Letter #115: Matinee Idols

John Calvin visits Paramount Studios; hijinks ensue.

Elder Klavan,

Well we’re talking about Hollywood, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised we’ve ended up describing how idols are made. The human heart may be their factory, but the Paramount lot is where they go through hair and makeup. If John Calvin had ever visited a soundstage they would have had to send a PA to the nearest drugstore for a bottle of Xanax.

You write that meaningful storylines can be strip-mined for their shallowest plot elements and rehashed endlessly until the inner life drains out of them. Just so. When that happens, audiences keep coming back for the thrills like addicts—exactly like addicts, in fact, compulsively grinding out a ritual of stimulation disconnected from any source of real goodness.

Cutting off the outward form from the inward grace leaves you with a dead object where there was once a work of art, a block of wood where once there was a sculpture of a living man. And here’s the worst thing: these hollow gods hollow us out, too. “Eyes have they but see not...they who make them shall become like them.”

You see it happening everywhere. Vigorous political movements decay into bumper stickers. The Reaganites defended America’s tradition of free trade against Soviet Russia; free trade felt so good, and worked so well, that we detached it from the healthy society which produced it and tried to mainline it into the veins of a global empire.

Eventually “free trade” came to mean letting mandarin autocrats siphon the lifeblood out of America’s heartland, while moderate proposals to limit this arrangement were designated “Socialism.” Which, given the track record of actual Socialism, is a very dirty word!

We could name other examples: sex is an embodiment of love so powerful that it washes every synapse in pleasure; take the pleasure but leave the love, you get sadism and filth. The mathematical models science uses to describe the world gradually get taken for the reality itself, turning the world into a plodding machine.

Dead idols make people dead inside; hollow gods make hollow nations. And yes, it happens to the church too: when Job says, “oh that my words were chiseled in stone,” he’s in the midst of an ecstatic revelation. The spirit of that revelation can animate the letters of his words, but if the spirit departs then the letters are just dead rock.

If our culture is pagan in the relatively benign sense of aping pre-Christian rituals, we also stand convicted of paganism in the grimmer sense of being fundamentally idolatrous. Jesus compared religious hypocrites to whited tombs—stone monuments of death, daubed in the color of life. As this realization spreads across our graveyard bacchanal, it’s hard to avoid concluding that the stale old ways have to be cleared away to make room for a fresh expression of the spirit they once captured. We must hope these dry bones can live.

Love,
Spencer