A Failure Of Performance Art

 

A billboard I recently saw in my city

Lately I've been reminiscing about my years in the abusive church known as the Assembly, and some of the strange teachings and practices which were pushed by this church.  The church I was involved in was modeled in many ways after the Plymouth Brethren pattern, although our head honcho denied that we were an exact copy but he insisted that we were a new and improved model.  (Note to any rabid PB's out there: A. Don't sue me.  You won't get much out of me beside two middle-aged neutered cats.  B.  Don't sue me.  There's already plenty of scathing criticism of you all - including the criticisms voiced by Garrison Keillor, former host of A Prairie Home Companion.  C. Don't sue me.  If you do, the angels of God will put a massive hurt on you on the Day of Judgment!) 

In retrospect, one of the weirder elements of our doctrine and practice had to do with our attitude toward instrumental music in our Assembly meetings.  You see, we firmly believed that in our worship, Bible study, and prayer meetings, any and all hymns sung were to be sung a cappella.  That is, they were to be sung with voices only - with no other instruments allowed.  This was because of a rigid (and frankly erroneous) interpretation of Ephesians 5:19 pushed by one of the granddaddies of Brethrenism, a certain John Nelson Darby, who believed that the presence and use of musical instruments during group worship was a sign of "worldliness".  However, we did believe in the use of musical instruments as a tool of "Gospel outreach" - that is, our attempts to evangelize (or proselytize?) the lost, also known as the "unchurched" in modern evangelical-speak.

Here things get interesting.  Before I met this group, I had been in the military, and had attended a number of live band performances at various bars near my post.  Thus I had acquired a taste for live music.  So when I encountered one of the "outreach bands" of the Assembly at a college campus, I was intrigued.  That bloody band was one of the means by which the Assembly hooked me.  But after a while in the Assembly, I discovered that although the use of instrumental music as a tool of outreach was allowed and encouraged, there was a bit of contention among the leaders and wanna-be leaders about the styles of music that were allowable in our "outreach."  So the Assembly band which I first encountered evolved gradually from 70's acoustic-tinged folk rock (think CSNY, Joni Mitchell, the Eagles before Joe Walsh, or some of the lighter offerings of Jackson Browne or James Taylor), eventually settling on what can only be described as a form of soft country rock.  The countrified phase lasted until some teens from one of the Assemblies in the Midwest formed their own hard-driving high-energy rock group.  (Think of Creed as an example of what these teens sounded like.)  They managed to achieve something that our band had lost the ability to do - namely, that they were able to get passers-by to actually stop and listen to them.  This threatened the narcissism of the long-time leader of the outreach band in my home Assembly, so he responded by amping up his band's performances and pushing his teenage kids to form their own hard-rocking outreach band.  Naturally he made his son the leader of our teen band - an example of living vicariously through one's kids - and talked of them as if they were in the same league as such well-known CCM (Contemporary Christian music) bands as Jars of Clay.

Our music-making for heathen audiences largely came to an end when the Assemblies fell apart in 2003 after the revelations of the criminal activity of our head honcho and his family.  But it is interesting to consider the message we sought to communicate through our outreach, as well as the strategic assumptions behind that message and our delivery of it.  For that message and its strategic assumptions have a parallel among many of the thought leaders in the larger realm of American evangelicalism.

The Message: 

The message we ostensibly sought to communicate was the message of the claims of Christ, namely that He is the eternal Son of God and that God gave Him on the Cross as a sacrifice for our sins so that everyone who believes in Him might be justified from sin and receive eternal life.  We preached that this justification was to be obtained by faith alone, and not by any attempts of our own to do good works.  We preached that this message demanded a response from those who heard it, and that an acceptable response had the following two elements: repentance from sin and receiving Christ as Lord.  Now I must say that although I have said strong things against white American evangelicalism, I am yet a Christian.  Moreover, I would categorize myself largely (but not entirely) as a fundamentalist.  So I have no problem with the Gospel message as I have just now summarized it.  However, I must say that that Gospel has mutated over the last few decades in American society.  (The message has always seemed to suffer from certain distortions as it passed through the lens of American culture.)  For repentance has been confined to merely giving up certain fleshly indulgences, and not to changing the way we relate to each other on a societal level, or the way we relate to money and earthly power. And actually receiving Christ as Lord - as Someone whose words we actually intend to obey - has been replaced by mere assent to "Judeo-Christian (or American) values" as defined by mainstream evangelical preachers. 

