Celebrity Morals and the Loss of Religious Authority

John Portmann

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000011616
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Ethics & Religion

This book examines American popular culture to demonstrate that celebrities have superseded religious figures as moral authorities. As trust in religious institutions has waned over recent decades, the once frivolous entertainment fringe has become the moral center. Young people and voters increasingly take cues from actors and athletes.

The book begins by offering a definition of celebrity and showing that the profile of celebrities has changed dramatically, particularly since the 1960s. They can now chart their own careers, manage their own personal lives and weigh in on pressing moral issues in a manner that hasn't always been the case. This can be to the good, it is argued, for some counterintuitive reasons. Very few stars pretend to be moral exemplars, unlike the frequently hypocritical elites they have replaced. Others, however, are seemingly poorly qualified to speak on complex moral issues. In the end, it also turns out that who tells us how to feel about any moral issue counts at least as much as what they tell us.

This is a fresh look at the impact of celebrity culture on contemporary morality and religious authority. As such, it will be of great use to academics working in religious studies and ethics, as well as popular culture and media studies.

Part I

Coveting

Introduction

The rapid rise of celebrity sovereignty

In 1989, the influential American philosopher Richard Rorty observed that “the novel, the movie and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change.” Who could have guessed the rapidity of acceleration in this arena since 1989? And what difference does it make? Rorty overlooked the persuasive force of celebrities but otherwise pinpointed a crucial shift in how we judge ourselves and others. Jon Stewart, Rush Limbaugh, Stephen Colbert, Sean Hannity and John Oliver exploit their media platforms to conquer the moral high ground and command the respect once reserved for clergy. Gradually they have assumed the vital responsibility of guiding America’s conscience.

Celebrities of various stripes have jumped on this bandwagon. Famous people rarely possess any philosophical, legal or theological training in ethics, and so the chief spokesmen and women on important moral questions increasingly are individuals speaking from the heart. Anyone can speak from the heart, so why we should endorse professional crowd-pleasers comes down to celebrity fascination. While they have our attention, stars will scold and elevate us, even though that’s not why we tuned into them in the first place. Since celebrities wield no more power than we assign them, they do our bidding and respond to our abiding passion for seeing justice done.

Despite their reputation for shallowness, some stars have written new scripts by seizing an opportunity to guide us outside ourselves and into worthy causes. The dominant source of moral authority has drifted away from synagogues and churches toward the NFL and the Oscars. Morality has become more secular and more urgent an affair.

Various polls have demonstrated the decline of religious authority in the United States (they show the same trend in Western Europe) since the late twentieth century.¹ To understand religious authority, think of the former prestige of the Catholic church. The largest religious community in America, the Roman Catholic church, suffered a profound loss of moral authority in the midst of a reverberating scandal involving priestly sexual abuse of children. Think as well of the sex scandals in other communities (Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, Warren Jeffs, Rabbi Steven Krawatsky, among others). Tawdry revelations make quite a dent in the armor of American piety. Make no mistake, though: Americans remain spiritually interested. Were they not, there would be no point to a book such as this one.

It is now commonplace to depict the 1960s as an era in which morality and authority disintegrated. Two reasons for this shift – in America at least – must certainly be the end to prayer and Bible reading in public schools. In landmark decisions (Engel v. Vitale and Abington School District v. Schempp), the Supreme Court closed off a traditional wellspring of morality. Recognizing an opportunity to shape values, famous people such as Paul Newman, Marlon Brando and Muhammed Ali took the reins and started to speak up on controversies of the day.

Historical precedents indicate that identifying new ways to tap into moral authority can instigate deep institutional change. Think of activists for child labor laws and Prohibition in the early twentieth century. Or, later, in the 1970s, when the Moral Majority came to power and helped Ronald Reagan win the White House – and in the process came to regulate school prayer and abortion access. Also in the 1970s, women’s rights and gay rights movements ushered in signal social transformations. At the same time, television talk show hosts Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey carved out a new niche from which to preach, and the nation well responded.

Celebrity moralists become more and more valuable in the battle for hearts and minds, political campaigns for elected office, charity fundraisers and judicial battles (for example, gay marriage). When morality becomes glamorous, it strengthens its hold over us, which is cause for celebration. As morality becomes a conventional arrow in a celebrity’s quiver, more celebrities will become graduation speakers, expert voices, senators, spokespersons and even presidents. And when we privately ask ourselves, “Am I a good person?,” we will increasingly try to imagine how a given celebrity would answer.

