Catholics and the cult of fun

The other day I was talking to a friend about the witness of the laity in the postmodern world. In the course of the conversation, my friend remarked, "I'd recommend Jacques Maritain's books to you, but you may have trouble getting hold of some of his work."

"Himself!" said my friend. "Apparently, the corporation that owns Barney also snapped up the publishing house that owns the works of Maritain. I've heard some of his stuff may be out of print now."

Visions danced through my head of a grey-haired lay French theologian plucked off a portapotty seat and devoured by the Big Purple Friend of Children. "I Love You [crunch], You Love Me [gulp]..."

But it also got me thinking, especially since (as Maritain himself would have insisted) such odd collisions of theology and culture are precisely the kind of thing we lay people must contend with if we are to bear witness in the postmodern world. And one of the most serious things we Catholic laypeople have to learn to confront is the Cult of Fun.

What is the Cult of Fun? It is the ruthless opposition to gravitas and a hard-core commitment to comfort and "good times" rather than self-sacrifice for the weak, the disquieting, the poor, and the demanding. It is a kind of sloth; an avoidance of the hard stuff of life. Its summum bonum is pleasure, its highest ethical standard, niceness, its most profound proverb "Lighten up!" and its mortal enemy, the Cross of Jesus Christ.

The devotee of the Cult of Fun practices a strict regimen of petty pleasures and avoidance of ultimates: Americans worship at this shrine more than any other nation on earth, while simultaneously feeling themselves to be the most adult and sophisticated people in history. Once, I heard a musician speaking to an American audience about the music of Brazil and extolling it because it "can address subjects which are taboo on American radio." The audience (this was an NPR broadcast) all sniggered knowingly as only a culture of apostate Puritans can do. "Those hot-blooded Latins can really talk dirty," was the subtext of their laughter. But the musician corrected them. "Oh no! I don't mean sex is taboo in America. That's all you people talk about. I mean death, suffering, poverty, beauty, and eternity." The audience fell uncomfortably silent. We're Americans. We don't talk about that.

What do we do instead? We Have Fun. Thousands of hours, billions of kilowatts, zillions of gallons of gas worth of pure, relentless, grueling Fun. For the devotee of the Cult, nothing is more important than that Fun, or at least that something Not Serious, be occurring constantly. Hence the popularity of television. Here is a box that, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, pours into our heads a constant kaleidoscope of sheer inconsequence and inane gabble to assure us that life is Fun and nothing serious is going on here. Liberal idealists cling pathetically to the notion that serious (i.e. public) TV can tame the titanic, mountainous heap of trash that is the ordinary daily output of the tube. But they are delusional. 30 years ago, "serious TV" could cover a presidential debate and the candidates could talk about serious things in a sensible way. No more. The tube demands that candidates now chatter brainless laughlines the way Mr. Ed did back in '62. The horse, so far from being tamed, now rides us.

Our culture's worship at the altar of Fun has major consequences for those who aim to bear witness to the Catholic Faith. For the Catholic Faith is offering Reality (the heart of which is Joy) while the Cult of Fun can offer only flash, distraction, sensation and glamour (the heart of which is Sadness). In the 60s and 70s the Cult of Fun was a powerful juggernaut with little to slow it down. As a man I know put it, that was "before all the big diseases hit." Since that time, however, things like AIDS, STDs, social imbecility, nihlism, despair and the disastrous collapse of the family (with the attendant of rise of feral youth, crime and other social calamities) has begun to throw a somewhat different light on the Baby Boomer appetite for unlimited Fun. In addition, the invincible Boomers have begun to discover another eternal verity: Age. This has also thrown sand in their machinery of Fun and made even that narcissistic gaggle of self-deifiers take stock.

As well they should, for the Generation X they have birthed (the ones who survived the Boomer commitment to abortion as a principal means of assuring their constitutional right to unlimited sexual Fun) have learned from their elders the important lesson that inconvenient people (aging parents as much as unwanted children) are best dealt with by lethal injection. Thus, we see the increasingly embittered Generation X embracing the idea that the way to preserve the Household Idol of Fun (which mom and dad passed on to them as one of the few lasting legacies of their generation before they divorced) is to off mom and dad via physician-assisted suicide when the old goats get too feeble to change the Beatles CD. "Mom and Dad would want it that way," they say. After all, what's the use of living if, in the words of Kurt Cobain, "Life just isn't 100% fun anymore"? Better the old man and old lady die and get out of the way than that the rising generation's chance for Fun be impinged. Thus it is that the High Priests of the Cult of Fun become (as our culture is rapidly becoming) Hitler with Mickey Mouse ears on, sacrificing the unFun to Bacchus and his consort, Euthanasia.

To this ghastly picture of an amusement park swept bare and empty, the Catholic Faith has, alone in our postmodern world, a reply. It is the reply of Sanity to mere Feeling, of Hope to mere Progress, of Love and Joy to mere Fun.

