Episode 10 - Christian Celebrity

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all right everybody so we've heard your voice you've asked us for more liturgies and specifically for an advent liturgy and we got you know uh off of tour right at the end of november and that's not a time to start thinking about an advent liturgy but somehow it worked we were like ah fine and we just did it last second uh but we're actually really happy with it we we like the liturgy to be kind of this work that some of these ideas that we talk about in the podcast can kind of come into a sort of spiritual practice with um and we want these to be the music and the poetry and the meditations to be tools for you to be able to grow and mature and foster your spirituality um in both privately and with groups we'd love to hear how that stuff works for you guys and want to help equip you as much as we can um website mike where's the website the liturgist.com slash advent and for those of you who have asked how you can help uh this one coming out on such a compressed schedule there is absolutely no marketing plan whatsoever so if you like this piece and you get something out of it the single most powerful thing you can do to help us is to share this project with a friend there's a very very very very compressed window that people can enjoy this this year and so if you like it share it we'd love it so guys we're talking about christian celebrity today and uh funny enough we just moved to los angeles and in unpacking our stuff my wife lisa happened upon a letter that was written in 1999 and i was uh 18 years old and i was about to propose to my girlfriend who was lisa gunger and this was a letter addressed to uh miss nicole nordman who is an artist she's a christian artist she's actually contributed her vocal to um one of the liturgies that the um that we have done and she's a friend now and uh but you know we've always been fans lisa and i have always been fans of her work and uh so this was like back back in the day and i was i was beside myself in this letter apparently because when lisa found this letter she had never read it before and she literally fell on the floor laughing and of course texted the picture of the letter to my family and me and to nicole and you know like just made a made a fool of me but so i'm just gonna share it with everybody i guess my myself as well because what better way to start out uh talking about christian celebrity than my own well you'll see you'll see here i go so here's my idea i'm wanting to ask my girlfriend to marry me i'd first tell you know i first tell her we're big fans i love her music blah blah and i'm wondering would you be at all open to helping me here's my idea i wrote a song for her about a year ago when i first fell in love with her we have a bridge that is like quote r bridge that is only a couple minutes away from where the concert is actually she was going to be in town that night i said my idea is that after a romantic evening i would have a table set up with candlelight with pictures taken through our relationship setup i'd have a cd player with romantic music playing and we'd have our dessert then all of the sudden she notices a stranger walking towards us on the bridge the cd player suddenly skips to the introduction guitar line of the song i wrote her her eyes are back on mine again until she hears the voice of her hero singing the chorus of her song she looks up and this stranger on the bridge is the one singing at this point she is nearly unconscious [Laughter] but is snapped back into reality and then back out again when at the end of the song is a new verse that she's never heard before sung by her kneeling boyfriend at her feet which ends with the words lisa will you marry me i think my girlfriend may just die if nicole nordman her favorite singer in the world sang her song [Music] and then it goes on and closes and my uh email address at the time was jazzalot hotmail.com oh my gosh oh man so did she write back uh her management did i believe and they were actually pretty gracious they were like this is actually something she might do but she's busy that night or something you know they graciously let me down but i was gung-ho oh man wait so what did you end up doing for the proposal when when this did not work out it ended up being something entirely different i ended up flying her to san francisco and it was this was in the day in 1999 and you could you could just go through security and stuff and you used to be able to like pick stuff up at the airport you know like packages or something i i don't remember that's what i told lisa anyway i think it must be i don't mean so i told her like we're here to get something and uh so we kind of were walking to the gate and she wasn't expecting to get on a flight and i just pushed her into the gate without her even seeing i was like oh look at this and i like brought her into the jet ways we were like the last ones to board she's like what are we doing flew to san francisco and did a whole little you know took her up to twin peaks with got a limo you know now i just want to clear up any confusion for people listening uh the male voice that told you the story about the letter is a guy named michael gunger he used to be on the program he's come back after a long exodus and uh the lovely uh ladies voice is rachel held evans who's joined us to talk about the very strange phenomenon of christian celebrity did you say who you are i'm science mike everybody knows that [Laughter] you know i asked our readers for questions and uh the first thing i got back was do your guests find it ironic to be the celebrity guest in a podcast about celebrity and then the very next comment was can i have your autographs so i'm really excited