Celebrity is Fraud

I think this is a good thing to remember: excessive celebrity is a type of fraud. This is the conclusion reached by James Davidson Hunter in his book, To Change the World. How I’ve come to worry about the undue influence that celebrities are coming to have on the hearts and minds of evangelicals, being so easily accessible from the internet. Just because somebody has an article or sermon posted on the internet doesn’t mean that they are an authority or even remotely correct in what they are saying. We would all do well to remember that Christ is Lord, and there is One who deserves our ultimate attention. Common men will err. It is inevitable. We should all be leary of making too much of any one person, organization, church, or ministry.  May Christ be our King! The following is an excerpt from Hunter’s book:

Celebrity is, in effect, based on an inflated brilliance, accomplishment, or spirituality generated and perpetuated by publicity.  It is an artifice and, therefore, a type of fraud. Where it once served power and patrons, in our own day it mainly serves itself and its pecuniary interests.  Celebrity must, of necessity, draw attention to itself. In American Christianity, the relentless pressure to raise funds within churches and para-church organization reinforces the pressure toward celebrity, with an endless flow of direct mail, advertising, and ghostwritten sermons, speeches, articles, editorials, and so on. These pressures are difficult to resist even for those who, by instinct, might find celebrity either tasteless or problematic. The reason is that celebrity is not just a certain kind of status one achieves but it is also a powerful institution the entire structure of which is oriented toward burnishing a leader’s image and projecting his or her visibility (pg. 260).