So Wally, a wacky DJ, a wanna-be Howard Stern, was a nice guy who “saw the good in everybody.”
That was mistake No. 1.
Then he got a great gig in radio as a drive-time DJ who looked for the negative hook in every story to drive his show and ratings. And he was good at being bad. He “couldn’t believe he was getting paid to do this job.” He would “sleep at the radio station.” But he was becoming “jaded and bitter.”
In short, being a mean-spirited smart aleck was taking its toll on his soul and affecting his marriage. Being a jerk was even more deleterious than than all the drugs he did.
So he decided to take two years off to “reconnect with God.” It proved just the right balm for his heart and mind, as well as for his family life.
But he was now out of money. So he went back to doing the only thing he knew how to do.
“You know this is going to mean that me and God are done for a while,” Wally told his wife.
So he went down to Atlanta, a “massive Heritage station,” but the world of big-time radio proved a den of iniquity, “a little bit of insanity, a little bit of debauchery, a lot of dysfunction, and that’s where my life went for a while. I still had my personal life where I’m teaching Sunday school…and the rule was ‘You can’t listen to my radio show…this is not good for you.’”
So he had a hard choice to make: God or gold. “You have to decide which man you’re going to be, and be that,” his long-suffering wife told him.
So he left mainstream radio and went into Christian radio. And it was all rainbows and hallelujahs.
Wrong.
“They hated me!” Turns out the guy continued to talk frankly about “having a bad day…about losing my temper and, you know, about not looking anything like Jesus, and to a lot of people, that’s not what Christian radio was. It was ‘Everything’s fine.’”
So “serving the Lord” proved to me a mass of headaches. But “I found joy, and that was a huge turning point for me.”
A nice little CBN segment on vocation, right? Or is it a nice little CBN segment on returning to the ghetto of “Christian media”?
I would loved to have asked him whether he could have stepped back from his mainstream career just a bit and tweaked his schtick, his gimmick, so as to hold on to his venue without losing his salvation, so to speak. I mean, he had to make adjustments for his new, Christiany audience, no? Or was the world of “real” radio so vicious that it was impossible to succeed without going to hell?
Look, if an evangelical Christian audience is your audience, if they’re the folks you know and who speak your language and whom you want to entertain, God bless. If you fashion yourself some kind of mediator between the world and the church, syphoning the redemptive bits for Christian consumption and spitting out the toxins, OK. Nothing wrong with that.
But I do wonder how young artists and entertainers and would-be media mavens internalize messages such as Wally’s (and the hundreds of similar stories CBN has been running since the world was supposed to end in the 1980s). I think many if not most would like a little taste of the Big Time, even if it’s with a wink and a nod, knowing they can always settle for the Christian subculture if they fail or the “lifestyle” proves deadly.
Frank Schaeffer, in that talk with Jay Bakker I linked to a few days ago, said snidely that many in the Christian publishing world would gladly trade in their careers for a chance to edit at Random House.
Let’s assume he’s right. What does that say about the quality of what the Christian world produces? Are the best and the brightest really just second-raters who weren’t good enough for the “real world”? Or was it just that they couldn’t catch a break? Are most in Christian TV/radio and magazine and book publication chomping at the bit to get out of Nashville or Rockford or St. Louis to go work in New York or L.A. or San Francisco? And if you’ve been in Christian media for a while, does it become nigh impossible to break through the secular ceiling once the recruiters learn you’re “one of those”?
I worked in mainstream publishing houses for years and years. I would probably be doing so now were it not for my paper trail. When I was preparing to make the transition here to Delaware, I submitted my resume to a local magazine, Delaware Today. Compared to some of the books I’ve worked for — Time, Discover, Men’s Fitness — small potatoes, but a big deal here, in Delaware, and professionally done. And I would have been thrilled to have been back in the magazine business in my new hometown with a 20-minute commute.
And I received an immediate and enthusiastic response! The editor in chief at the time wanted to talk to me. Then dead silence. No follow-up. No responses to repeated e-mails. I had a suspicion of what had happened, but I couldn’t prove it.
A year went by. There was a new editor in chief at that same magazine. I submitted another resume. Received another enthusiastic response. She wanted me to come in and talk. Then … dead silence. No replies to my follow-up e-mails.
