Orangepekoe

This week we are collectively getting sick of celebrities, especially the kind for whom their only claim to fame is being famous. I have ignored most of reality TV, still being traumatized by the Ron and Amber Survivor season finale. I was proud to be the last person to know who Susan Boyle was. I remember in a grocery store I saw her picture, a normal looking, unassuming picture with a caption, the most famous person in the world. I thought, I don’t know who this woman is but she’s probably being exploited because now reality TV is trying to get the people who don’t want to be celebrities into the madness. The next time I heard of her, in the super market tabloids again, she was being checked into a hospital where she had some sort of emotional collapse.

This story is backdropped by the on going saga of a Pennsylvania couple with eight children (two multiple birth pregnancies) who are dealing with rumors and allegations and possible proof of infidelity (http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/juneweb-only/122-11.0.html). And as their family goes into trauma, the cameras keep rolling and the ratings are soaring.

And finally, another reality show featuring celebrities who are celebrities for being professional celebrities features two stars who quit the show which highlights competition for minor amenities in a Costa Rican jungle. This story was the most haunting because part of what the cameras caught was a faith commitment.

from the (http://www.masslive.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2009/06/heidi_and_spencer_quit_nbcs_im.html)article, a seasoned actor and reality show veteran who described himself as a nondenominational born-again Christian offered to baptize Celebrity A whose wife, Celebrity B, a professed Christian. The sacrament took place in a “picturesque stream.”
Toward the end of the article, the writer wrote, “Soon after that, the couple declared they had had enough, and were getting out of there.”

What is so haunting is that on some level, I think the couple and the seasoned actor were sincere. However, the show was not and it managed to make a very intimate religious experience into a marketing marketing moment. If Pennsylvania couple’s family drama and Susan’s exploitation is not enough to make you shut off the television, the baptism on demand should.

Over the last few months, I have been subject to people who felt they needed to go out of their way to tell me how meaningless baptism was and how it was awful that infants were baptized and that baptism should happen only when people are adults and they are ready to make a public confession. However, a reality TV show is not quite what Jesus had in mind for a public confession. How public is a reality TV show? What public is watching? Or, what crowd is being a voyeur. There is a difference between witnessing and voyeurism. The witness has a stake in the commitment being made. The voyeur is detached and the event has little or no meaning for the detached voyeur. Perhaps the critics of infant baptism are demanding the faith profession should be made in the company of strangers who have no attachment to the vows being made. This is clearly not what is meant for the witnesses of a baptism either. For in a baptismal service, the witnesses must acknowledge that they support the action being taken and they are active participants in the faith journey of the one being baptized. However, I have been to a few baptisms of adults and some of them are quite touching while others invite the audience to be an unattached voyeur (that’s actually rare, but who knows, now that reality TV has shown us a new form or marketed baptism).

Perhaps the reality TV baptism was the last straw for Heidi and Spencer, not because it did not have meaning, but because it had meaning and reality TV is not the venue for profound spiritual experiences, just like TV (at least in the US, for now) avoids too much shows of sexuality because of the boundaries of intimacy and the p word (which I won’t write because it will get caught in a google search.) I find the Heidi and Spencer episode haunting because it took one of the most sacred acts of Christendom and made it into spiritual p (yes, the word from the previous sentence, rhymes with horn). This is heart breaking.

I am proud to no longer own a TV and I have missed the last ten years of ridiculousness on the b tube (don’t want to use the b word either, rhymes with oob).