Originally posted Jan 12, 2012, at Lutheran Confessions. Republished with permission of the author.
I could become seriously frustrated and hyperbolic on this one, so feel free to bail right now. You have been warned.
Lots of people are re-posting a video that has gone viral on YouTube. It’s about how Jesus is better than religion, and why the poet/rapper making the video hates religion but loves Jesus.
Here’s my central point: People love this video not because it is true but because it has high production values.
It’s a classic example of where the medium (a well-made “music” video) convinces through the rhetorical force of the medium and accompanying soundtrack rather than the validity and coherence of the message. The medium, in fact, overrides and replaces the message. It swallows it.
It’s all in the presentation
In fact, an inversion occurs, to such an extent that the very thing the poet is declaiming (religion) becomes the thing he is celebrating, because his video is a classic example of what “religion” is. He says religion is about how you look on the outside rather than what is on the inside. Ipso facto, this video is all about presentation.
Religion makes high production value videos in front of cool buildings with guys in fancy clothes instead of feeding the poor.
Religion needs really cute guys who can rap handsomely about their weakness in order to prove that Jesus is about weakness rather than strength.
Religion needs bad rhymes to cover up inelegant prose. As one teen noted, “It’s like he built the poem around a rhyme. Rhyme can ruin otherwise good poetry.”
Religion takes an authentic, tried and true form (a faith testimonial) and turns it into a viral YouTube phenomenon requiring lots of expensive cameras and shots, and less authenticity, in order to get everyone excited about why, in a death match between Jesus and religion, Jesus wins hands down.
This video is the height of religiosity, not a critique of it. This video IS religion.
And since we still have no idea what religion actually is, other than, using the same assumptions as the video, it must be a very, very, very bad thing, the rhetoric of my preceding sentences has convinced you, right?
Find a link to Clint Schnekloth’s blog Lutheran Confessions at Lutheran Blogs.
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I don't think it's all about production and presentation. Most internet memes end up being quite low budget and sometimes lousy presentation, and yet get far better coverage than this one. Think of the O RLY owls, Rick-rolls, Keyboard cat or the pepper-spraying cop.
What makes these things go viral is that they strike a chord with the observer. That video isn't proving religion is evil to anyone-- it's resonating with people who already have had negative experiences with religion. What compels people to spread it is that it expresses what they in part feel in a way they would like to, but can't quite. That video goes out and finds ready soil in people's injured hearts that are set against God.
But this is the Message we have in Christ: that through God's dying and rising, we are reconciled to God. Our hearts are no longer set against God, and in that Message (with or without religion), we find healing. Where this video does proclaim Christ, those injured hearts can be healed. And the witness of our upcoming Gospel lesson is that with healed hearts we become fishers of people. Given the world in which we live, that inevitably becomes religion, which brings people full circle back to embracing what they once rejected.
"The medium is the message." Marshall McLuhan
Video is a "cool" medium that makes watchers passive recepients rather than critical observers.
The "personal Christianity" video has a strong rebuttal from a nameless friar-in-training who stands up for "community Christianity" in the form of the Roman Catholic church.
Check out dueling viral videos:
http://benjaminunseth.wordpress.com/2012/01/17/hate-religion-love-jesus/