Now there are many motives for preaching this message, but in the United States, the motive among evangelicals in recent decades has been threefold, namely, to "reclaim America for God", to "reclaim Christian cultural values", and to "re-establish America as a Christian nation."  This shifting of motive from spiritual transformation to the building of secular, earthly political and cultural power for a certain privileged group is one of the prime causes of the mutation of the Gospel message over time.  

The strategy of delivery:

One of the key strategic assumptions behind our delivery of the message was first and foremost that the Word of God has intrinsic power in itself, apart from any human input.  Therefore, it is necessary only to proclaim the Word in order to fulfill the duty of preaching the Gospel, for the Word is able to do its work all by itself.  Bible verses such as Jeremiah 23:29 ("Is not My word like fire?" declares the LORD ...) and Hebrews 4:12 were used as proof texts for this point of view.  (However, one danger of such a viewpoint is that it neglects those parts of the New Testament which speak of the power of a good example and proclaim that preachers of the Word need to practice what they preach!)

The outcome of this strategic assumption can be seen in the multitude of inventive means which evangelicals, fundamentalists, and similarly-minded Protestants devised for the proclamation of their message.  These means have included preaching (obviously), in churches, Gospel halls, city parks, street corners, circus tents, and other places where people congregate.  But they have also included Gospel tracts and other printed matter, bumper stickers, billboards, T-shirts, movies, music CD's (and later, MP3's), live musical performances, "inspirational" or "faith-based" fiction, and other examples of artistic expression.  The arts have especially attracted the interest of those who have sought to inject "Christian" or "Judeo-Christian" cultural values into our society, as exemplified by a book written in the 1990's by Bob Briner titled Roaring Lambs.  Briner's book challenged those who call themselves Christians in the U.S. to make their mark in the arenas of moviemaking, television, other visual arts, and literature.  (Indeed, I seem to remember reading somewhere that his book was one of the inspiring influences that led to the formation of the band Jars of Clay.  But I can't find the exact reference to this, so don't quote me.)  Thus the "Christian culture industry" has received a massive boost over the years because of this focus.

Another key strategic assumption has concerned the response of the hearers of the message.  It has been assumed that if these hearers reject the message delivered, it is because of a spiritual or intellectual defect.  The assumption of a spiritual defect is too frequently made by those evangelicals or fundamentalists who are too lazy to actually get to know and understand their audience.  Thus their knee-jerk reaction is to automatically say that those who reject their message do so because "they are in spiritual darkness!" Those who assume that the rejection is due to an intellectual failure on the part of their hearers assume that the hearers are held captive by deeply formulated philosophies such as secularism, Marxism, post-modernism, or similar doctrines.  Evangelicals who assume such motives in those of their hearers who reject the evangelical message fail to realize that most people don't usually have time to think hard about various secular philosophies in detail.  (After all, most of us are too busy working like dogs!  We don't have time to read books ;) )   

Such assumptions have not adequately equipped the mainstream white American evangelical/Protestant church for the present times, in which many, many people are abandoning evangelicalism and church attendance, and some are even abandoning faith altogether - a time which has seen the birth of a new term, namely, exvangelical - a time in which the ranks of these exvangelicals are swelling.  (For an example of this, please listen to a recent podcast interview of one of the former members of the Assemblies I used to belong to.)  So let's close with a brief consideration of these times and the reasons for the people who are rejecting evangelicalism in these times.

