Pop Revolutions

JON: In our latest issue of The Other Journal, we focus on "Pop Revolutions." You’ve talked about being wary of revolutions that are commodified within a consumer-capitalist system. How do you discern that—encouraging a revolution while we live in a culture that wants to commodify revolutions?

SHANE: It’s very tricky. There’s a great book by Herbert Marcuse called One Dimensional Man.6 It talks about how the dominant culture and pattern is able to absorb anything and that revolutions have become a sort of appendage. And so when you have thousands and thousands of protestors that show up to the Republican Convention, it only shows the power of the Republican Conventions, especially in the newsstands.

I always think that it won’t be long before you can buy gas-masks for protests that are made by Lockheed-Martin, so that everything is able to find it’s place and to be consumed and marketed within the larger culture. You know, the picture of the rebel sells. The picture of Che Guevara on the front of a coffee-cup.

But I think that it’s one of those things where you have to be wise as a serpent, innocent as a dove. For instance, there was one article about us in the New York Times that they called "Rebels With a Cross," and so we’ve had that kind of a danger for ourselves. And we’ve had Time Magazine, ABC Nightline, all these sleek people that want to do stories.

We’re very careful about that—we discern it together and rarely do we do much of that anymore with all the hype. We’re careful that we tell the story ourselves. Usually the story that they want is about this privileged group of people who have moved into a poor neighborhood and are doing all this great work for the neighborhood. And that can be very disempowering to our neighbors who have lived and survived and who are caring for each other. So we just have to be careful about that.

I think we’ve learned a lot from watching other groups, like Emergent.7 One of my critiques of Emergent would be that it’s become incredibly narcissistic, and so you just end up talking about talking. It’s one thing to say, "Life happens when we sit around a bar and talk theology." It’s another thing to sit at a bar and talk about sitting at a bar talking about theology. You know? And so you can end up really sucking the life out of a movement.

This is why I’m not too excited to do conferences and workshops on New Monasticism or the Movement, or things like that. Wendell Berry wrote a great article called "In Distrust of Movements" where he kind of gets at that;8 he warns not to fall in love with some big vision but to pay attention to the ingredients of it, like life together.

Bonhoeffer says it really well: "If we’re in love with our vision of community, we’ll destroy it, but if we really love the people around us, we’ll create community." That’s been really important.

I’ve seen that in church growth movement, where you can really rip the congregation apart trying to build your seven-point strategy for church growth. Or within a progressive activist community, people can just tear each other apart with their "vision for a better world" and can be very, very aggressive and judgmental and hurtful to each other. I have seen the faces that this takes everywhere.

I wrote an article on our website in reaction to some of that. It’s called "The Marketable Revolution," and it talks about the dangers of that.9 It’s a temptation of Jesus to be culturally relevant. Most of the people I really admire within the Church’s history have actually called into question everything that was relevant in the culture and also many of the really ugly things that Christianity developed in the quest to be relevant to the culture.