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A house catches fire. A child with muscular dystrophy struggles to walk. A group of desperate immigrants arrives at a national border. Each example involves harm that can be redressed, and each event harbors a moral message open to interpretation. The content of the message should be more important than the messenger, but Americans care more about the messenger when the messenger is a star. The fault lies not in our stars but in us. Anyone could alert us to social problems, but celebrities can magically distract us from the many demands on our attention and focus us on compassion.

A number of other scholars have already probed the magic of fame and the emergence of celebrity activism.² I instead focus on what I call celebrity moralism, which is slightly different. According to an old adage, the pen is mightier than the sword. In this case, activism is analogous to the sword, and moralism to the pen. I link moralism to a campaign to change hearts and minds, as opposed to a crusade to march loudly through the streets. It’s not that moralism deserves more respect or admiration than activism – it’s that moralism is too important to overlook. Moralism aims at our conscience, the root of enduring social change. Although I do not object to protests or demonstrations, I don’t want to miss the dynamic contributions to moral progress people can make behind the scenes.

This book moves between three closely related themes: celebrity fascination, moral authority and the ethics of celebrity watching (which includes privacy). We will all benefit from reflection on our moral relationship to celebrities, who speak for us more frequently than ever. We don’t exactly elect celebrities, but we do empower them. We also ridicule, suspend or replace them at will.

This book combines two things almost everyone cares about – celebrities and the triumph of good over evil. The secular West increasingly stages a conflict between those who still see morality as a matter of texts (for example, the Bible or the Koran) and those who see it as a matter of convictions (for example, the strong should not abuse the weak, we should not take more than we give, and it is wrong to use people as a means to an end). Celebrities were already quite powerful before they stepped into the job of integrity monitors; now they command even more clout.

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Celebrities come and go. Their radiance can certainly fade fast.

Countless souls boast some superior talent or another but lack the title “celebrity” and so go largely unnoticed by the public. Sad. They may be heroes in their own lives, but nothing more. Few will remember them, but then the same is true of various celebrities of yesteryear. Hic transit Gloria mundi.

The ancient Greek gods offered Achilles a poignant choice: you may enjoy a long but relatively dull life as an unknown, or you may bask in the glory of fame during a brief lifespan. Achilles opted to be a celebrity.

People of note have been around for a long time, and many others have yearned to make the leap from obscurity to renown. Such parvenus have been the stuff of legend, novels and films. The famous have intrigued, amazed, intimidated and outraged us. The literary genre of biography refracts those lives touched by the magic wand of stardom, genius, courage or singularity.

We occasionally feel awe when watching celebrities. Envy, anger, lust, disgust and other emotions may also come into play. The thrill of suddenly understanding yourself (through learning about a famous person) resembles the emotion that might overtake you at the Grand Canyon or the Great Barrier Reef. Awe is all to the good in most cases, but the object of awe determines moral evaluation (awe over a tax fraud, for example, disqualifies our respect for the person who pulled it off). We tend to care more about information that can benefit us personally, and so it stands to reason that someone interested in distinguishing himself from the crowd will study celebrities.

Not everyone wants the same things (for example, fame or fortune) or in the same ways. Some people are fairly content with what they have and seldom compare themselves to others. Some people look away from celebrity news because they are depressed, and others because they have transcended the rat race and achieved enlightenment. This contentment usually follows years of conscious effort to stop wanting what is not good for them, to stop wasting time, to stop feeding the fire of celebrity frenzy.

Why do so many young people ache to become a celebrity? And how will they know when they have qualified for the title, really earned the crown? It’s one thing to hunger for excellence in a given arena, but another to yearn for fame for fame’s sake. Centuries ago, the Romantic chivalric tradition transformed the way the West thought about love, from a merely pragmatic arrangement to an ideal, something to be enjoyed in and of itself. In the nineteenth century, to take another example, “L’art pour l’art” indicated the implicit superiority of that art which was created and celebrated for its own sake, just because it was art. Today, the spirit of the adage applies every bit as much, if not more, to fame. Fame has become an end in itself, a highly stylized destination, as opposed to an incidental effect of achieving a separate goal.

Why should onlookers follow media celebrities who offer them little, if any, actual assistance? Perhaps the most compelling reason is inspiration; stars provide us with a glimpse of what our lives could be. Celebrities keep alive our hopes for a better life, and it is impossible to put a price on that service. Celebrity fascination reflects the lure of lives we envy as well as potential confusion over the souls in which wisdom can be found.