Flattening, Breakdown and Failure

As I mentioned earlier in this post, the Gospel message has undergone a certain "flattening" in American culture.  This is seen in the things that the Bible put into the message that modern conservative evangelical/fundamentalist preachers have chosen to leave out.  For instance, there's the fact that the fear of God is seen in the way we treat each other - Job 22:6-9; Job 31:16-28.  And that the love of God is seen in the way we treat each other - 1 John 3:16-20; 1 John 4:20-21.  And that racism is sin, because it is an act of murder - 1 John 3:14-15 ("Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer; and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.")  And that God is opposed to the rich - James 5:1-6; Luke 6:24 ("Woe to you who are rich ...").  These are the things which God put into His message which people like Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr. and John MacArthur and other ecclesiastical sycophant followers of Trump have left out.  Meanwhile they have condemned things which God never condemned - things such as critical race theory, "woke-ism", social justice, and every other admonition to them that they should treat other people the same way they themselves want to be treated.  

This has led to a certain unpalatability of both these messengers and their message.  Indeed, from 2016 onward, these messengers have become not only unpalatable but downright nauseating.  I mentioned earlier in this post the need for the messenger of the Gospel to practice what he preaches.  This reminds me of a certain part of the third book in Liu Cixin's Three Body (三体, "San Ti") trilogy in which the people of Earth were tasked with configuring their society in such a way that any alien observers from outer space would be able to see that Earth humans posed no threat to the rest of the universe. The nature of the problem was such that this message (a "cosmic safety notice") could not be delivered by words, but only by actions.  (That part of his third book was where I first encountered the term "performance art", by the way.  Also, I'm not going to tell you how things worked out for the humans.  You'll have to read the books.)   This plot twist was a clever way of pointing out that one can learn much more about what kind of people one is dealing with by looking at what they do than by listening to what they say.  

This point is amplified by another book to which I was recently exposed, namely Haruki Murakami's Novelist As A Vocation.  In his description of the violence which ultimately ruined the student protests in Japan in the 1960's, Murakami wrote, “Uplifting slogans and beautiful messages might stir the soul, but if they weren't accompanied by moral power, they amounted to no more than a litany of empty words... Words have power. Yet that power must be rooted in truth and justice. Words must never stand apart from those principles.”  This is obviously true not only of secular social movements, but of white American evangelicalism and Protestantism over the last several decades.

That the words of American evangelicals have largely proven to be empty can be seen in the racism of the white American evangelical church, its misogyny as seen by the staggering levels of spousal abuse (see this, this, and this for instance), its staggering levels of child abuse, its hypocrisy (as seen in its promotion of religious leaders and political candidates who claim to stand for morality yet wind up getting caught with their pants down), its violence (as seen in the "Christian nationalists" armed to the teeth who stormed state capitols during the COVID lockdowns in 2020 and who participated in the U.S. Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021), and its greed.  

Indeed, if we look at what evangelicals actually do instead of what they say, we see that white American evangelicals (and the sons of Gehenna whom they have spawned in places like Brazil and Australia) care only about amassing secular earthly power to themselves.  The only thing they want is dominion, domination, and control.  Their religious profession is merely a tool to achieve this goal.  Their lust for power over others is seen in the ways they treat everyone who falls into their clutches.  It is seen in their treatment of their own women and children.

And this is what will lead eventually to their downfall and eventual loss of all earthly power.  I am thinking of the power of shared stories to illuminate the true character and nature of abuse.  I am thinking of the power of sunlight to disinfect dirty laundry.  I am thinking especially of the power of exposes, of scandals revealed, of things like the Shiny Happy People documentary of the abuse that took place in the family of Rethuglicans Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar even as they paraded their family on national TV as an example of the perfect American family.  Truly, "...there is nothing covered up that will not be revealed, and hidden that will not be known." (Luke 12:2)

It will be interesting to see how evangelical power-holders react and respond to the dwindling of their power in the years to come.  Suffice it to say that I expect that their response will complicate our attempts as a society to deal with issues of encroaching limits and the erosion of economic, political and military power in general.  