that our people are going to get this but yeah it's freaky this actually all came about the idea for this episode because um rachel was facebooking or tweeting or something i don't remember i was tweeting because i got pulled into the middle of this where sh like she had kind of expressed some like antipathy towards guru-ism and i think was having a conversation about that in the context of rob bell and everybody's talking about him because of the oprah show and uh and then a couple of people on twitter kind of uh told her she shouldn't be questioning rob because he's on the team yeah they said it would be bad for the team and of course that got me a little i don't like that sort of tribalism thing uh so yeah but i mean i understand what they were saying they were saying you know criticism can do more harm than good and i wasn't even really being critical of rob i was just kind of like responding to an article somebody else had written but i think the whole rob bell goes on oprah thing has kind of kicked this whole conversation into high gear um because it's you know oprah sort of is the the celebrity i mean it doesn't get more celebrity than oprah so i think what people are trying to process is okay well now that rob bell is hanging out with oprah and doing a show on oprah winfrey network what does that mean and i think people are weird about it because we're weird about celebrity and or mike you're friends with rob right and when you and i got to to talk not long ago you were saying like people assume you know oprah now oh yeah it's super awkward like it's well you know you've met rob and you hang out with rob so clearly you're at dinner parties with oprah which is looney so mike what i really would like to ask is if you can get my next book on oprah's book club please yeah it's crazy it's crazy well so i i have a bunch of i have a bunch of sciency thoughts and then we can get to the meat of it after that like um people are weird human beings are weird um you know and to talk about christian celebrity like what it what is celebrity really where does that come from and why are we so obsessed with celebrities um basically a celebrity is anyone who is widely or popularly known and i like to think of celebrity as a ratio and that ratio is uh the number of mutual relationships you have to the number of parasocial relationships you have so mathematically your fame could be expressed as a ratio or a fraction let me explain that a normal relationship is a relationship with someone that you know them and they know you now they might not be symmetric but you've actually learned about each other through conversation and interaction a parasocial relationship is a psychological term for a relationship where one party is unaware of the other sometimes we meet people and we already have a relationship with him that's a surprise to us because they're very familiar with our work and so what's happening to me that's new in my life that's really confusing is i'll sit down at a dinner party with someone i've never met and tell some start to tell some story from my past and they already know it because they've consumed some media where that information was there already and so para social relationships can be normal where you just like someone's work right but i really like neuroscientist andrew newberg's work but i would be very unlikely to sit outside of his house in a parked car because i'm not actually very interested in him as a person because i don't know him so that would be a normative parasocial relationship but we have a tendency to become deeply invested in parasocial relationships and as we consume more and more media that a person is produced or media that speaks about a person psychologically and neurologically there's a real tendency in humans to mistake that for actual relationship to become emotionally invested into a person they don't know and to even in extreme cases carry on a belief that they actually know the person in a mutual way so you could have someone who tweets occasionally and gets a tweet back from a public figure and because of that carries on a false internal narrative that that they're friends with them so there's these parasocial relationships but the question is why why on earth do we get into celebrities right in the first place there's a thing that's studied and documented called supernatural stimuli excuse me supernatural is the wrong word super normal supernatural is uh is a totally different thing super normal stimuli so a dutch researchers actually were the first to make a breakthrough on this and they figured out that if you if you took like a wooden ball and you painted a really bright fluorescent blue and put dark polka dots on it robins would abandon their eggs to sit on this fake egg that was larger and brighter than real eggs and then they figured out that other types of birds if you made a little wooden chick and you made its mouth brighter and redder than a real chick's mouth they would starve their real babies to try to feed this fake chick because their brains were going for the better than normal stimulus if you move up to you know larger brained animals the same is true for rats rats will try to eat food items that are so rich that they're rapidly detrimental to their health because they're they're they're super normal they're beyond anything that would occur naturally but but brains don't have the ability to filter that out uh from normal stimulus to realize it's fake to the point that they figured out that this is crazy male turkeys will try to mate with an attractive looking fake female turkey head on a stick over an actual female turkey so now when you think about celebrity in modern society amped up by photoshop and social media we go no woman looks like that no