GODSTUFF: Oops, we did it again.

Three years ago, the Associated Press had written Britney

Spears’ obituary. Just in case.

Spears was 26 and seemingly mid-freefall in an epic tumble from

grace. A divorce. A custody battle. Barefoot trips into gas station

bathrooms. Tattoos and Cheetos and Big Gulps. Strange wigs, bizarre

accents and even stranger company.

And that was before she shaved her head.

Britney circa 2008 was a train wreck, one that many of us couldn’t

ignore and some relished with voyeuristic glee.

Images of the formerly “perfect” teen idol in a state of shocking

dishevelment and acting in an increasingly erratic fashion plastered the

front pages of supermarket tabloids and celebrity magazines.

Video footage of her latest debacles — run-ins with police, visits

to the hospital and to rehab, driving aimlessly around Hollywood for

hours on end, flashing her private parts on an outing with Paris Hilton

— made the evening news and racked up millions of hits on websites

across the world.

Spears’ personal tragedy and public dismantling became a twisted

form of entertainment. Commentators wondered whether the ultimate

destination of her meteoric rise to fame was to crash and burn into

oblivion.

Today, Spears is 29 and her rehabilitation (and re-ascension to the

stratosphere of superstardom) is in full swing.

Collectively, we placed her on a pedestal, knocked her off, picked

her back up and set her back upon it. Only time will tell whether that

cruel cycle will repeat itself.

In his new book, The Exile of Britney Spears: A Tale of 21st

Century Consumption, Christopher Smit, a professor of media studies at

Calvin College, examines the role we — the consumers of the product

Spears is selling — have played in her creation, near destruction and

re-invention.

At once scholarly and eminently accessible, Smit’s book chronicles

Spears’ creation as a cultural icon and analyzes what her story says

about the state of our souls.

“Britney began as a member of a spiritual culture, one which cradled

her, crafted her and called her out,” Smit writes in a chapter titled

“The Baptists.”

“As a Southern Baptist, young Britney would have been called to

consider the world in a very specific way — in particular, she would

have been asked to see the outside world as something which needed her

— a world that needed Jesus to be seen through her,” he writes. “She

began her life with a mission, one which asked her to live for others.”

Spears began her life as a daughter of the South, a middle child in

a middle-class family in rural Louisiana, gifted with a powerful voice

and an even more powerful desire to perform.

Like Elvis Presley before her, Spears began her journey to fame

singing in the church choir. Seemingly overnight, she traded in her

choir robe for Mickey Mouse ears as an employee of the Disney company,

and then for a midriff-bearing Lolita costume made famous in her first

hit video, “Hit Me Baby One More Time.”

“She sings because she loves us, but also in order for us to love

her; she sings for God, but also for heaps and heaps of money; she waits

for the right man yet flaunts for all, wearing a Catholic schoolgirl

outfit,” Smit writes. “The hyper-public nature of Britney Spears the

performer forced Britney the Baptist to deal with these issues head-on,

in the cultural spotlight, way too early in life.

“How many 17-year-old girls are asked, on `60 Minutes,’ to defend a

worldview? Then again, how many 17-year-olds get to ask their friends,

`What should I wear when all the world is watching?'”

Smit argues that team Britney was complicit in her rise to fame, but

“we developed the picture” of what she would become, “she offered the

negative.” In other words, we, as active or passive consumers of her

public image, are equally complicit in all this.

“We have been armchair anthropologists speaking without conviction,

articulating without consequence, marking without a map,” he says.

Consuming Spears as a product or commodity — chewing her up, and

spitting her out — is a kind of “unconscious cannibalism,” Smit says,

an act of dehumanization that is “not only mindless and effortless — it

is also a … sort of violence.”

Many of us now are closely watching the public unraveling of another

celebrity, Charlie Sheen. His descent into madness and addiction is our

entertainment du jour, one that the actor seems to be offering up with a

certain relish.

Spears’ exile did not end with her demise. But it could have.

As Sheen’s story continues to unfold, we would do well to be

chastened by the words with which Smit concludes his exploration of

Spears’ rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-riches story.

“It’s left to us what we will allow her to do … what we will allow

her to be,” Smit says. “That is the result of breaking. That is the

outcome of exile.”

This commentary originally appeared via Religion News Service.