A Few Thoughts On The Death of Betty Geftakys

My foray into blogging initially began while I was living in Southern California, in the aftermath of my departure from an abusive evangelical group known as "The Assemblies."  Those who want to find out more about the group can click here.  My first blog was an account of my experiences in that group (especially as an African-American in that group), and my thoughts and reflections upon leaving it.  When I left the Assemblies back in 2003, it was because I had come to realize that the family that was in charge of the group - namely, George and Betty Geftakys and their two sons - were a collection of crooks.  Back then I was under the impression that the Assemblies were an example of a "fringe" group that did not reflect white American evangelicalism as a whole, and that evangelicalism was, by and large, healthy - so that I believed that in order to heal from the damage I suffered, I simply needed to find a "healthy" church after leaving the Assemblies.  What a far cry from my attitude today, when most of the world can now see that white American evangelicalism is a disgusting barrel of monkeys, and that it has been so for a rather long time!

As I mentioned, the Assemblies were abusive.  This abuse was an outworking of the way in which the head family exploited the members, and an outworking also of the way we were taught to relate to each other in our bid to climb the ladder of church leadership.  But some small element of Scriptural truth managed to seep into the consciousness of most of us members - especially the part of Scripture that teaches that when you do wrong to others, you need to repent.  And that this repentance must involve making things right with the people you wronged.  So when the Assemblies were blown apart by scandals in 2003, many of us hoped, prayed, and half expected that George, Betty, and their two sons would sooner or later take that step of repentance.

In the years since my departure, George Geftakys died (in 2014), and his son David died (in 2017).  I learned today that George's wife Betty died just last month.  I am ashamed to admit that upon hearing of the deaths of each of these people, my first reaction was a rather strong feeling of schadenfreude.  Today I have once again needed to repent of that feeling.  For I still follow the Good Book, which says in part that God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked.  Yet as I read that same Good Book, I can't help but shudder at the thought of the legacy these people have left and the future that awaits them.  Their later years remind me of a chapter from a Chinese sci-fi book that I recently enjoyed, namely the Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin.  The chapter in question is titled, "No One Repents."

Link - All The Wiser Interview With Dawn Smith

For those readers who may still be involved in the toxic dump known as White American evangelicalism, I have a resource that may detoxify you.  Here is a link to an interview I just listened to.  The subject of the interview is a person I knew back in the day when I was involved in a toxic, abusive evangelical cult - a cult which made me for a while a toxic, abusive person until I learned to walk away.  The language in the interview is mostly family-friendly (except at the very end), and I agree with almost everything the interviewee says - especially her critique of White American evangelicalism.  As for me, as a person of color I will never join a White church again.

The Scapegoating of the Named Patient

Those who have followed my blogging for a long time know that I originally began blogging in order to document and reflect on my experiences in an abusive fringe evangelical church in the United States. That church was founded by a dysfunctional husband-and-wife team and their two dysfunctional sons. These four formed the original leadership core of that church (or, to use their terminology, that "Assembly"), and I am convinced that from the very beginning the sons knew fully and accurately just how much of a counterfeit their parents were, and therefore knew fully and accurately just how much of a scam their "Assembly" was. Quite naturally, the dad appointed himself the "head honcho" of that sorry bunch (or as he put it, "the Head Steward of the Work!").

As time passed, the Assemblies grew both in the total number of groups and the total number of members in each group, and this necessitated the promotion of certain ambitious members of each group to places of leadership. Once a person was inducted into a leadership role, he almost always found himself in a select inner circle whose members were allowed to see aspects of our head honcho that were hidden from the rest of us. Those aspects consisted of embezzlement, corruption, hypocrisy, secret malignancy, and exploitation (including sexual sin) - although from time to time, all the rest of us could see the open malignancy, pride, narcissism, and bullying that flashed forth from the leadership and from our head honcho.