man looks like that plastic surgery are you kidding me nobody's eyes are that big nobody's breasts are that large no no man odd has that physique but at a lower level at the more primitive parts of the human brain we're attracted to those things we are a social animal we learn to emulate our leaders and to please our leaders so that we can remain in the tribe that's become like a hijacked meme in modern civilization in the form of fame and celebrity i read this book about the history of fame years ago that what this guy was arguing was that there was always like notoriety and you know respect but it was often more for like the office of a person or what the person had done or you know where celebrity of an actual real celebrity is a pretty late development and really started taking off with uh movies you had these larger-than-life figures you were in these love scenes and you are staring at the face of uh just these beautiful people and you were like right there and all of a sudden there was like this culture where everybody felt intimate with these people in a different way the earliest celebrities were the most successful members of tribal people groups the strongest warrior and the wisest chieftain in the tribe were little celebrities the whole tribe wanted to be around them wanted to be like them you know and and being in tight with them was a key to survival if you were a weaker beta male which is where my lineage comes from uh weaker beta males have been winning the favor of alpha males as long as civilizations have been around it's like hey i can't win a fight but uh you know i can watch your back when society sort of built these constructs around prestige especially as we got into language and as we got into culture totally those positions became emblematic of what used to be personal the pharaoh the monarch those sorts of things superseded the actual individuals and as human civilization scaled the reason it had to be position-based is because most of the people who heard of the king never saw the king so the king couldn't simply rely on traditional biological signals in order to be revered it had to become hierarchical and mimetic so fast forward to our modern times media and technology allow individuals to amplify and subvert those structures again because you know your visual cortex has a really hard time telling between a high fidelity two dimensional image of a person that's animated versus the actual person and what could be a greater example of supernormal stimuli than a human face on a 70-foot imac screen your visual cortex is just overwhelmed with this image of a person it's a tremendous amplifier for parasocial relationships the way this becomes unhealthy the way fame and celebrity get weird especially in the church but also in just regular media is when people confuse a person for their work like it's no big deal really liking somebody's work or thinking somebody's work is not great you don't know them and it's not even bad to make commentary based on their work it's what would i think the line where things get weird and unhealthy and destructive is when we start to talk about and make assumptions about people we don't know and have never met yeah one time i wrote a blog post called you don't hate me you hate my brand and it caused quite a bit of a stir because what i was trying to communicate was that whether people are praising what i write or hating what i write it what they love or what they hate isn't actually me it's it's a collection of images and words and as true as i try to be to my art and to my writing into my work as as authentic as i try to make it it's still not me and so when people say oh i just love you i wince a little bit because they don't most of these folks telling me this don't really know me or oh i really hate you they don't really know me enough to hate me um sometimes i feel like we commodify one another and then we consume one another and in the internet age has made it possible to do that to all sorts of people and you can kind of have this 15 minutes where you go viral or your youtube video goes viral or your song or your whatever it is and it can be the most embarrassing moment of your life or the greatest moment of your life or just a menial moment and everybody consumes it eats it up and then spits it out and then you're forgotten within a few weeks i guess what but what troubles me is the way that we've sort of projected this onto christian leaders to the point that we have leaders or artists or preachers or musicians within this subculture of christianity that tends to commodify people and then consume them and i don't really know what to do about it and what a lot of people will say to me is well haven't you benefited from that to some extent and i have i mean it i'm sure that culture has helped when it comes to selling books but that also kind of assumes that when people say that they're also assuming that it's all a good thing and that you know you have no right to critique celebrity culture if you are a part of it in some way but that kind of is assuming that there's only an upside to getting that sort of attention there's a lot of challenges that come with it too i don't have the problem when it's like really admiring and liking somebody because of their work and what i know of them i really love them but there's a fine line where it stops becoming about the work it's it's a similar thing like with lust it's like you are an object that i can use for my own pleasure for my own social status you know like i think that with music a lot of times people freak out about bands not necessarily because they're like real connoisseurs of the work of the music but being a fan of that band puts them in a social place that makes them cooler with their friends