I wrote a post about cultural altruism hubs. That post, and this one, which is related, discuss a kind of organizational or "scenic" structure or structures that people could build. I don't feel like this is a thing I should pursue, so I'm not looking to try to build those structures myself. But I think the ideas are worth writing up. Maybe someone else will find them useful.
I often write to a secular audience, or to no audience / to myself. But in this case, I write more to a Christian audience.
Creative people are especially susceptible to spiritual attack. Culture war brings out Satan. Some cultural-spiritual warfare is fought by "foot soldiers" (through interpersonal contact). Others through "air support". Airplanes are sophisticated machines. Books, movies, etc. are machines made out of thoughts and images. Culture "flies in the air". So producing cultural artifacts puts new "airplanes" or "drones" in the sky. These artifacts fight each other and fight people on the ground. With good air support, ground troops can have an easier time. So (I think) with good cultural artifacts, interpersonal evangelism and discipleship can go better.
Los Angeles is a center of the movie and music industries, which manufacture cultural artifacts (that part of the "air war"). Those industries are not always kind to the people who try to work in them. Many people have dreams of success in them, but only a few can succeed. There are stories of exploitation in those industries. This can affect everyone who tries to "make it". The overall culture of these industries seems to largely be non-Christian. Christians trying to work in those industries may experience as much exploitation and as many broken dreams of success as non-Christians. They may also experience culture shock and spiritual attack (for instance, being invited to hedonistic parties (something that I would guess happens), or being acculturated to the dominant secular culture to the point of compromising their faith). They may also experience hostility, due to their beliefs.
Are Christian creatives in Los Angeles missionaries? Arguably yes. So they can be supported and cared for like any other kind of missionary. (I recommend reading Serving as Senders Today and The Reentry Team, both by Neal Pirolo, to understand what I have in mind by "support" and "care". Briefly, churches or other sending teams can provide moral support, prayer support, send and receive messages about what's going on in the field, maybe money or logistical support, and help in missionaries transitioning in and out of service.)
Creative missionaries could care for fellow creatives and engage in evangelism and discipleship like any other kind of missionary. But they also "translate the Bible into the native language" of their fellow creatives, by being creative themselves, and/or into the language of the US in general, or even of other parts of the world, where LA culture industries reach.
I feel like if I were a suspicious secular person (perhaps an ex-Christian), an incorporated missionary agency sending financially supported creative missionaries into LA would be disturbing and lead to bad press (if evangelical Christians think that there is an oppressive, militant "other" in the cultural world, so do secular people -- everyone is "David" seeing "Goliath" in each other). Creative people tend to have their own ideas and some might not want to work with a missionary agency themselves. (It's good for creative people to be independent-minded in order to see what other people don't see.) Financially supported missionaries might be harder to relate to by struggling actors, writers, musicians, directors, etc. that they may be trying to reach.
So I think maybe the best way to implement creative missions is to set up structures to care for and support the creative Christians who find themselves in Los Angeles, as though they have sent themselves already, but maybe without enough support.
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Implementation:
I don't know anything about what might already be going on in this area. I can imagine that something like this is already going on.
I think churches in Los Angeles are already doing some of this support and care work. What they might not have is the sense that their creatives are missionaries dealing with spiritual warfare, culture shock, etc., and not know as much as they could of how to be good "senders" and "carers". Perhaps what is needed is to equip those churches.
Also, creatives might not have the sense that they are missionaries on a mission field. They might benefit from additional teaching and encouragement in having a really Christian worldview and practice in their art and life.
Other ideas:
1. Establishing refuge places in Southern California
so that people can (affordably) get out of LA to take a break from it.
2. Connecting churches that have creatives to creatives in LA. (Not
every church is a good place for a creative person to be.)
Southern California (plus northern Baja California) could be seen as having two areas of strategic significance for cultural people: Tijuana which is a gateway to Latin America and/or to understanding the non-American, non-"developed" world; and the cultural artifact manufacturing center of Los Angeles. In between is San Diego, a quieter place (maybe the military in San Diego is of cultural strategic significance?).
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Caveats:
I have not spent a lot of time in LA. I was involved in a low-budget film production that got actors from LA and have seen the incentives for exploitation and selling yourself in filmmaking. I can sense a certain amount of felt unhappiness and spiritual darkness from Los Angeles filmmaking (Hollywood and I guess "aspiring Hollywood" or indie film productions). I don't have direct experience with the music industry in LA.