The Cult of Fun holds as dogma that feelings are trumps. To any assertion of truth, the ready answer of our culture is "That's true for you but not for me." This is thought by many to be an appeal to "reason" over against the "despotic" Christian call for faith in the unseen God. "If you need something to believe in," says our culture, "believe in Yourself." Anything rather than be "ordered around" by a transcendent God.

The idea at work here is that something is true if it feels true, but not if it is a fact. For feelings are internal to Me (and I am the source and center of all that is) but facts are external and therefore "imposed." Thus, one believes or disbelieves in everything from God to golf merely as a matter of taste. If God feels true to Me, then He exists. If not, then My Feelings have abolished Him with the same ease as a flyswatter abolishes a fly. The problem with this notion is simply that it is not God, but feelings, that die like flies. A Cult--and a culture--that bases its existence on Feelings may just as well be basing its existence on a weathervane, a light breeze, or a cloud formation. And clouds are not notable for their ability to withstand the assaults of tyrants who, believing in themselves rather than God, decide to muster an army and invade Poland, erect a gulag, or slaughter whole populations in Killing Fields, Cultural Revolutions, Great Leaps Forward, show trials, collectivizations, and sundry inventions of the human mind unordered by the transcendent God.

Over against such madness, the Church proposes for our belief a God who does not change and to Whom we are conformed, rather than a vague evolutionary ideal which always thinks our feelings are really neat. Such a God, whose splendor is precisely the "Splendor of the Truth" is a God who, so far from being either a chimera of piety or a metaphysical tyrant, is in fact solidity, health, normalcy and freedom itself. In the words of the old Thomists, He cannot be moved, and therefore He can move us to a place of sanity in our thinking which is not blown about by every feeling or obsession to come down the pike. He is Sanity.

The next thing the Catholic Faith can offer to our postmodern world is Hope instead of Progress. A moment ago I mentioned that many still speak of trust in oneself as far more reasonable than faith in an unseen God. This idea is not new. In fact, it is old hat, having been most enthusiastically promoted over two centuries ago by Enlightenment rationalists who classified themselves as committed to "brute fact" and Reason. For them, the awareness that the physical universe operated according to certain Laws seemed (mysteriously enough) like overwhelming proof that there was no Lawmaker. Instead they came to an unshakable faith in Science and the power of human reason to conquer all. And this profound faith in Reason has percolated down to the present day. Among its central dogmas was belief in the Future and the Coming Great Rosy Dawn of an Enlightened Humanity who live purely by reason and not by faith (invariably described by them as "superstition"). This Gospel According to Voltaire and H.G. Wells has had many modern apostles, perhaps none more influential than St. Gene Roddenberry.

Yet the irony is that, just as it has achieved its most widespread popular proclamation in our culture, faith in reason is now being laughed to scorn, not by Catholics (who have never denied the validity of human reason) but by atheists in the academy such as Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish who have finally figured out what the Church has been insisting upon since the Enlightenment: that the validity of human reason is itself dependent upon the mystical dogma that there is such a thing as Truth and a human person, made in the image of God, who can really apprehend that Truth. Such people, however, rather than returning to the Faith, instead choose to follow a sort of anti-logic and deny the validity of reason as just one more "superstition." Thus, the Reason which the Enlightened Naturalists trusted in to carry them to the Great Rosy Dawn has instead "progressed" to a denial of the very foundations of Reason itself. For if human beings are sheer accidental collisions of molecules, there is no reason to suppose that our capacity to reason is anything other than accidental either. As J.B.S. Haldane observed long ago, if our thoughts are simply and solely the result of a chance collision of molecules in our brains, we have no reason for supposing our thoughts are valid, and thus no reason for supposing our brains to be made of molecules. Worship of Reason has led to the denial of reason.

How could devotion to Reason come to such an absurd pass? Because such an ideology looks only to creatures (like science, power, race, class, gender... or Fun) for its final hope. And the creation, as Paul makes clear, has been subjected to futility (Rom. 8:20). Look there for hope while rejecting the supernatural Creator and you have placed yourself in the position of a person energetically sawing off the branch he is sitting on. As the Catholic Faith makes clear, we are made, not so much for the future as for Eternity, for something completely outside time altogether. That is, for God. This does not mean that Reason is worthless, nor that any of the creatures we love are bad. Indeed, one of the ironies of the present situation is that Catholics who defended faith 200 years ago against the fanatical rationalist, now defend reason against the fanatical irrationalist. But we do so with the clear awareness that mere reason, like all God's good critters, is limited. It can point you to God, but it can't unite you with Him and it certainly can't replace Him.

And this limitation is especially true of the Idol of Fun, which is perhaps the most tepid and depressing pseudo-god in our pantheon of cheap idols. But the Cult of Fun's loss is the gain of the Christian. For the very tawdriness of the Cult of Fun makes it much easier for the Catholic Faith to speak loudly, clearly and attractively to the postmodern world. For the Cult of Fun, compared to God who is Love is a Twinkie compared to the Great Feast of the Lamb; it is some ditzy gum-chewing chick in a bowling jacket compared to our long lost and deepest love; it is a medley of Bee Gees tunes on a tinny transistor radio compared to trumpets and angels and the sound of many waters. Because the Catholic Faith offers us the Love that made the worlds.

