Who Do You Know?

Which musician, speaker, movie star, or athlete do you love? Lauren Daigle? Brené Brown?  Ryan Gosling? LeBron James?

When we use the specific word “love” to describe our relationship with figures like these, we are participating in “celebrity culture.” This culture is woven into nearly everything we consume – and it’s so deeply enmeshed that most of us barely notice it. 

But do we truly “love” these celebrities? And what happens to us when we use such a powerful word to describe our relationship with these famous people?

My most recent guest on the Good Faith podcast, Katelyn Beaty, is the author of the influential book “Celebrities for Jesus.” In this episode, she analyzes what happens to our collective spirituality when the church attaches itself to celebrity Christian preachers, authors, musicians, and more. It’s a fascinating topic and I encourage you to listen.

Katelyn was speaking about how the church collectively relates to Christian celebrities. But this dynamic is even more pervasive in our individual relationship with secular figures. For instance, I often say that I “absolutely love” Prue Leith, the co-star of the Great British Baking Show that my wife and I watch on many nights. My considerably younger (and hipper) friend tells me she “adores” the musician Bad Bunny.

But I’ve never met Prue Leith. I don’t really know how she relates to the show’s lowest ranking staff when she’s off camera. I don’t know how she fights with her husband. My friend doesn’t even know Bad Bunny’s real name, much less how he treats his parents.

This disconnect points to a deep and largely unnoticed change in modern life: celebrity culture has eliminated a long held prerequisite for declarations of love: namely that we know someone personally. As my friend and regular Good Faith guest Andy Crouch has noted, we now feel a deep connection to our favorite celebrity all the while lacking any meaningful insight into that person’s character behind a carefully cultivated public image. We now regularly pronounce love for someone we don’t actually know.

One might protest, “With celebrities, when I say “love” I just mean “like” or “enjoy.” But the semantics reveal an underlying and radical shift in human relationships. A key trait of love is how it causes us to lavish time and attention on the people we love. According to the best studies, Americans spend an average of 4-5 hours per day consuming some form of celebrity-centric content. In contrast, they average 34 minutes per day engaging in person with friends. An astounding 40% of adults in Great Britain go at least 3 days without a face to face conversation with another person.

We must now proclaim love for our digital celebrities because we have a shrinking number of people in our embodied lives to whom we can employ that verb.

For eons, we humans spent the majority of our time in face to face interactions. In just a few short decades, we have replaced this time with the private consumption of celebrity driven content. But the faux love of celebrity culture can never deliver the real thing. This is why those who are more entertained than ever before in human history are simultaneously the most lonely and sad of any previous generation.

God offers an alternative. His love for us is infused with an intimate knowledge of us, which encompasses how he “knitted us together in our mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13) to how he knows us by “every hair on our head” (Matthew 10:30). 

For Jesus, love and knowledge are inseparable. In his most extended teaching on the nature of love (found in John 13-15), he emphasizes that the presence of personal knowledge is critical:  “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15).

We most fully participate in this love – one that is infinitely deeper and richer than celebrity love – when we love others in this way. The way Jesus combined love and knowledge with his disciples is the blueprint for how we relate with others in our lives: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.” (John 13:34-35)

Discussing the many practical steps we can follow this blueprint is beyond the scope of this little essay. But it certainly begins with conscious intention. Left to the unconscious, our daily (and especially nightly) practices will naturally follow the path of least resistance. And it is infinitely easier, at the end of a tiring day, to fire up the remote or scroll through our feeds than it is to do the messy work of reaching out, scheduling, meeting, and otherwise working through the messiness of embodied relationships.

I know this because I too succumb to this temptation. And there’s nothing wrong per se with any given act of media consumption by itself. But when this practice consistently crowds out human relationships — especially with those outside our immediate family — we are distorting an essential aspect of how God meant for us to live.

I sense God calling me to set my intention to follow the harder but much more rewarding way of imaging his love via concrete relationships. If you feel the same tug, I invite you to join me. Reply to this email with your thoughts – do you struggle with celebrity love? Have you found ways to prioritize real, embodied connection? And with your permission, I’d love to share them with our Good Faith audience.

A final aside: notice I said “the Good Faith audience.” I consistently refrain from ever using the term “Good Faith community.” In the Biblical vision, a Christian community (the koinōnia) is a local group of followers who share life via embodied practices of eating, serving, worshiping, loving, and more. People who do not know each other and only share the practice of downloading the same podcast can never be a community. But we can be what I call (at the end of every Good Faith episode) a campfire: a place where we take a break from our varied journeys in order to share stories and insights. Finding a good campfire can be especially vital when we feel lost in the world. The guidance we receive around such a fire – even a digitally lit one  – can sustain us in our journey home. Back home to our hearth, the place where we actually live, with the people we deeply love.