Fascination is awfully difficult to sustain; we tire of it eventually or it comes crashing down when satisfied (for familiarity breeds contempt). Celebrities need the honor and validation onlookers offer; onlookers, it should be remembered, can withdraw that enthusiasm at any time. It is wrong to use other people, to manipulate them for our profit or enjoyment, and we should be sensitive to the audience’s moral duty to treat their entertainers respectfully. Famous people face a constant uphill battle, as every performance, exhibition, concert, film or interview could be the threshold of the dreaded downward trajectory.

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Celebrity hair stylists and celebrity bodyguards and celebrity facialists can charge their other clients higher fees, for these professionals have entered the orbit of famous people. You supposedly benefit from their proximity to greatness.

Meanwhile, our often routine lives necessitate distraction. In our dreamy private moments. Celebrities unveil what they might be willing to do on our behalf. Those reveries provide useful clues about what we really want (a vexing problem in rich democracies and a puzzle that keeps many therapists in business). Such moments also pump us up, helping us to see ourselves as more important, more powerful, altogether special – our best selves. We heed the ethical direction of people who bewitch us.

If this sounds fanciful, it shouldn’t, for morality can summon a tipping point beyond which an argument seems futile. The way a family or a community distributes resources may reflect individual or quite peculiar ambitions, but distinctions are still drawn between legitimate needs (housing and health insurance) and simple indulgences (the latest video game). The extent to which race, social class or a swastika on a T-shirt is “no big deal” determines the extent to which bystanders are willing to fight for a new way of seeing the world. Since at least the time of Plato, moral direction has emerged as a pressing personal and social necessity, as opposed to a frivolous add-on. Celebrities increasingly shoulder the important burden of coaxing us into our better selves, and they are doing a pretty good job.

The United States is no less idiosyncratic than any other country, and so its values can’t always be exported. But given the vast demand for American cinema and popular music, the US arguably comes closer to universal influence than any other nation. What celebrities pronounce matters, as does their activism. Space limitations in this book prevent consideration of how famous people in other lands accomplish similar ends.

Few performers have worked harder to pepper their artistic triumphs with social interventions than Lady Gaga, who not only ingeniously catapulted to singing fame but also tapped into an American feud over the rightful place of sexual minorities in American culture. This graduate of a Roman Catholic convent school crafted her faith’s official teaching that lesbian, gay and bisexual people are “born that way” into a chart-topping song and music video on the eve of the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision to legalize same-sex marriage. It is impossible to gauge the extent of her contribution to this legal volte-face, but one can see the gratitude of lesbian, gay and transgender fans at her public appearances. Like quite a few other female singers, she made a sex object of herself and, in so doing, responded to market demand. Gaga added a plea for love and toleration (which is not to say she is the only singer with a message) in a country that had only allowed sexual minorities privacy a decade earlier (for until the 2003 ruling Lawrence v. Texas, Americans caught having gay sex at home could be imprisoned). Such was her influence that an organized Yale group invited her to speak on campus in 2015.

With her mother Cynthia Germanotta in 2011, she established the Born This Way Foundation at Harvard University, which aims to fight help bullying and abandonment by strengthening communities and social networks for young people. In 2018 Gaga co-authored a widely discussed Op-Ed piece on suicide in the Guardian (London). She published the piece on World Mental Health Day.³

Celebrities tend to focus on social justice, which cuts across religious communities and political affiliations, and to exercise moral leadership. Since so very many experts disagree on what moral leadership is or what social justice consists of, it could be that celebrities are doing nothing more than emphatically expressing their support for one cause or another. But even that is something big, given the shuddering force of celebrity fascination. They don’t really have to try to shape our conscience, as we would watch them anyway. At least they seem to care about conscience. For good reason, scholars sometimes try to measure the impact of celebrity activism; no one has yet been able to pinpoint the extent to which a politician or journalist or celebrity has molded consciences. Nor, for that matter, do we really know how much a pope or president or media mogul such as William Randolph Hearst or Rupert Murdoch has shaped the culture in which he worked.

Ultimately, a good idea is a good idea, regardless of who holds it. We shouldn’t blame an idea for the people who hold it, yet we frequently do. If an evil dictator were to become an environmental activist or a climate change proponent, we might well think less of the cause. (Hitler, for example, loved both nature and dogs.) Civil rights activists struggled in early years because the chief people praising diversity and racial equality (both good ideas) were black. The women’s movement and the gay rights movements both tripped over the same problem. Helping hungry immigrants and curbing schoolyard bullying don’t b...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Coveting
• Part II Moral authority
• Part III The ethics of celebrity watching (and bashing)
• Further reading
• Index