"But that sounds so serious," says the devotee of Fun, "what good is it attending to all this cosmic junk if I can't have my funnies?" To which the Faith replies, "It certainly is serious! But it is not sad or dull. For as G.K. Chesterton observed long ago, the opposite of funny is not serious; the opposite of funny is "not funny." Heaven (for which we are made and to which Christ calls us) will have all that the Cult of Fun promises but doesn't deliver. For Heaven is Joy and Joy is, as C.S. Lewis says, the serious business of Heaven. Fun is just a paper thin shaving from the top of the great Cake at the Wedding Feast of the Lamb which is, in the words of J.R.R. Tolkien, "Joy, Joy poignant as grief, beyond the walls of the world."

Such a Love and a Joy is what makes martyrs saints and saints martyrs. It is worth dying for when the Cult of Fun is barely worth living for. It is not for Nintendo and niceness that people throw away their lives like poems over a waterfall. It is for Love. It was not for a vague preacher who taught "Niceness is Nice" that men and women over 20 centuries went willingly to hunger, to suffer, to struggle, to rejoice and to die. It was for an Incarnate God who took us very seriously indeed; seriously enough to suffer death on a cross and rise again to everlasting Joy. All this is the stuff of real life, a real life that the disposable styrofoam Cult of Fun with its twinkies and trash cannot begin to give, yet which we, despite our fear and timidity, hunger and thirst for with our deepest being.

This little meditation began with the whimsical image of a lay theologian gobbled up by a big purple dinosaur. One of the central images of the book of Revelation is a more disturbing picture of the Christ nearly devoured by the "huge dragon, the ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan" (Rev 12:9). The dragon, be it noted, does not succeed. And so he comes down to earth "in great fury, for he knows he has but a short time" (Rev 12:12) and occupies himself with, among other things, creating the Cult of Fun. Starved himself, he starves its devotees by convincing them that man lives on bread alone. He teaches these prisoners to look no further than their next meal and so leaves them famished. For you can never get enough of what you don't really want.

But in God's mysterious purposes, the Church has been given, and is called to give, the Bread that is transfigured into the body and blood of Christ. It is this Bread for which we were made and which was prepared for us since the foundation of the world. It is this Bread for which the prisoners of the Cult of Fun hunger. And it is this Bread of Life and this Cup of Gladness which are the source and summit of the Joy that is vastly more than Fun. That is why the substance of the Catholic gospel is "Taste and see."

It is also why we as lay Catholics are called (as Maritain was) to bear witness to the Splendor of the Truth not merely with our words but with our whole lives. For the fact is, there is a queer intuition of truth in the grotesque image which began this essay. The devotee of the Cult of Fun will indeed be tasting your life and mine constantly to see whether we savor of Joy, which is the taste of the Bread of Life. If we do not, then he will return to the Egyptian leeks and onions offered in the Temple of Fun. But if we live in the Joy of God and He lives in us, then willy-nilly, the devotee of Fun will be drawn to the Lord of Joy. For Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit. Thus, and not otherwise shall the prophecy of Isaiah be fulfilled and another soul hear Christ saying, "Heed me, and you shall eat well, you shall delight in rich fare" (Is 55:2).

a low blow. You didn't read the article.

The mainstream press and elite Hollywood implies that religion is about denying anything pleasurable, including sex. The church has always said that pleasure has it's right place, and by obeying the limits the result is not neurosis but a well balanced personality.

Chesterton's book orthodoxy says that anti catholics ridicule the church as being against pleasure, because of it's teachings on suffering, and it's insistence that lust and greed etc. are sinful.

Then the anti Catholics ridicule the church when they hold fiestas and parties and cheerful celbrations like Polish weddings.

In the long run, a Polish wedding is a lot of fun, and ends in a happy couple making love and making children which most people outside the elite consider a good thing.

The elite imply that promiscuous sex and drugs are the only way to have fun. But these things lead to misery, disease, and loneliness...

The last few decades have been a case of Catholic Church meets the Brave New World. But now that our feel good culture has given us rampant abortion, rampant divorce, rampant pornography, rampant drug use, rampant homosexuality, rampant pre-marital sex, rampant venereal disease, rampant broken and shattered families and not least of all, rampant homosexual teenage boy rape right within the Church, the bow of the great ship of Church is turning slightly into the filthy current... Things have gotten so bad that the Church is realizing that it must fight or lose itself to the Brave (actually Cowardly) New World.

The mainstream press and elite Hollywood implies that religion is about denying anything pleasurable, including sex. The church has always said that pleasure has it's right place, and by obeying the limits the result is not neurosis but a well balanced personality.

Hollywood brings fleeting pleasures and despair - the Church brings great joy and freedom.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.