Vanity of Vanities

Over the weekend, our podcast Awkward Asian Theologians dropped its latest episode, this time on the topic of celebrity.

That is correct, Daniel and I leveraged our newly found stratospheric celebrity status to condemn the evils of celebrity status.

More to the point, we looked at the phenomenon of the “Catholic Celebrity” (as opposed to a celebrity who happens to be Catholic), and the growing cultural reliance within the Church on leveraging celebrity status as a marker of fidelity and authenticity.

Even more to the point, Daniel and I looked at how this growing ecclesiastical reliance on the celebrity ecosystem (which in turn is highly dependent on online formats, especially social media), ends up having an impact on how we conceieve of faith, the Church, and our relationship to both. Like all ecosystems, they work because we - Christians or otherwise - are unaware that they are doing their work on our predispositions, though we hope to bring those workings to your awareness.

Chief among them is the subordination of faith to individual preferences, as an individual property that one can pick up and put down at will whilst staying true to a raft of ideas. Tied in with this was Jodi Dean’s idea of social media celebrity being dependent on the distribution of what she calls “affective nuggets” that give emotional enjoyment, which then becomes the criterion of truth. In other words, if it does not make me feel good, it is not true (and this is true regardless of whether one is classified a “liberal” or “conservative”).

Also tied with the relationship to faith is the relationship to one’s subordination to ecclesial belonging as a criterion of orthodoxy. Put another way, in the age of celebrity, fidelity to the Church as a necessity for one’s salvation becomes reformatted to fidelity to a celebrity as a criterion of abstract orthodoxy. Decoupled from the ekklesia, the Church then becomes a series of what are called “lifestyle enclaves”, where belonging within an ecosystem that demands difference gets replaced by an ecosystem that demands strict conformity (the terms of which become narrower and narrower, something which I neglected to say in the episode).

“Vanity of Vanities” can be listend to in full on Spotify, Apple Podcast and Amazon Music.