CROWD IS UNTRUTH
by
CARL TRUEMAN
________________________________________________________________
Carl
Trueman as professor in the Alva J. Calderwood School of Arts
and Letters, Grove City College, PA. This article originally appeared
in www.reformation21.org
The great
Danish theologian and philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, is probably
best known in Christian circles for his haunting reflections upon
God's command to Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. While I
am guessing many of us would question the theology that underlies
some of Kierkegaard's exegesis of the passage, I think there are
few Christian writers or preachers who have so ably captured the
terror and confusion that must have filled Abraham's mind as he
made the lonely journey to the place of sacrifice.
Kierkegaard
is not easy to read at the best of times; and some of his longer
works are, to put it very bluntly, surely among the most tedious
masterpieces ever penned. Who, I wonder, except for the most infatuated
fan, has ever ploughed through all of the stages on life's way
recounted in the book of the same name? Further, his appropriation
by later existentialist philosophy has had the twofold effect
of making him a rather suspect character among the ranks of the
orthodox, an irrelevance to philosophers trained in Anglo-American
circles, and a quaint figure of yesteryear to the vanguard of
the latest continental philosophical ideas. Indeed, I remember
as a young Christian finding his journals particularly interesting;
and then reading Francis Schaeffer and realizing that SK should
really be placed in the `debit' column; I myself was thus one
of those whom James Barr characterized as not having to think
because Schaeffer had done my thinking for me.
Yet,
over the years, I have returned to SK again and again, and not
just because I found a compulsive need to think for myself and
to resist letting Schaeffer -- or any of the other evangelical
gurus -- do it for me. Partly the pleasure of reading SK arises
from the fact that his one-liners are virtually without peer.
Indeed, if you are as bone-idle as I am, you have to love any
man who can come up with a statement such as `Far from idleness
being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.'
And I even a possess a mug with the caption, `The truth shall
set ye free; but first it shall make ye miserable.' If ever there
was a sentiment of which a northern European, living in the oversized
Disneyworld that is the U.S.A., needed to keep reminding himself,
it is surely that one. Indeed, among the few pleasures left to
me now that my children are teenagers and regard me with withering
disdain, is that of being a pessimist trapped in a nation of chirpy
optimists, are the bleak landscapes of SK's essay and the films
of Ingmar Bergman. I need my misery.
But
there are other reasons for reading SK, perhaps most of all his
unnerving ability to nail aspects of society that have actually
become more significant since his death rather than less. Here,
it is some of his shorter, lesser known essays that contain some
of his most brilliant and penetrating insights. One of them in
particular, 'The Crowd is Untruth,' is both profound and prophetic.
In it, he captures brilliantly both the power of the anonymity
of the crowd, where personal responsibility, accountability and
identity is surrendered to the larger group; and pinpoints that
which became all too tragically true in the subsequent century,
the ease with which a talented person can manipulate a crowd into
doing the most terrible things. Crowds can make otherwise perfectly
sane people do otherwise inexplicable things: run down the road
with traffic cones on their heads, applaud at the end of Justin
Bieber concerts, and as we now know, herd others into gas chambers
and onto killing fields.
Demagoguery
is, of course, the bane of politics; but it is also much to be
feared in the church. I have often mentioned my dislike of the
American evangelical tendency to exalt the great conference speaker
and to allow him to do the thinking; such is surely the kind of
secularization that Paul fears has invaded the church in Corinth,
where crowd pleasing aesthetics trump critical thinking. The danger
in the church, therefore, is not that perfectly ordinary and decent
people will construct gas chambers and usher their neighbours
off to them; rather, it is the surrender of their God-given intellects
to those who use the clichés, the idioms, and the buzzwords
of the wider culture to herd them along a path which the leader
chooses. Fear of the leader, fear of the pack, fear of not belonging,
can make people do strange things.
Even
more significant for Christians today, I suspect, are the peddlers
of authenticity that now swarm around the web. They are easy enough
to spot: the slightly out of focus webpage photo, with eyes averted
from the camera, serious, pensive expression, soul patch, glasses
in a style first sported in the seventies by existentialist Swedish
hairdressers called Sven, perhaps torn jeans, autumnal lighting,
maybe a few leaves scattered on the ground. And, above all, constant,
grating references to 'authenticity.' Given the clichéd
manner in which it is relentlessly expressed, such `authenticity'
is, it seems, a somewhat synthetic product: whatever individuality
of the blogmeister might otherwise possess is often simply obliterated
by the mass-produced idiomatic pseudo-cool of the cutting-edge
crowd through which `authenticity' is expressed. It's a crowd
pleasing product which, surprise surprise, too often merely reflects
the predilections of the crowd. Of course, not a few of these
kind of authentocrats quote Kierkegaard. A supreme ironist himself,
SK would no doubt have appreciated the irony of Kierkegaard chic
in the crowd of untruth and the fact that claims to authenticity
are always in this present age sure signs that one is dealing
with a phony. And yes, before anyone shouts `Physician, heal thyself!'
he would probably also have been amused, in a horrified sort of
way, by the irony of appearing on a mug, a commodity for the mass
consumer market.
