Desperately Seeking Fame

One of the major ends contemporary consumers seek is celebrity. A consumer culture seems to revolve around celebrity stars who tell us what we need and should want. Our attachment to these figures is not simply affectional. Rather, such people become a sort of materialistic guru to us. They preside over a goods-based spirituality in which they are the deities, we are the worshippers, and the means by which we ourselves might become transcendent is in purchasing.

David Beckham is one such figure, an insight developed in Ellis Cashmore’s Beckham on the English soccer player David Beckham, now in Los Angeles. It’s a good read, and here’s a good quotation from it on this topic: “The excitement, love, glamour, and intrigue proposed not by Beckham but by the narratives drawn about his life say more about contemporary culture than about the player himself. They tells us that we now have a generation hooked on the irrational pleasures of celebrity watching, or, more accurately, celebrity fantasizing. People dream about becoming fabulously wealthy and globally famous but they have no effective means of achieving these ambitions.” This is a telling quotation. I’m interested here in how Christians become consumers of celebrity. In today’s age, even gospel preachers subscribe to “branding” and become larger-than-life entities.

Is this a healthy development? Or is it an accomodation, no, an embrace of a culture gone mad?