Several decades ago I attended a midweek worship service at the Brooklyn Tabernacle with a family friend, and the vibe as we entered the room was very similar to what is being described in this article and what is eloquently sounded in the accompanying podcast. Back in the 1740s, when the first Great Awakening happened in Connecticut (a…
Several decades ago I attended a midweek worship service at the Brooklyn Tabernacle with a family friend, and the vibe as we entered the room was very similar to what is being described in this article and what is eloquently sounded in the accompanying podcast. Back in the 1740s, when the first Great Awakening happened in Connecticut (as described by Jonathan Edwards), what I'm calling a vibe was framed as "enthusiasm": a powerful, unstable, indisputable flow of collective feeling that feels to those within the charmed circle as though all fear, all withholding, has disappeared, leaving only the tenderest, most vulnerable sort of love. Actually, check that: in Edwards's time, the predicate to such enthusiasm, such mass conversion, was the harshest sort of jeremiadic warning: a ministerial thundering-down about how close the pits of hell were "at this very moment." God's wrath was right there. So, come to Jesus! Here, though, there was no jeremiad, merely an invitation to beloved community in Christ. And yet, if you listen closely, it's clear that hovering behind this contemporary scene of mass conversion IS some sort of terrible fear: fear of being cast out by the ravenous maw of the social media matrix; fear of meaninglessness and lovelessness; fear of being suddenly thrust into the scene of a mass shooting. In some sense no explicit jeremiad is needed because contemporary life, mediated through mass media and social media, has become a kind of incipient hell of its own. So it's not surprising that a specific set of young people, both religiously primed and impressionable, yearning for human connection and a love-blessed alternative to that contemporary mediated hell, just wants to come together, sing songs, sway, and feel the love. That's what's going on here, in my view. The feeling in the room is real--and communicable. Listening to Reingold's report on iPods as I jogged, I found my own eyes misting as the sonic landscape took me back to Jim Cymbala and his wife and the Brooklyn Tabernacle and its choir, the feeling of walking into a large shared space filled with people praying unabashedly in public, flowing freely in fellowship, nobody judging anybdy. NO JUDGING. That's key. Love accepts, it doesn't judge. Social media, and especially Twitter, judges incredibly harshly, hanging you out to dry precisely as Jonathan Edwards sought to in "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Our contemporary hell is "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Social Media Flash-Mob." Those students in Kentucky yearned for more than that. I salute them for acting on their yearning, for remembering and acting on the deeper, older magic that lies in beloved community, beyond the icy, fear-based pleasures of scapegoating. They've got much to teach us.
Several decades ago I attended a midweek worship service at the Brooklyn Tabernacle with a family friend, and the vibe as we entered the room was very similar to what is being described in this article and what is eloquently sounded in the accompanying podcast. Back in the 1740s, when the first Great Awakening happened in Connecticut (as described by Jonathan Edwards), what I'm calling a vibe was framed as "enthusiasm": a powerful, unstable, indisputable flow of collective feeling that feels to those within the charmed circle as though all fear, all withholding, has disappeared, leaving only the tenderest, most vulnerable sort of love. Actually, check that: in Edwards's time, the predicate to such enthusiasm, such mass conversion, was the harshest sort of jeremiadic warning: a ministerial thundering-down about how close the pits of hell were "at this very moment." God's wrath was right there. So, come to Jesus! Here, though, there was no jeremiad, merely an invitation to beloved community in Christ. And yet, if you listen closely, it's clear that hovering behind this contemporary scene of mass conversion IS some sort of terrible fear: fear of being cast out by the ravenous maw of the social media matrix; fear of meaninglessness and lovelessness; fear of being suddenly thrust into the scene of a mass shooting. In some sense no explicit jeremiad is needed because contemporary life, mediated through mass media and social media, has become a kind of incipient hell of its own. So it's not surprising that a specific set of young people, both religiously primed and impressionable, yearning for human connection and a love-blessed alternative to that contemporary mediated hell, just wants to come together, sing songs, sway, and feel the love. That's what's going on here, in my view. The feeling in the room is real--and communicable. Listening to Reingold's report on iPods as I jogged, I found my own eyes misting as the sonic landscape took me back to Jim Cymbala and his wife and the Brooklyn Tabernacle and its choir, the feeling of walking into a large shared space filled with people praying unabashedly in public, flowing freely in fellowship, nobody judging anybdy. NO JUDGING. That's key. Love accepts, it doesn't judge. Social media, and especially Twitter, judges incredibly harshly, hanging you out to dry precisely as Jonathan Edwards sought to in "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Our contemporary hell is "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Social Media Flash-Mob." Those students in Kentucky yearned for more than that. I salute them for acting on their yearning, for remembering and acting on the deeper, older magic that lies in beloved community, beyond the icy, fear-based pleasures of scapegoating. They've got much to teach us.