or you know like um if i take this autograph back to my youth group i'm going to be the cool kid that got the autograph from the artist that i love you know like where the person becomes something rather than somebody how that happens is a thing worth talking about i'm not exactly sure it happens that's uh that's a real thing with celebrity is the conflation of personal identity with expressive identity so people create their identity via external means now this isn't just with people uh exhibit a white earbuds connected to an apple device that makes a statement about who i am my nike shoes make an expression about what i believe about the world just as much as my spotify playlist and for the cerebral types the books on my bookshelf now some of this is normal and natural and healthy and just fine but when people are going through some phase of identity adjustment due to trauma or development think about divorce think about adolescence you know natural life changes traumatic life changes death of a loved one they go through a phase where their identity is in flux and being adjusted and people are more susceptible to get obsessed with celebrities and to worship or destroy them when they're going through these transitions because their internal sense of identity is so diminished all they have are their external markers and connections so for someone whose life is in shambles who thought you know rob bell was the future of the church and then he writes a book that disagrees with their ideology guess what they only way to psychologically predict their own identity is to lash out in anger against someone who a day ago was how they identify with who they were you know when you're going through a crisis of faith of some kind when everything you thought you believed you're questioning and holding with an open hand and re-examining and somebody comes along you know that seems to speak into that in some way i wonder if that kind of starts the cycle going too because then you identify so strongly with that christian leader that you almost deify them and then of course if they go a direction that you're not ready to go everything falls apart again and it's this deep emotional turmoil as a result and i wonder if that's one reason why we can't seem to break away from this in christian cultures because when you're thinking about your faith and i mean that's really important to people that's a huge part of our identity and so we have these people who speak about faith and we project onto them we we have fears and hopes wrapped in what they're saying because it's such a huge part of our identity i i've had someone email me a very long and kind note about how they'd stopped believing in god and they found my doubt series and it changed their life they were going to church again their marriage was going well and it just made my day and the next day uh the eric garner verdict happened and a little upset i mean i i tend to not have much vitro on my tweets but i did have some lament that day on twitter and um sort of camaraderie with my black brothers and sisters in america and this same person unsubscribed from my email list and left a long comment about how i thought you were a smart christian i thought you were to help but it turns out you're not you're as a fraud and a fake and against america and it was sort of like whiplash but then like that's exactly the thing you're talking about rachel they thought they'd found something that created stability but then in some way because they don't actually know me they just read some stuff i wrote which as michael says is a recording of my cognition but not the entirety of who i am as a person or even a significant portion of it they figured out way this guy he sounds like a liberal and that bothered him it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love better help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through better help you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions better help has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com liturgists well michael you wrote a whole chapter about this in the crowd the critic and the muse which i loved by the way and just i go back to that book often when i'm having i don't know writer's block or when i'm feeling overwhelmed um but you had a whole chapter in your book about celebrity that i just thought was really fantastic and uh you said we think we adore these human beings celebrities but we've never even met them what we love is the idea of these people celebrities represent the power and love that we want for ourselves and when they have the audacity to reveal that they are just as human as the rest of us we're delighted to see them punished for it and i thought that was a really great insight but in addition to sort of the anxiety we feel when somebody we once identified so much with or thought we identified so much with um goes a different direction and we feel anxiety over that we can also feel a sense of i don't know superiority and excitement when we see a celebrity fail um you know if they're a celebrity that doesn't hold our ideology or that we think teaches some problematic things or whatever or we're jealous of them there's sort of this glee to see them fail um and you see this especially these days sort of on the internet where there's you know so many parody accounts that just make fun of christian leaders and artists and writers and pastors and um that just seem to take a sort of delight in every misstep um that people make i don't really know how to fix this i don't really know if this is just what part of what it means to be human in the united states of america or what um but yeah there's sort of the the anxiety that accompanies a celebrity we like going a different way or