Fame and Celebrity in the Christian Life
“The right kind of fame arises from a life well lived, not a brand well cultivated.”
Back in August, Katelyn Beaty published Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits Are Hurting the Church. I had been anticipating this book for more than a year since I was first informed of it when I was preparing a proposal for a similar book in the fall of 2021.1
General Impressions of Celebrities for Jesus
I finished reading Celebrities for Jesus two days after it was delivered to my Kindle. I found myself highlighting and agreeing with a lot of the book, which makes sense given that I have spent my whole career in Christian publishing and am an author myself.
If you work for a Christian organization of any kind—church, school, publisher, or otherwise—I encourage you to read this book. If you are simply a lay Christian who follows Jesus and participates in the life of your local church, I think the book would be helpful for you to read, but you may not find it as interesting and compelling as I did. I would understand if someone read this book and felt it had a bit too much “inside baseball,” detailing the pitfalls of Christian celebrity that are eminently fascinating and relevant to someone like me, but may simply not matter to someone in my community group who maybe reads a single Christian book in a given year and wouldn’t even know most of the celebrities Beaty names in the book.
I’d like to just share a handful of insightful selections from the book with you, and then maybe a few of my own reflections.
Quotes from Celebrities for Jesus
Here are some notable selections from the book:
… the very nature of celebrity, especially in a digital era, is that it hides its power behind the illusion of intimacy. (p. 7)
The right kind of fame arises from a life well lived, not a brand well cultivated. (p. 8)
… fame itself is not sinful. We shouldn’t assume famous people, including famous Christians, are inherently shallow, power hungry, or hiding deep, dark secrets behind closed doors. (p. 10)
Ordinary people are the primary way God has worked in and through the world over the centuries. More and more, though, it seems that a lot of us aren’t content to be ordinary Christians. (p. 11)
Mass media gives us the illusion of intimacy with famous people we follow and admire. The primary functions of mass media are to entertain us and to get us to buy things. Thus, modern celebrities—including those in the church—feed the cycles of entertainment and material consumption. The tools of mass media, such as the screens in my church when I was growing up, are not neutral. As soon as an image of your pastor is projected onto screens across multiple sites, your church is borrowing from the worlds of entertainment and consumption, whether intentionally or not. The pastor on the screen is no longer just an expositor of the Word but someone we expect to entertain us or to sell us things. (p. 12)
Mass media gives us the illusion of intimacy with famous people we follow and admire. The primary functions of mass media are to entertain us and to get us to buy things. Thus, modern celebrities—including those in the church—feed the cycles of entertainment and material consumption. The tools of mass media, such as the screens in my church when I was growing up, are not neutral. As soon as an image of your pastor is projected onto screens across multiple sites, your church is borrowing from the worlds of entertainment and consumption, whether intentionally or not. The pastor on the screen is no longer just an expositor of the Word but someone we expect to entertain us or to sell us things. (p. 12)
Today, institutions are more likely to serve as ‘platforms for performance and prominence’ that leaders use to elevate their public image and their brand than as sites of collective good work and societal transformation.
….
In other words, many of our religious institutions serve the individual leaders rather than the other way around. (p. 39–40)
In our celebrity-obsessed age, celebrity sells. At the least, Christian book buyers should be aware of why certain authors get the privilege of publishing a book. It’s not always because they are called. Sometimes it’s simply that they have cultivated the impressive appearance of calling. (p. 115)
Obscurity would be easier for many celebrities if we didn’t need something from them. As it turns out, the costs of celebrity implicate us, the fans and consumers. We feed celebrity by turning to famous people to meet our own social and emotional needs. (p. 131)
It’s easier to have a fan than a friend. A fan will only reflect back to you your own simulated glory. A friend, on the other hand, will reflect back to you your true glory. (p. 173)
The kingdom of God is not coming through bright lights and loudspeakers and impressive buildings and multimedia teaching series and PR specialists and strategic partnerships and viral content. It is not coming through entertaining anecdotes and polished talks and bestselling books. It is not coming through any strategy. It’s not even coming through you and me. We don’t build or usher in the kingdom of God. We merely attest to its reality in our lives. If only we would get out of the way. (p. 175)
I could share a dozen more, but if you like these, you should probably just buy the book.
Reflecting on Christian Celebrity and Fame
The unfortunate reality is this:
The easiest way to get access to speaking and publishing opportunities in evangelicalism today is to have a significant social media following or other sort of digital fanbase of some sort (a large newsletter subscriber list, a popular podcast, etc.).
Regarding Christian publishing, I am glad to say that not all Christian publishers view a significant social media following as a prerequisite for a book contract. I happen to work for a publisher that examines a prospective author’s platform as a part of the book proposal process, but sees platform as subservient to the actual content and ideas within the book proposal. I am grateful for this not only as someone who sits on our pub board (the team that helps select proposals), but also as an author without much of a platform!
The reason the prominence of platform in Christian speaking and publishing circles makes me sad, other than the obvious ethical implications, is that sometimes I wonder how many gifted Christian authors and speakers we aren’t hearing from because they aren’t shady enough to buy followers on Facebook or “pretty” enough to attract a massive Instagram following or contentious enough to gain followers on Twitter.
The kinds of skills it takes to build a powerhouse social media brand are not the same kind of skills it takes to be a trustworthy Christian author or speaker. Sometimes those skills overlap, but not always. In fact, sometimes the tactics it takes to accrue a significant social media following are not the kind of qualities you want in a Christian author—like a quarrelsome person on Twitter!
The challenge for people in Christian publishing or other spheres of influence that platform others is to discover those who have accrued some measure of fame because of their faithfulness and not simply because of their brand. But, unfortunately, foolishness often attracts more followers than faithfulness.
My prayer is that God would be gracious to bless us with the wisdom of many who are plainly uninterested in fame, however much of it they have, and purely interested in faithfully stewarding the gifts God has given them, not so that they may serve themselves, but so that they may serve others even if it comes at great cost to themselves.
We are servants not celebrities.