Of course,
the peddlers of mass produced authenticity are soft targets, as
easy to spot as their navelocentric web musings and pictures are
easy to mock. But the crowd mentality also poses a problem for
the Protestant Christian without the soul patch, Sven glasses,
and camera with blurred vision. The Reformed world has its dark
suits, its hall of fame, and its clichéd patois of pieties
as well. We may talk about truth rather than authenticity - and
rightly so - but when belief in that truth becomes merely a function
of being part of the crowd, then we too have failed to be truthful
individuals.
There
is a real tension here. Our faith demands only one mediator, and
we as individuals are to put our trust in him; but we are also
part of a corporate, communal entity; this communal dimension
of Christianity finds expression in a common authority, that of
the Bible, and a common language - that of the creeds, of the
confessions, and in deed of our own distinctive traditions, by
which we communicate with each other and by which we express our
corporate identity. Thus we are caught always between the need
to trust directly in Christ as individuals and yet to give due
weight to our identity as part of the larger body. The question
to ask is: is this a tension we live with as we should, or is
it one which is too often resolved on one side or the other? Given
the current reaction in Christian circles against individualism
variously defined, and a renewed emphasis on community, it is
worth asking if the tension is not in danger of resolution in
favour of the corporate and at the expense of the individual.
Take,
for example, our faith. How much do we truly believe for ourselves
and how much do we believe because some great figure, some leader
in our chosen community, believes? Or because we just happen to
belong to a church where everybody believes the same? In the American
world of celebrity cults and megachurches, even in the Reformed
world, this is an acutely pointed and relevant question. Indeed,
one does not have to be in a megachurch to see the temptation
to sit back and just belong through the formalities of public
worship and the vicarious belief of the church as body. But if
you take a man and put him on a desert island, or in a place where
nobody believes the same things, what will happen to his faith?
Will it survive? Was it more than a mere public performance or
a function of belonging to a particular community? Stripped of
its context, it will stand naked, and appear as it really is.
To put it in a way of which Luther would have approved, only the
one who has truly come to the point of despair in himself as an
individual can then truly come to faith in the saviour; for he
cannot have another to believe on his behalf; the truth he sees
is not something `out there' or reported to him by another; it
necessarily involves his very being and identity. One must first
believe as an individual before one can belong to the community.
The
is the problem of American Christendom. Now, all of the palaver
about the 'end of Christendom' should not fool us into thinking
that a form of Christendom does not still exist. Anywhere where
Christianity has become a formality, there is Christendom; anywhere
where the belief of the group substitutes for the belief of the
individual, there is Christendom; anywhere the rules of the outward
game can be learned, executed with panache, and substituted for
the attitude of the heart, there is Christendom. And, lest we
forget, the form of that formality can be orthodoxy, just as easily
as it can be heterodoxy; it can be rooted in the Westminster Standards
just as easily as in the tweets of the latest aspiring authentocrat;
it can be found in traditional worship styles as much as in the
spontaneity of the new. And, ironically, American individualism
feeds directly into this negation of the individual: the individual
as consumer, as dilettante, thrives in a world of large, anonymous
churches, churches which happily continue week by week with only
10% of the people engaged in giving of time and money; there are
no demands made on the 90% of individuals who make up the corporate
entity precisely because the body is essentially self-perpetuating.
The crowd is truly untruth at that point.
This
tension in orthodox Christianity, between being necessarily part
of a whole and an individual accountable to God, is something
with which all Christians must wrestle. To resolve it one way
or the other would be to lose something crucial, for the Christian
faith demands we reject both solipsistic piety and also any notion
of the crowd as our mediator. The one cuts us off from the body;
the other makes us mere passengers who never engage God for ourselves.
There
are no easy answers to this; that's what makes it such an interesting
and irresolvable tension. But, as it stands, the church in America
seems to have the worst of both worlds: an individualism which
does not lead to true individual existence as a Christian, one
where I truly take responsibility for myself before God but allow
others to do it for me; and which therefore plunges inexorably
towards the anonymity of the megachurch and the laziness of the
pew-sitting Sunday passenger. It is not simply the crowd which
is untruth at that point. It is the church as well.
