“We have taught our images to be free ; are we glad?
are we glad to have brought convenient heresy to Logres?”
-Charles Williams, “Bors to Elayne: on the King’s Coins,” in Taliessin Through Logres
A Christian response to popular culture must touch on the all-pervasive
obsession of that culture with images, and particularly with the Image:
the Image of God – that is, the image of people. Technology, once the
respected servant of necessity but now a slave of desire, has allowed
an unprecedented promulgation of images in the forms of advertising
/entertainment. People tell fewer stories, but consume more images.
Films are considered “sensational” and “mind-blowing” because of
special-effects. Newspaper and magazine articles get shorter, while the
pictures within get larger.
Yet
the one type of image that has grown to dominate others is that type
which manipulates the sexual desires of its viewers. Pornography is a
source of tremendous damage to Christian men and women, and it is no
longer easily avoided: magazine stands feature prominent displays of
splayed, air-brushed, nearly-nude women and men. These images lie: the
look in the half-open eyes of the woman says, “Come to me, all you who
thirst, and I will give you satisfaction. You do not have to work for
my love, but will simply have it. I will make you a God.” Yet these
images do not produce satisfaction when viewed, but a more deeply
consuming desire for more images, or, worse, a desire to be an image of
these images: something rather than someone; something other than a
child of God: then follows eating disorders and steroid-culture and
credit cards maxed-out from spending on “the right look.” We
desperately try to shed the Image of God in which we are made in order
to be remade in the image of the image of popular culture.
This should concern Christians, for Christianity is, at its Root, about
The Image: The Image of the Invisible God, Our Lord Jesus. (Col. 1:15)
If Christians claim to follow The Image that is Lord over all other
images, and The Image that we ourselves are images of, we must be able
to provide thoughtful criticism of popular culture’s use of images, and
an alternative.
We can provide better than an alternative: we can point the way to the
maker of images, the Image of the infinite and loving God. When Our
Lord presented Himself as a human, He re-declared all humans to be
essentially good. As the Athanasian Creed states the mystery, Christ is
one Christ, “not by conversion of the Godhead into Flesh, but by taking
of the Manhood into God.” Our Lord Jesus is the great re-iteration of
the very first thing said about humans in scripture: “Let us make
humankind in our image, according to our likeness,” and soon after,
“God saw everything that He had made, and indeed, it was very good.”
(Genesis 1:26; 31a)
What does it mean to be in the image of God? To the original hearers of
Genesis, the terms “image” and “idol” were virtually synonymous (cf. 1
Sam. 6; Ez. 7:20; Daniel 2-3). If you wanted to know what the god Baal
looked like, you would go to Baal’s temple and look at his image/idol.
Likewise, if you want to know what the Lord God of Genesis looks like,
look at His image: humans. In other words, when you look at a human
being, you are seeing an image, or a likeness, of God. If you want to
see what God looks like, look at another person. “Truly I say to you,
to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even to
the least of them, you did it to me.” (Mat. 25:40) This is why St.
James points out that it is ridiculous and wrong to bless God while
cursing those who are made in the likeness of God. (Ja. 3:9)
—
We see in popular culture, saturated with images, a question and a
longing: The question is, “Who am I in the image of?” The question is
heard in the chinging of the cash registers of a billion-dollar fashion
industry, which is mostly shallow imitation. It is heard in the
convulsive vomiting and groaning stomachs of the ten percent of women
who suffer from eating disorders in North America. It is seen in the
empty eyes of thirty-five year old women and men, in the prime of their
lives, who feel completely unlovable because of a few extra wrinkles or
pounds, or a receding hairline.
Most of these people choose to make themselves in the image of culture.
Since the breakdown of the religious worldview in the west and the rise
of Postmodern thinking, many have accepted that there is only culture.
I exist in reference to culture and nothing more. My image is therefore
not worthy of reverence, but should be consumed by others as I consume
others. In the terms of Martin Buber, I am not a Thou but an it. I am a
cog in the wheel of cultural consumerism: Marilynn Monroe to Madonna to
Britney Spears to who? To another product, but not another person. If I
can have the physique of him, if I can have a girlfriend who looks and
dresses like her, if I can be like them, I will have an image that I
know, somewhere deeper and sacred within me, I must have.
But that image is a lie, for that her, the “perfect woman” with the
“perfect look,” does not exist. The image of Jessica Simpson spread
invitingly on the cover of Maxim Magazine is not the person of Jessica
Simpson: Firstly, because the image does not accurately represent what
Jessica Simpson looks like (makeup and perhaps mutilation [plastic
surgery] beforehand, lighting and positioning techniques during the
shoot, and airbrushing and “trimming” later – all meant to offer an
object of desire); Secondly, because Jessica would not, in person, look
at me that way, and I not at her with my unabashed, lusting gaze. I am
not her husband or boyfriend. The only person whom I have the strength
to lock eyes with in that way is my own love, and even then it is
dangerous. Images, if they do not lead to a truth beyond them, are
destructive. That image of Jessica is mere entertainment and only
entertainment: Jessica is not entertainment, but a person.
Or is she? The Christian may answer yes, because Jessica is made, like
all of us, in the Image of God. In the image of God a person is freed
to be themselves, because they are made in the image of one who is
beyond culture, beyond mere reference. All long to relate to the
Omnipotence, the Infinitely Varied, the God of Ten Trillion Galaxies,
who would have them be who they are to Himself; and also to themselves
and to others. This is the image redeemed: the image where we find
Jesus.