where we're not sure about and then there's the delight in seeing some of them fail um one another thing too you know the bill cosby situation i think has been really enlightening as far as all this is concerned because so many people equated him the person with the guy on tv and that story that it suggests people are experiencing almost like a sense of loss as these allegations come out and um seem to be gaining some momentum and seem to have some truth to them there's the reaction people have had like oh he can't do that because the bill cosby they knew from tv doesn't seem to be lining up with the bill cosby that these women experienced um and you know you see some people sort of delighting in it if they did not agree with his ideology and then you see other people really kind of mourning it but that's an example too of somebody who whose art as much as it touches us and as much as we can appreciate it and laugh and see ourselves in it and um as great a storyteller as he was that his art still wasn't him i drew a cartesian graph the other day um about that concept specifically thinking about bill cosby because that's something that's really bugged me um a person is not their work a person makes their work and their work carries their stamp but a person is not their work and the way i know that is you can have people who are basically good good character of integrity who make good work and you can have good people of integrity who make really bad work but you can also have just real shyster unethical evil people who make fantastic art and then in like the the worst case you have a terrible person who makes terrible art and it's sort of this quadrant right so what happened is that the grief comes from we thought bill cosby was in you know the top right and it turns out he was in the bottom right good work but not the the hero we believed him to be now so what the question for me is does that undermine his work uh does does the number of americans white americans who questioned their stance on race based on that tv series does to what degree is that diminished based on these allegations the degree to which he was a role model and a source of inspiration for young black children who had never seen someone who looked like them in a starring role in a prime time television series those things are still true it just turns out it's also true apparently it appears that uh he was doing some very very awful things to women frequently and and so if if if we allow ourselves to invest ourselves in a parasocial relationship with bill cosby this can become traumatic psychologically to us however if we maintain what i think is a more healthy mentality of appreciating people's work or not then we're less likely to be personally devastated or to lash out when people stumble that doesn't mean i think we turn uh a turn away and ignore the issue i think any time suffering or abuse is happening it must be addressed i think this thing is just so foundational to how so many of us live in society with how much we are impacted by this idea of celebrity and that some people what some people say is elevated over what other people say and if we put our you know down to our very local church pastors that we expect something of them that is never true it's not like everybody's got something going on that we would be disappointed in if we knew you know like everybody is human and everybody's got their struggles and everybody's got their days that they're not going to be the hero they're going to be they're going to be the villain on some days you know like everybody and um we don't want that we don't like people in our we don't like our leaders to be human beings that are flawed and in a healthy way i think all of us um should be disappointed and even angered by the bill cosby situation um but it's some guy that we appreciated some of his work and we found out this guy was doing really awful stuff it shouldn't devastate to the heart where now i question other things or whatever and i don't see any difference in the church and and the secular world in this area at all i think the church has just used religious language and actually sometimes it's worse i feel like in the church because you have the the religious authority bestowed upon celebrity yeah it's the view that not only is this person famous they're famous because god wants them to be successful because they must be yeah like if we like somebody and we like what they have to say we'll say that their celebrity is a gift from god if we don't like what somebody says then we say that their celebrity is just them selling out and them capitulating to culture or bowing to pressure um when i guess maybe it's just i'm trying to say that how we feel about sort of well-known figures says a lot about ourselves and what we value and and speaks to a lot of the tribalism which i think is kind of the what's behind so much of christian celebrity so you know folks who are kind of in the raw bell corner or at least maybe just see the world in similar ways or he's helped his work has helped them um you know they want it's almost like now they'll defend him no matter what he says because he's you know it's like that person telling me like hey get in line it hurts the team if you i never signed up for team rob you know like i just i like his stuff i i really do but i you know i'm not i don't see him as above criticism at this point uh you know i don't see myself as a in a tribe um so yeah i think maybe that if we could address some of the tribalism uh i think that could really help i mean if we were able to just to accept that everybody is is flawed and capable of of doing bad things and making mistakes and if we were able to sort of judge too the difference between you know somebody whose theology