Why do so many musical superstars think that their careers are part of a divine plan?
Before they were famous, many of the biggest pop stars in the world believed that God wanted them to be famous, that this was his plan for them, just as it was his plan for the rest of us not to be famous. Conversely, many equally talented but slightly less famous musicians I’ve interviewed felt their success was accidental or undeserved—and soon after fell out of the limelight.
As I compiled and analyzed these interviews for my new book, I reached a surprising conclusion: Believing that God wants you to be famous actually improves your chances of being famous. Of course, from the standpoint of traditional theology, even in the Calvinistic world of predestination, God is much more concerned with the fate of an individual’s soul than his or her secular success, and one’s destiny is unknowable. So what’s helping these stars is not so much religion as belief—specifically, the belief that God favors their own personal, temporal success over that of almost everyone else.
[. . .]
Let’s call it competitive theism, a self-styled spirituality that can be overlaid on any religion and has nothing to do with personal morality. This faith gap, I’ve noticed in the interviews I’ve done, is often what sets the merely famous apart from the ridiculously famous. It can make the difference between achieving what’s possible and accomplishing what seems impossible.
February 14th, 2011 | 12:10 pm
Geniuses, particularly creative geniuses, experience something similar – if you research the lives of the great writers and composers, like Mozart and Dickens and Joyce, what you invariably find is an overwhelming belief in their own talent and destiny, divorced from all rational considerations and normally emerging before they were young enough to have produced any enduring art.
February 14th, 2011 | 1:06 pm
It is an interesting question. If God is responsible for hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters, I think it’s only fair to hold him responsible for artistic disasters like Lady Gaga and the Black-eyed Peas Super Bowl show. Of course, believing that God wants you to be a celebrity pop star can either be rooted in revelation or delusion. If the latter, then we’re up against the problem of free will, wherein God allows the world to be subjected to the many consequences of the Fall (including bad music and narcissistic “artists”) until the day of Christ’s return. Come quickly Lord Jesus.
February 14th, 2011 | 1:20 pm
What Charlie said. God is responsible on the sovereign sense, but that’s quite a different thing from saying that God actually wanted Lady Gaga to achieve the kind of fame she has, in the way she has done it, and that her conviction of her destiny was something other than hubris and/or delusion.
February 14th, 2011 | 2:48 pm
This might be termed “giving them enough rope to hang themselves.”
February 14th, 2011 | 2:52 pm
I’ll approach this from the opposite direction. One can posit that God does not “cause” evil, but rather *allows* it to exist. Therefore, God may be held blameless for the reality of man made suffering like genocide, slavery, and Lady Gaga.
February 14th, 2011 | 3:52 pm
Which reminds me of one of my all-time favorite “Onion” headlines:
“Quarterback gives Jesus the credit for his team’s loss”
February 14th, 2011 | 8:38 pm
Or maybe fame is a curse, and the more people like those mentioned in the article do things that displease God, the more He does actually want to curse them… and so the fame comes. Maybe that’s how it works sometimes.
February 14th, 2011 | 11:40 pm
On fame.
At the Grammy’s The Avett Brothers performed with Mumford and Sons and backed up Bob Dylan on Maggies Farm.
The Avett’s put down a marker back when they started out almost a decade ago, with their “Salvation Song.” It might be worth contrasting their anthem with all the chest-thumping of the superstars:
We came for salvation/We came for family/
We came for all that’s good that’s how we’ll walk away/We came to break the bad/We came to cheer the sad/We came to leave behind the world a better way … .
AND THEN THIS:
And they may pay us off in fame/But that is not why we came/And if it compromises truth then we will go.
I like that.
My interview with Bob Crawford of The Avett Brothers here:
http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2010/march/bobcrawford-avettbro.html
February 15th, 2011 | 9:15 am
Thanks for the Avett Bros. interview, Keith.
I saw Lady Gaga on 60 Minutes Sunday night and was reminded of a line from a Johnny Cash song that went something like this: “In rivers and in politics, the lightest things rise to the top.” Gaga does not seem to be weighed down by any kind of thought. It is not by a miracle that her career has risen in today’s market. It’s just physics. She said (apparently channeling Barney the Purple Dinosaur) that the point of her act is to get young people to “believe in themselves.” You can only feel a kind of pity.
What is odd to me is how an act so utterly hackneyed passes as creative. When the most tired gestures of the avant-garde are recycled yet again to become yet another version of the same old bubblegum pop (I mean, you know, she sounds like Cher), perhaps it’s time for a reevaluation of things.
February 15th, 2011 | 12:00 pm
Yeah, “what’s the weirdest, stupidest-looking, most shocking thing I can both come up with and get away with” is NOT “creativity.” Far more disturbing than Lady Gaga’s penchant for such, is how many people are confused on that point.
February 16th, 2011 | 10:14 pm
Personally, I’d rather have someone believe that God wants them to get up on stage and sing than (as more than one Old Testament figure believed) kill entire populations of men, women and “suckling infants” with the edge of a sword.
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