In the spirit of continuing the conversation:
I’ve written before that Paul Simon is my favorite lyricist, and when taking this photo I was reminded of a wonderful -but strangely isolated- line in his song “The Obvious Child,” a song which for many years I took to be rather about me and which largely inspired me to take up the drums, first by playing on a homemade and home-painted kit of buckets, unused aquariums recycled from my menagerie, and popcorn tins and later on increasingly expensive sets, until I finally left my equipment, and along with it the interest that had guided much of my life through high school and college, in New York when I left my college there.
The line which came to mind took me years to understand, and was probably explained to me by someone else: I regularly fail to grasp even very simple poetry. Simon says, “The cross is in the ballpark,” referring to the transition of Christianity from the church into the stadium, from the pulpit into the production studio. The song is otherwise personal, and this line stands out as the sole cultural context for the character’s plaintively-expressed anxieties.
There is a connection between the mass-production of faith and the isolation of the individual in his fears, I am sure. In any event, above is the ballpark; the fences seem almost to frame an altar, but there was no cross to be seen.
(From Photophobia).
A very well-expressed thought on corporate or “industrialized” faith. I’d agree, and say that I think there are few things more obvious than the fact that “mainstreaming” religion was one generation’s (failed) attempt at making their faith relevant or appealing to society at large.
It was probably, at the time, a well-meaning attempt to bring religion into the 20th Century - from cathedrals, lecterns, and latin doxology to mass-media (television/radio), corporate communities, and to political activism. Religion, trying to catch up with society, took its models and paradigms for organization from industrialized corporate culture. And during this same period of “mass-production of faith”, American Protestantism became synonymous with right-wing political views.
As a result, however, I think many individuals who grew up in such an environment have grown up only to become disgusted with the way such an approach (as you said) isolates the individual or, as I would say it, removes the diversity from faith communities. If we’re constantly told we’re all 100% alike and everything is fine, and that we ought to look, act, feel, express ourselves identically or in a way that represents the group at large, pretty soon we don’t feel anything at all.
…Which is why I think that religion stands a good chance of making itself obsolete in the 21st century unless it ceases working for some sort of “kingdom of god on earth” (a “new Christendom”) and stops taking its cues from society at large, and begins drawing its models from the simple foundations and founders of the faith. At least that’s where I believe I see things headed.