you might not 100 percent agree with and somebody who's you know doing abusive things or teaching abusive things that would help too unhealthy admiration or unhealthy disdain that's where it goes you know like i don't care if the the church is full and men are going if there's abuse but that doesn't mean i know anything about the guy doing the abuse i'm just going to take that opportunity to have a conversation about abusive spirituality and you know there's this other tendency that's not as related to celebrity but related to the way we invest ourselves in ideologies and people have this tendency to invest in increasingly weak test cases to prove their devotion to an idea so if i like apple i love apple's crappiest product because that's how much i like apple so um ideologically speaking the same thing can happen people can pick uh questionable characters or questionable situations in order to show how deeply uh they believe an idea and that's a completely unconscious process by the way to me this is actually something that can change pretty easily yes um in people's hearts and minds because a lot of it is just seeing it like if you can see how steeped our culture is and how and how we personally can get in this way of thinking and when you see when you start realizing why am i mad at this person that i don't don't even know like why am i spewing all of this vehement stuff on this blog about this person that i don't know and why is it making me feel so uncomfortable with myself like as soon as you see oh my gosh just because i have this weird relationship with this idea of what i think this person is and that's because i have problems in myself and that's because i have i need this pedestal to make up for something that i can't find in myself as soon as you see that it's like oh my gosh the anger the anger will go we don't talk about sin a whole lot i don't think on this podcast so far but to me this like so much of the idea of sin is when you make a person something less than a full person image of god burying human being stealing is not just wrong because it's just against the rules it's when you steal from somebody have you ever had something stolen from you it feels like something of your personhood was diminished that's the essence of so much sin and brokenness in the world what's kind of at the root of this is are dehumanizing one another and just as we dehumanize someone when we sexually assault them or call them names or reduce them to a stereotype based on their gender or sexuality or whatever it may be we dehumanize people when we reduce them to celebrity it's tricky because on the one hand i want people to remember that i'm a person but i'm not just the sum of my political or social views that i'm not just the girl who supports you know or just the person who's always talking about gender and the church and being annoying about you know that kind of thing yeah i want people to know that i'm a person but at the same time it can feel a little bit like manipulation to do that it gets so tricky and i'm sure you i mean y'all both know what this is like when you're an artist he tries to put so much of yourself and so much truth into what you create and to put yourself out there knowing that that even the truest part of yourself is going to get consumed it can be really disorienting people will say well it can't be that bad i mean you're a best-selling author stop complaining about flying all over the world to talk to people because that was something i was really struggling with was all the travel that comes with speaking and feeling sort of just like slowly whittled away by all of that event after event and felt like i was kind of losing a little of my humanity in that process but if i talked about that the reaction was sort of like well who are you to complain but i think that just shows the degree to which people have bought into the idea that celebrity must make you happy i didn't succeed my way out of insecurity i'm still super insecure i it doesn't matter how many books i sell i'm always going to be jealous of ann voskam and the thing is anne's probably got people that she's jealous of i mean it goes on and on and on and on like it's i don't know if we can demystify it i wonder if that might help a little bit but if you try to demystify it it's almost like people don't even believe you you know like oh well it can't be that bad i mean um and it's great on the one hand i mean it's great going and speaking and and it's great selling books but it didn't fix my insecurity i still worry about what's gonna happen when i stop selling books everybody just wants to know that they're beloved and that they're valuable and that doesn't change like i didn't get that by selling books i hope there's some way to be more honest with people about the realities of i don't know speaking and and writing and publishing and making music and in this world that it's not the success or one book that sells or one song that is really popular that doesn't just hurt switch off this magic button where suddenly i'm super confident about myself and i'm securing my self as a child of god and all that stuff that you think fame is going to give you like we already have access to that now like you don't have you don't succeed your way to that stuff or you don't i don't know what we think celebrity gives it just doesn't i'm so new at all this stuff like so new that it's all it's really easy for me to remember and see both sides of this issue and also to watch the relationships in my own life change because the only real thing that changes in your life is you have weird interactions that result from parasocial relationships that's really the only big difference as as people start to learn who you are uh and um people make assumptions