The interesting thing that happens to people who exist for a long time in such an environment is that they tend to become like their environment. This means that most of us tended to become jerks (and few things are more annoying than a religious jerk), and because our head honcho was a king-sized jerk, the people closest to him - his deputy leaders - became some of the biggest jerks in our group. Many of us who were not in the inner leadership circle did not recognize the extent to which we were becoming corrupt in our zeal to become like our leaders. When that corruption was pointed out to us by outsiders, we were able to justify it by saying that our gung-ho zeal, and the pushiness of our proselytizing/recruiting of others, and the way we disparaged anyone who had a life outside our group was all actually evidence of our spirituality. (I guess it was! Just not the way we thought.) We also justified our attempts to find people whom we could boss around by claiming that this was an evidence of our desire to "grow in stature." I must say, though, that our inability to recognize the foolishness of the things we were being taught to emulate is no excuse, but rather an evidence of almost criminal stupidity. (And for every finger I point outward, I recognize that there are three pointing back at me.) But the men (and some women) who comprised the inner circle of leadership knew something the rest of us didn't know - that the leading family - the head honcho and his wife and sons - were engaging in criminal behavior, including domestic violence. Yet they became the chief enablers of the head honcho and his family. Not only this, but many of these deputy leaders became petty tyrants and bullies in their own right, causing much distress for the people under their authority.

Although this system was corrupt, it did seem to possess a certain durability, in large part because it had evolved a very efficient means of dealing with any honest, non-corruptible people who were recruited into its midst. Such people usually left soon after being drawn into an Assembly, and when they left, the leaders would tell very convincing lies about how these leavers left because of some hidden "sin." Some of these leavers made the mistake of trying to persuade us "stayers" that they left because they saw holes in the head honcho's doctrine and preaching. Whenever that happened, the leaders would simply say that the leavers left because of "spiritual pride." But the leaders and the head honcho got something more than they could handle when a few of these leavers and some of those in the process of deciding to leave found out about the domestic violence, financial irregularities, and adultery going on with the head honcho and his family. Our "Assemblies" therefore suffered an existential crisis from 2000 to 2003, and it was a crisis which most of our groups did not survive.

Now what is interesting about this crisis is that the vast majority of the members were forced to face the reality that the head honcho we had all been following was a thoroughly corrupt hypocrite. A corollary to this realization was the realization that our deputy leaders had been corrupt enablers of the head honcho. As this additional realization began to be spoken openly among us, the deputy leaders began to try hard to portray themselves as fellow victims with us against the head honcho. Some of them even went as far as trying to say that they tried without success to rein in our head honcho. And all of them condemned the head honcho and tried to wash their hands of him. Based on what I know of some of these leaders, I think their vehement final public rejection of the head honcho was motivated by a desire to pick up the pieces of the small-time religious "empire" which the head honcho had created, so that one or more of these deputy leaders might crown himself the new "head honcho." In other words, by their condemnation of the head honcho, these deputy leaders tried to scapegoat him (as the most obvious target) in order to draw attention away from their own complicity in perpetuating a toxic, abusive system. The thing that thwarted these deputy leaders in their ambition was the fact that the rest of us had by this time awakened to the fact that not only had we all suffered abuse at the hands of the now deposed head honcho, but that we had also suffered abuse from his deputies, and that these men had acted like jerks toward the rest of us. So it was that most of us, me included, walked away completely from that mess.

Years later, I found myself dealing with other dysfunctional systems, and this pushed me to read a large amount of literature on the dynamics of dysfunctional organizational systems, whether on a household level or on the level of something larger. One of the things I learned is that in dysfunctional systems controlled by an obviously sick, evil, or deranged person - the "named patient" (also known as the "identified patient") - the other members of the system frequently bear significant culpability for the continued survival of that system. Yet it is usually convenient for them to blame all the problems of the system on the "named patient."