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Postscript:
What about film directors? I mentioned them above. They are employers, people in positions of power. But they are at the mercy of their funding sources. Directors have to cobble together funding and employees from various sources, and then work intensely during production, with long pre-production and post-production times. Once finished, they sell their product on the market and hope for critical and financial success, which is uncertain. A lot of money rides on what they do. If they lose too much money, maybe they can't work again. It sounds like a risky, stressful, "disestablished" line of work.
This sounds like perhaps a more intense (or not) version of what entrepreneurs in general go through.
A film director could do the wrong thing because they are under some kind of pressure. Perhaps it is true of any kind of entrepreneur. Or business executive. How much wrongdoing comes from powerful people who are (subjectively or objectively) in insecure positions? Perhaps it would be good to come up with care and support for them.
Maybe if a person doesn't have money, that's their hard limit, and only with additional funding would they be able to do the right thing. (Maybe there could be funding to help them do the right thing?) With better support (prayer, moral, logistic, communication) and the expectation that they can get care if they fail, they might have more courage to do the right thing in marginal cases where they may not really be risking their success, (where perhaps it is some kind of delusion of danger or sin that puts its thumb on the scale of their perception of risk), or even in self-sacrificial cases where they have to sacrifice their success (their business venture/film? / career?) to do the right thing.
(Funding to help do the right thing: a director could develop a relationship with a funding agency that would commit to providing at least a significant part of the director's funding for each of their films, conditional on them doing the right thing and not necessarily on them being commercially successful. In other words, provide grace, or slack, so that directors can fail commercially if they do the right thing on set or in their other operations.)
(Conservative talk radio, to me, sounds like the voice of people who are suspicious and hardworking -- maybe small business owners who could easily go out of business and who have to deal with other insecure people who might cut corners or make untrustworthy deals to survive. Can there be care and support for them?)
Likewise, people in the spiritually dark worlds of the elites. Do Washington, DC churches adequately care for politicians and staffers who fight a culture war of their own? Political theater is part of the "air war" that movies are also involved in. Political decisions and governmental implementations of them have cultural consequences.
(Silicon Valley sounds like a place with its darkness and its own, different culture. What about it?)
People with bad reputations (criminals, prison guards, and police, for instance) may need care and support. It requires discernment how to support someone who has directed their life toward wrongdoing.
Like with creative missionaries in LA, I don't know anything about what might already be going on with care / support for people in these areas.
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The church I grew up in had a sign over the door as you went out, that said "You are now entering the mission field". Probably everyone could see themselves as a missionary, and everyone experiences occupational hazards as they interface with the world. And so everyone could be sent and cared for -- by other people who also could be sent and cared for. Do churches send and care for their own pastors? (Maybe pastors should have some support from outside their own congregations.)
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Everything is powerful, culturally. Everything sends a message. The way you do business as a small business owner affects the overall culture, the sense of how things are and how people act. Similarly with the products a business owner releases on the market. Each one is a movie or book, conditioning people's minds. The caring professions are culturally powerful.
This raises the question: if everyone has cultural power, if each person can say something that has a significant effect on someone (at least on him- or herself), what should you say? Are you the missionary for God and the truth, or for an off-flavor of God and a somewhat misleading truth? You have to seek to know what is true, so that you can correct what is wrong.
This process of self-correction has to go on on a societal level. Society (people within it) must speak against what is believed by society (other people within it). What does it take to oppose a consensus or effective consensus? What if the consensus involves the caring structures that you can find? Who will care for you when you burn out? Will the price of getting care be that you have to stop pointing out what's wrong?
So as much as care and support sound like a good thing, for at least some people, those who would point out what is least popular, it may be good to develop independence from human support and care. A wise society concerned with protecting itself from its own blind spots might try to develop the strength behind that independence in people, and not only promote care and support for people. For a believer in God, deriving strength from God, rather than from people, is a way to be strong enough to say what's unpopular.
It's possible for Christian (church-based) culture to somewhat discourage the individual from seeing things from their own perspective, and instead tries to enmesh them in a social organism. An individual church, and many individual people, will fare better if they are simply in-some-sense-"properly" interrelated socially. But Christianity as a whole suffers if it becomes blind due to its success in orienting individuals toward the points of view of their nearby congregations, which all can potentially be misguided.
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