shah and the Empress, one question continually
came to mind: 'What am I doing here?'" Briner never fully
answers that question—he is simply conveying amazement
at the opportunities that had opened up for him. But it's
a particularly striking place to begin a book about "roaring
lambs." The shah was not, after all, just another world leader
of the day—his totalitarian government, notoriously propped
up by the cia, was operating one of the most ingeniously brutal
torture programs in the world at the time. What was
Briner doing there? Was he, perhaps, using the opportunity
to let the shah know that, in spite of the U.S. government's
craven support of his regime of torture and repression, American
Christians were praying for the shah to repent and for justice
to be done for his victims? Or to warn him that Briner was
going to use his media contacts to prevent that international
tennis tournament from being a media relations triumph for
the shah in the Western world?
From the
fact that Briner doesn't say anything further about what he
did in the shah's presence, we suspect he did nothing of the
sort. The fact is that Briner couldn't—not if
he wanted to be invited back, or to maintain his reputation
and access not only to the shah but to the organizers of events
like that tennis tournament, reputation and access that were
vital for the continued and increasing success of his business.
Briner may have looked at that moment like a roaring lamb,
but (unless there's something he didn't tell us) he was really
a bleating lion.
Something
has been bedeviling evangelical Christianity since
evangelicals began emerging from their fundamentalist cocoons
in the 1950s. The evangelical narrative, as historian Douglas
Frank has argued, was formed in the context of shaming experiences—young
fundamentalists at Wheaton College being sent out to evangelize
in the upwardly mobile suburbs around them, scholars like
Carl F. H. Henry arriving at Harvard and rediscovering a vast
and challenging intellectual world for which fundamentalism
had not prepared them. In this shame narrative, evangelicals
were a set-upon minority, despised by the "world." The world
was powerful, wealthy, and educated—"Christians" were
marginal, poor, and only beginning to do serious scholarship.
Whatever
truth this narrative may have had in 1950, it is seriously
out of date. Recent studies by George Barna and Christian
Smith, among others, have shown that evangelicals are as well-educated,
affluent, and represented in prestigious occupations as the
general population. The furor over a Washington Post writer's
description of evangelicals as "poor, uneducated, and easy
to command" came not only from the blatant inaccuracy and
prejudice behind that statement, but also from the wounded
and delicate pride of the recently shamed.
Meanwhile,
the Christian music industry, once a beleaguered and clearly
second-rate alternative to mainstream music, has become a
consumer force to be reckoned with. Nearly every major "Christian"
record label is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of a mainstream
record company—testimony to the bottom-line power of
a market segment that comprises as much as 30 percent of the
American population. Christian music consumers were the booster
rocket that launched Sixpence None the Richer and Jars of
Clay into their careers, a built-in constituency that most
non-Christian bands would kill for. In short, evangelical
Protestants in America, based on numbers and sheer purchasing
power (the power that counts in a consumer economy), as well
as their already-documented presence in the cultural pantheon
of pop stars, are not lambs.
Still,
evangelicals still favor the language of victimization. Case
in point: while enclave or even gated community
might be the best terms to describe the places of evangelical
separation from the larger culture, the favored term is invariably
the Christian ghetto, making an implicit connection
to some of history's truly oppressed groups—from Jews
in seventeenth-century Italy (for whom the word was first
coined), to the black and Latino residents of today's inner
cities.
After
all, if American culture at the turn of the millennium is
a festering swamp of moral decay, then which would you prefer
to be? (a) A persecuted minority group struggling to offer
their vision of righteousness to an uncomprehending world;
or (b) a part of the reason the swamp exists in the first
place? The choices aren't so stark, of course, but most human
beings will tend to interpret the evidence in favor of (a),
avoiding the clues that they are more responsible for the
status quo than they would like to think.
Briner
himself brings up an interesting example early in Roaring
Lambs. Professional athletics is one arena where Christians
are already vocal, welcome, and influential. Briner acknowledges
that much is corrupt in pro sports—for example, he tacitly
admits that the increasing encroachment of sports on the Christian
Lord's Day is problematic. But that is not a reason to avoid
working in professional sports, Briner says—in fact,
the whole reason that Christians are as influential in sports
as they are is that "Christians did not run away ... when
games were played on Sunday." True, even with a significant
Christian presence, professional sports have become increasingly
riddled with "dishonesty, exploitation, drugs, illicit sex,
ego gratification gone out of control, and the attempt to
deify money." But, "I believe things would be worse if Christians
had fled this area," Briner insists.
This is
option (a)—Christians as the righteous, if ineffective,
remnant. The decline of the surrounding culture is simply
a further inducement to stay involved. But isn't option (b)—Christians
as part of the problem—equally possible? Elsewhere in
Roaring Lambs Briner praises the movie Chariots
of Fire, which hinges on a Christian athlete who refuses
to run on Sunday. Briner went to work for the Miami Dolphins,
knowing that they played on Sunday, in order to be a Christian
presence there. But a good portion of the paying fans at those
Sunday afternoon games were themselves Christians. Isn't it
possible that the presence of all those Christians in the
Miami Dolphins organization was an encouragement for thousands
of Christian fans to spend their Sunday in a way that would
have mortified the hero of Chariots of Fire?
While
calling evangelicals to greater involvement with the culture,
Roaring Lambs never invites evangelicals to consider
the ill effects, potential or actual, of their involvement.