about what your life is like that's not true right so i go to a local church it's a great church uh i have great friends there but i am a very natural work the room kind of person and i've actually trained myself to turn that off at church i kind of just want to go to church and just just be at church and like listen to people but the other thing that happens is it gets a little lonely and people don't realize this because everyone assumes i'm not available all the time in my own city and my own life my friends don't call as much um you know and part of that's legit because they call it hey man what's up i'm like yeah i'm in new york you know and so no i can't go out tonight but then when i'm actually home everyone's just been so trained and not available that they don't call and so what the the actual reality is it's not that there's some sort of glamour or some sort of achievement it's just i've sacrificed some of the life i loved in order to do work that's meaningful to me and that's it that's that's the whole the whole thing and you know i got really weirded out first the first time someone asked me for an autograph i was like what um and then the first time someone recognized me in the atlanta airport like those were two sort of like dizzying encounters and not in a good way and i actually asked rob about those because he has some experience with that and he told me something was really helpful and i hope i hope this illuminates both sides of this conversation i hope everyone listening whether you have a bunch of records out and sell books or you consume media and and and just go to a local church whoever listening i hope this helps rob told me that when someone comes up and they want to take the picture or they want an autograph it doesn't have anything to do with me what actually happened is through my work they had an encounter with the divine and they want something to commemorate the experience and so that autograph and that picture and that handshake isn't about me and my ego but instead a way for them to reflect on god in a similar way that when i go to laguna beach california and stand on one spot in the beach i can remember a moment that was meaningful and special that's not weird for me and that's not weird for the other person that's just both of us acknowledging something that's happened in our lives it's an interesting like thing to think of our parasocial relationships as real relationships that need to be kept healthy we all have them they're unavoidable and i don't think they're bad like jesus had parasocial relationships with all the people that came to listen to him speak on the mount you know like um but then there were times he knew to keep that thing healthy he had to get away and go up to the mountain and and leave all those prayer relationships behind you know like um so knowing both as a creator and people that might know you from that side that you don't know them as much um trying to keep a healthy relationship with that and knowing like uh both how to be human to them and how to be transparent with them but also how to use your work there are some people's work that if you know the story where it's coming from the work actually takes on new dimensions um itself like if you know that that person that's singing about being free was actually a slave you know like how is that not gonna make the idea of freedom in that song or whatever it is come alive in a different sort of way you know so um i i don't think we have to just be these gnostic workers we're just our physical bodies are separate from the spirit of our work or something um oh man i like that uh but having yeah maintaining healthy relationships both on on the creator side and then on on being a fan like i'm i'm a fan still of people's work but the more i've kind of seen behind the curtain of celebrity on being on the other side of it on some in some interactions i want to be a fan a person that respects other people's work the per the person in the line that wants the book signed that's going to try to to bring some humanity to that interaction still i wonder if this speaks to the just the general collaborative nature of art art isn't just merely something that you make and then gets consumed by people it's like the consumers if you will also are part of the process like what they do with your songs whether that's like they have a memory associated with it from a road trip they took driving across the country with their friends or like it it's really truly collaborative in nature and it's true for art that's about faith too a word i might use might trigger a memory for somebody else or a connection to scripture that i wouldn't have even put there so it's like when people are excited and sort of fanning out or whatever it may be it's not just about you actually it's it's actually about them and the experience they had interacting with your art and then making that art a whole new thing in that context and so maybe we can just kind of enjoy that you know just sit back and enjoy it like if i can divorce it from like oh this is weird they're super excited but but if they knew that like you know what a slob i am and how i can talk back to my husband and you know like that i'm just this person they wouldn't like me as much but it's not really about me like rob says it's more about their their experience and us coming around this writing or this song or this sermon all together and and bringing our own experiences to it so where we're at here if i'm following along celebrity not good or bad ultimately not a not a value call what we all should strive for as people who make things and people who consume things is fostering healthy relationships be they normal or parasocial and helping others to do the same is that a