SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT 09
March 8, 2009
MANUFACTURING CONSENT: A CARROT FOR THE EASTER BUNNY
For the first Sunday of Lent, we thought about a ‘temptation’ to massive over-statement in the present Church. We looked at some of the ‘negatives’ – suffering, the passion of Jesus, etc. Today, for the second Sunday of Lent, I want to continue that reflection, and suggest that there is also a temptation to portray the positives of Christian faith in a highly exaggerated way, as if to overpower people with positivity and so ‘make them believe’. I think the Catholic Church, over the last half-century or so, and maybe longer, has often given in to this temptation. Again, real balance is needed. Today the gospel is about one of these positives: the transfiguration of Jesus. I want to critique the idea of ‘instant transfiguration’.
In my lifetime, the catholic world has seen vast mutations. Until the mid-sixties, and Vatican 2, there was a paradigm in place that looked and was secure, and demanded and held the consent of most of the faithful. With the preliminaries, celebration, and aftermaths of Vatican 2 came another one, quite different, that also looked secure, and also demanded and held the consent of most of the faithful. Now, after the papacy of John Paul 2 and even more in the present papacy, there is a swing back to restoration of the pre-Vatican 2 paradigm, with major ingredients of very pre-Vatican 2 days: it too seems to demand and hold the consent of at least a majority of those who still consider themselves to be church-goers. I do not want to argue the toss here about which paradigm was ‘right’. I think at any given time the prevailing one was considered to be ‘right’ by those who bought it. My concern is rather, what happened to make it seem so ‘right’ to so many people that they consented to it, and even changed their basic consent to it from something else?My question is about the marketing, and the reception of the marketing. Something ‘good’ was presented in such an overwhelmingly total way that it just had to be accepted and believed.
There are other instances of similar paradigm changes in the same period – outside the church. There has been a change from branding nations as good and bad, to branding civilizations as good and bad. The civilizations concerned have also changed: Islam, the Arabs, the Middle East have been ‘created’ as the ‘Great Enemy’ instead of Russia and communism. Again, my question is about how this was sold to people, and why they bought it. Another arena to investigate might be the swing in scholarly reconstructions of various ‘worlds’ of Christian interest and investment: from keeping commandments to concern for the poor and justice; from interior piety to exterior political intervention; from individuality to community. Another might be the role of women in the modern world and church, the change in attitude to and practice of sex, the availability or not of certain forms of ministry across boundaries of race, gender and sexual preference. Another still might be the relation of religion and science. Once again, I am not raising questions about right and wrong answers, but about the way various answers have been communicated with the outcome of general consent from people at large.
I have only recently become aware of some reflection on this point by authors like Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. Chomsky has a book, ‘Manufacturing Consent: the political economy of the mass media’. In it he speaks of a ‘propaganda model’ that is the source of such manufactured consent. It highlights issues like ownership of what is presented, funding for the presentation, the continuous flow of information about it, the way it handles flak against it, and the contact with public forums in the media. I believe the accessibility of facilities for gatherings is a factor, the availability of journalists interested in the issues, the plausibility of press conferences, and the normality and usefulness of ‘ordinary language’ employed about it. This does not exhaust the list of things involved. I assume that many of these factors – especially ideological and political ones - operate unconsciously, at least initially. How did NASA sell the idea of space exploration? What sort of headlines, images, fabricated illusions, public international daydreams? It was pitiably shallow, bedeviled with ambiguity, a front…. But it engineered consent to something no one understood… In some ways, there is a history here, within Protestant Churches, from which we might learn. There is a whole stream there of ‘evangelical’ attitudes: Reform, Puritan, Pietist, part of the ‘Great Awakenings’, missionary, fundamentalist, and in the U.S political scene, the religious right among the Republicans. The catholic tradition was not like that, but has become more so, more ‘evangelical’ in that sense. Certainly there is weaker institutionalism in the Catholic scene than before. Where there is weak institutionalization, fundamentalism tends to emerge…. It is like the rise of the rest when the power brokers are not so strong… Subgroups (at times with large numbers) come together and get enthused about their own categories. We saw it at World Youth Day in Sydney – much real fraternity, not quite as much understood and intelligently assimilated faith.
With it, questions of a more qualitative nature might be looked at. To what extent can ‘manufactured consent’ be valid as the true assent of faith? To what extent is the Magisterium itself practicing the manufacture of consent? To what extent is the opposition to the Magisterium also – paradoxically - doing much the same thing?
Why do I raise these questions on this ‘Sunday of the Transfiguration’? For many people, ‘transfiguration’ stands for ‘resurrection’ (Easter is coming). Over the second half of the last century, the church (rightly) presented ‘The Resurrection’ to us as the key to everything. We bought it. But I don’t think we understood it, or thought about it enough. We assumed it was a resurrection that did away with suffering and death, and cleaned all that sort of thing out of our picture of Jesus (and our picture of ourselves). I think that’s why we bought it. Instant positivity. Too good, so believe it!
If we look at the gospel reading for today, ‘transfiguration’ isn’t so simple. The disciples obviously believed in it and wanted it for Jesus. They thought he could turn it on at will, and that it was his (and theirs?) without any suffering and death. Jesus disagreed. He told them not to talk about it until after all the coming suffering and death was over. There would be no gain without pain. There would be no glory that dispensed from the cross. The truly transfigured one would be the disfigured crucified-risen one, with the values of facing the cross and dying on it written into the personality of the risen transfigured one. That would be his real transfiguration. The only real kind.
You can’t sell that. You don’t want to buy it either. You can’t manufacture consent to it. You can only get into the reality of the real, and find out what a cross and a death on it are really like there. And then – only then – will you have for the first time a real idea of what rising means, in and with the values written into you by the experience of the real. The truly transfigured people are not the ones in the picture books of the saints. They are the battlers, the worriers, the strugglers, the ones that face the reality of their own inadequacy on the streets, at home if they have one, at work if they have a job ….. And no, we won’t tell anyone else about them until they too rise out of this deadliness and carry with them what they learnt in their character through their own unique experience of going that way…..
Let’s pray this Lent that our Church stops manufacturing believers on an assembly line, and begins to honor the ones who have come to believe through facing their own difficult and limited and even disfigured reality. In a way, it is their ‘feast’ that is the true feast of the Transfiguration.