Involvement is assumed to be purely beneficial: "Amy Grant
retards the spread of evil every time one of her records plays
on a secular radio station." (Briner was, of course, writing
before Grant became a more ambiguous figure.) The iconography
of the Roaring Lambs CD—a lamb standing apart
from the herd, its head ringed with something like a halo—lends
credence to the idea of a pure minority, whose influence might
be resisted but will unquestionably be for the good. Briner
cites the biblical example of Joseph as an example of one
who rose to great power and then was able use it for positive
influence. But for every Joseph, scripture offers us a King
Saul as a stark reminder of the dangers of power-grubbing,
even among God's anointed.
We evangelicals
like to think of ourselves as powerless, but we have actually
been given a great deal of power. In order to be wise as serpents
and harmless as doves, we need first to come clean about the
ways that we have gained power at a very high price—the
price of not being able to risk losing that power when the
time is right. There are marvelous exceptions, such as Van
Halen's pro-life lead singer Gary Cherone, but any Christian
who aspires to roaring lambhood needs to seriously question
what ideological sacrifices it will take to gain a hearing
on the wider culture's terms. At the same time, we must stop
seeing ourselves as cultural non-entities when, in fact, we
already have power, and will need to give an account of our
stewardship. We are lions in lambs' clothing.
The
best models for "roaring lambs," then, will be people who
rightly grasp the truth about power. The teachings
of Jesus suggest that true power can be accessed via a very
unlikely source: from being aligned with the truly powerless,
from serving those who cannot serve you back. If the world's
form of power is derived from the elaborate mutual back-scratching
that circumscribes the world of CEOs, pop musicians, and movie
stars, the Kingdom of God's power comes from emptying bedpans.
Or from advocating for those who will never be able to pay
for a lawyer. Or from seeking justice when that could cost
you your career—or even your life. Any litany of twentieth-century
saints will invariably be dominated by those who gave up human
power and (by choice or by force) cast their lot with the
powerless—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Mother Teresa. It was this reversal which gave them both the
integrity that allowed them to criticize the larger culture
and the clout to be heard.
But simply
to point to those three as the true heirs to the Roaring
Lambs Hall of Fame may smack of cliché, and misses Briner's
point that Christians should be shaping popular culture from
within. So, where are the Christians who are truly influencing
American culture from within, even as they acknowledge the
plight of the marginalized and God's place as the only true
source of power? Drop by most any African-American church
on a Sunday morning and you'll begin to see, or rather, to
hear.
Black
gospel music is arguably the most influential tradition in
all of American popular music. Without it, jazz, blues, rock
and roll, R&B, and hip-hop would not exist. Without gospel
music, we never would have had Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin,
not to mention Moby or Lauryn Hill. While Contemporary Christian
Music (CCM) has struggled to field artists who can simply
replicate the sound of secular chart-toppers, gospel music
has been a consistent force in shaping and reshaping America's
musical culture. Fifties doo-wop and sixties soul owe equally
heavy debts to gospel a cappella groups like Sam Cooke and
the Soul Stirrers. Countless musicians across many genres—from
jazz drummer Brian Blade to classical trumpeter Wynton Marsalis—got
their start in the rich musical culture of the black church.
Modern
gospel artists like Kirk Franklin may borrow from the musical
vocabulary of secular America, but they also influence the
music of wholly secular acts (how many Top Forty artists are
falling over themselves to copy that signature CCM sound?).
Moreover, gospel music has provided the musical and lyrical
vocabulary that many mainstream artists of faith—from
Johnny Cash to Bob Dylan to U2's Bono—have used in their
most poignantly and obviously Christian songs.
Gospel
music is, essentially, the developed voice of a truly oppressed
people who, though they were powerless on the culture's terms,
have found favor, and hope, in God. And because of this, gospel
possesses a deep integrity that the majority culture finds
difficult to match. From Elvis to Eminem, white America's
obsession with co-opting (or, one could say, stealing from)
black musical culture indicates a deep-seated hunger for integrity,
or at least for the sort of innovation and substance that
true integrity produces.
By all
but overlooking the wide and overwhelmingly positive influence
of gospel music, Roaring Lambs sadly misses what is
probably the largest flock of true roaring lambs in our culture.
The inclusion of a moving track by the black South African
vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo on the Roaring Lambs
CD is a step in the right direction, though in a way it only
makes more poignant the absence of any American gospel music
on the album.
Not everyone
can be a black gospel musician, of course. (For starters,
you have to be black.) But there is a way for even those of
us with real privilege to take a few steps closer to being
a true roaring lamb. Simply, it is to identify who those who
are oppressed, and to cast our lot with them. Then wait a
while. Suffer a while. Slowly, we may begin to develop a foundation
of integrity from which true cultural influence can be based.
Want an example? Take one of the most artistically influential
figures in folk music, whose echoes resound across the decades,
from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen to Beck. Woody Guthrie
spent much of the 1930s and '40s traveling and living with
migrant laborers and dust bowl refugees, turning down opportunities
for popular fame when the trappings of success interfered
with his populism or his wanderlust. And though he's rarely
remembered as a Christian musician, Guthrie's affection for
the person and politics of Jesus crops up again and again
among the thousands of songs he penned.
More recently,
Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn's faith-fueled advocacy
for social justice had him spending time and writing songs
in Central American refugee camps. (Cockburn, too, gets a
somewhat-distant nod from the Roaring Lambs producers,
with Vigilantes of Love's cover of his "Wondering Where the
Lions Are.")
This is
the communion of saints toward which Roaring Lambs,
the book and the CD, points ever so tentatively. Whether the
"active, church-going, born-again Christians" who read Briner's
book and eagerly add the CD to their collections will join
them, or whether they will simply pursue the gilded cage of
success in the world's most wealthy and powerful country,
is a question that remains all too undecided.
Andy Crouch
is the editor-in-chief of RQ. He is no relation to Bartemius
Crouch pere or fils. Nate Barksdale is the editor of RQ.
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