fair assessment of where we've gone yeah i feel like i learned a lot from this actually i felt like this was free therapy for me [Laughter] we didn't really answer any questions well i mean we i was reading them and we answered a lot of them without reading them i mean there's a couple that were addressed to you guys by name and actually there's one that's really good i'm gonna i'm gonna give this to you from a reader on twitter rachel how can you cope with haters without hating back especially when meeting in person um well i mean it could the thing is my mantra with the whole and haters i actually don't even like that word so much because it sort of reduces people to i don't like a world that reduces people to fans or haters it's just like most people are just people so all people are just people that can be kind of dehumanizing but as far as people who are strongly critical of me personally my whole mantra with that is thick skin tenderheart and i got this from dan because one day i had a big ugly blow up on the internet i guess it was probably with some calvinist or something and hadn't gone very well and uh people they were it just moved from like a debate like a healthy debate on something to just people being pretty cruel and really mean uh and i remember i sat down on the couch next to dan and i folded up my arms and um you know sat next to him and i said you know what if i'm gonna make it in this world and this sort of boys club of a industry then i'm gonna have to toughen up i'm gonna have to be super hard i can't let anything get to me i'm gonna have to grow thick skin you know it's kind of giving myself this talk uh but i'll never forget dan turned to me and he said oh rachel i'm so proud of you you know you're a really strong woman and you really do have thick skin but he said but whatever you do please don't lose your sweet tender heart because that's part of what makes you rachel and it's one of the reasons i love you and so of course then i'm just reduced to a pile of tears and makeups running and i'm sobbing and uh but it's kind of stuck with me like you want to grow thick skin but you you don't wanna if you close off the part of yourself that can be hurt by people's criticisms and people's meanness then you're gonna also close off the part of yourself that feels compassion and empathy and love and can be moved like i'm not willing to sacrifice that so that means sometimes just letting it hurt like letting people's criticisms get to me i don't think people of jesus you know followers of jesus have the option of um [Music] you know closing ourselves off like that and and building that armor around ourselves so sometimes i let it hurt and and it just is gonna hurt um and then with practice you get better at it like you don't let as many things get to you and you know it can be kind of instructive too like what criticisms like why are certain things hurting my feelings so much like if somebody says oh i think rachel is going to hell i'm like probably not if they say oh you know rachel uses too many passive verbs in her writing i'm like oh my gosh they're right i used the verbs way too much you know it's like because it's one of them is more i'm more sensitive about like more insecure about so it can kind of be instructive too like why is this hurting me so much is it because it's a lie that i like to believe about myself is it because it's um something i'm insecure about because it's true is that so i try to as much as i can learn from the criticism when it hurts like why does this hurt me what is this how can this be instructive what i've learned is the [Music] relationships and inputs that matter in my life are the people i know when i'm close to and everything else is noise um and i've learned that from rob because rob is unaware we're having this conversation and we'll remain unaware and all the people blogs people are writing he doesn't read them he just moves on and makes the next thing and i've started to emulate that i don't i don't look at my google rankings i don't i don't check out all the inbound links coming to my blog um you know i i read the sort of things that come in on my facebook page and the liturgist comments and those sorts of things because those are people who are connecting to my work in a real way and i'll even have uh conversations with people that disagree with me because frankly oh my gosh you guys you are the classiest disagreers on the internet the most thoughtful critiques i ever get are through the liturgists um thanks for coming out yeah they they called me out for uh misquoting uh the the pull of gravity i really appreciate that so eight versus nine eight or nine nine point eight versus eight i just dropped the nine point i was nervous anyway uh i'm actually pretty embarrassed about that there's my insecurities sometimes i misquote scientific concepts anyway yeah that's tough for a guy named science mike it really is i blew my only job [Laughter] but i mean that's the whole thing so the people in my life i know they affirm me really well and i just i just hold on to that i i just have a life full of healthy relationships and i just lean into them all right well i think we've covered a lot we'd love to hear your thoughts about this episode guys uh neither i or michael are on tour right now so we'll actually have time to come and check out your comments at the liturgist.com podcast you can hit us up on twitter at the liturgist or on facebook.com the liturgists it's great to have you back michael those were two really tough episodes to do without you and rachel oh my gosh it's so awesome every time you can you can be a part of the show all right well this is uh this is science mike i'm michael gunger oh i'm rachel evans and this has been the liturgist podcast