So we fast forward to April 2020, and I have to say that a few recent essays in popular online news sources have raised my eyebrows. The essays have all been about the coronavirus pandemic and the completely and utterly dysfunctional response of the Trump White House to the pandemic. And while I agree with the fact that Trump botched things "bigly," what strikes me is that some of these essays have called for Mike Pence to take over the Federal coronavirus response because of Trump's malignant incompetence. The author of one such essay pleaded with Pence to "remove Trump and save us from the coronavirus." Another essayist stated that the coronavirus crisis would not have gotten as far out of hand in the United States had someone else been president - "Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Mike Pence, really almost anybody else..." I am not a huge fan of Hillary Clinton, but I will agree that we would not be facing what is likely to become an economy-destroying crisis on account of the coronavirus if she had become President in 2017. But what I see in the mention by these essayists of Republicans who might have done a better job than Trump reminds me uncomfortably of the attempts by the deputy leaders of my former abusive church to rehabilitate themselves by means of loud public denunciations of our former head honcho. Except that this time, it seems to be certain members of the Republican Party and the conservative political establishment who are trying to rehabilitate themselves by condemning Trump.

The only problem is, they can't succeed. Not if they're honest with themselves. Just as the former deputy leaders of my former church condemned themselves by condemning our former head honcho, these must realize that they condemn themselves by condemning Trump. Don't get me wrong - Trump needs to be denounced, like my former abusive church head honcho needed to be denounced. But the voices on the right who are condemning Trump must admit that they themselves are the very people whose desire for moral impossibility combined with their ungodly access to concentrated wealth and power to bring us the regime of Trump in the first place. Trump is therefore a symptom of a wider dysfunction.  Aren't the Republicans the same people whose narcissism refused to acknowledge that their desire for what they want needed to be tempered by the recognition of the rights of the other peoples who live on the earth? Are not many of these people the same people who paid large amounts of money years ago to create the Tea Party movement? Many operatives from this movement are now loudly demanding that the restrictions on gatherings and businesses imposed by state governors in order to halt the spread of COVID-19 be immediately lifted.  And are not many Republican politicians just as insane as Trump? Do you think that a Sarah Palin presidency would look any different by now? Who among these people was protesting during the days of Trump's Muslim travel ban? Which of these people rebuked Trump for stationing U.S. Border Patrol agents and military personnel at the southern border to rip Mexican children out of the arms of their parents and throw them into cages? How many of them approved of the destruction of social safety nets in Wisconsin by former Governor Scott Walker? How many of them have secretly or openly agreed with some of the nutcase statements from Governor Sam Brownback about "God, guts and guns" - especially about his disdain for gun control even after high school students across the nation expressed outrage over the lack of effective gun control in this country? How many of them refuse to acknowledge anthropogenic climate change even to this day? How many of them are trying to disenfranchise voters in states controlled by the Republican Party by refusing to allow mail-in voting during the present pandemic?

These people are infected with the same malignant narcissism which animates Trump. Some of them may not be as far along in their disease as he is, yet they are all moving inexorably in the same direction toward a singularity of moral impossibility in which they demand supremacy at all costs, regardless not only of the rights of others (including both nonwhite and white others), but of physical reality itself (including the actual science of epidemiology and its bearing on the propagation of viruses). Blogger Olga Doroshenko describes this narcissism thus in its effects on Soviet Russia: "During [the Bolsheviks'] 73-year rule, the Russian narcissism reached the final stage: total separation from reality and hence, self-destruction of the nation." (Emphasis added.) As the United States and its leadership are wholly taken in their own narcissism, our own self-destruction looms as a distinct and unpleasant possibility.  We'll see who finally takes the fall for that self-destruction.  But if you are a Trump supporter, and you find yourself one day with a mouth full of gravel, don't just blame him.  Blame yourself also.