Here’s my guess. I can’t prove it, but when the same thing happens twice … They saw my experience. I’ve held a lot of editorial titles, senior titles, managerial titles, at instantly recognizable publishers. Then they drilled down a little deeper. First Things. (What’s that?) Commentary. (Didn’t Woody Allen make a joke about them?) They did some Googling. Read some of the stuff I did for Beliefnet. OK, weird, but still acceptable. Then for First Things. Uh oh. Then Commentary. Oh no. Then this blog.
Into the trash went the resume. My competence or experience were no longer relevant. I was one of those.
Yeah, you’d better make a choice. And not just would-be writers and entertainers and DJs and artists. Colleges, too.
Are Christian colleges producing world-class innovators and creators or resources for parachurch organizations? Are they preparing their students with the wherewithal to make it in New York or L.A. or San Francisco or Chicago, to persevere despite the backlash they will face and the presuppositions? Or are they setting them up for failure, with the “church” and its ancillary affiliations and associations as the backstop?
Mark B.
October 13, 2012 at 3:33 PM
Here is my serious question. I have no doubt of the secular ceiling. In the corporate world it just involves the fact of 100+ hour weeks. They own you. Wife and kids don’t agree? Get a new wife and kids. I also don’t think that the talent level of Christians is necessarily 2nd rate. That’s what the current owners of high ground want to believe and want you to believe. Let’s just say that skills-wise people are more fungible than they like to think. The question is why is most original stuff produced by “Christian Organizations” 2nd rate? Or maybe the question should be why isn’t there a Daily Beast/Newsweek whose bias instead of being urban liberal is christian? That bias not the intentional editorial result, but just the result of staffing. Why are Christians or Christian organizations unable to build that?
Anthony Sacramone
October 13, 2012 at 4:00 PM
If we’re talking about a venue, it would probably end up being controlled by one “party” and thus have to tow a party line, and thus alienate a lot of talented folk who might otherwise wish to contribute but who don’t want to have to sign a “Statement of Beliefs.” Not that the other side doesn’t tow its own party line, obviously, but the Christian line will be much, much narrower. It will be Catholic or Baptist or Reformed or a Moonie-type operation. It will perceive its audience as being much narrower, too.
As for the talent that could conceivably contribute: My guess is, and it’s only a guess, is that the most gifted of the bunch save their best material for mainstream venues and keep their heads down about their personal beliefs — OR, if they’re convinced that they can only make a living writing for a predominantly Christian audience, they soon discover, or perhaps assume, that the audience wants what DJ Wally’s audience wanted: “Everything’s just fine.” So you wind up with stuff that’s inoffensive but hardly thought-provoking or penetrating or original or, heaven forfend, just plain brilliant.
Either the best and brightest run away, or they write/create beneath their talents for fear of a righteous backlash.
Mark B.
October 13, 2012 at 4:45 PM
OK, part 1 makes sense. The enforcement of a check box doctrinal review vs. truth. But knowing that happens it would seem to be possible to specifically rule that out with a “don’t be evil” founding principle. Unless this is really a statement of funding in that Christians really won’t fund something without heavy check box editorial control.
Part 2a makes sense. A bird in hand is worth two in the bush, and since ChristianBeast doesn’t exist now, I’m writing my good stuff for Newsbeast and shutting up.
Part 2b makes sense, is deeply troubling, but also brings up a question. All audiences expect some “crap”. The NYT has to publish all kinds of crap that the urban liberal finds good, right and true and tells the upper west side that “everything is fine”. That can be everything from the obligatory gay marriage announcements to Thomas Friedman (It’s all flat I tell you!). Why is the NYT still able to publish Pulitzer stuff in the midst of the “everything is fine” while all that the Christian venue is able to publish is the schlock?
Is the problem the editorial staffs? At the same time too beholden to check box doctrine and not jealous enough of the stuff that actually makes a difference.
Anthony Sacramone
October 13, 2012 at 4:59 PM
Yes.
And one other factor: the most innovative and creative and thoughtful writers and artists are all too often off the reservation, so to speak. They have broken with their traditional religious upbringing, either because they perceived it as too constrictive, mean-spirited, superstitious, daft — or because they thought it would hold them back in realizing their dreams.
So, while I hate to say it, we’re recruiting from a smaller talent pool to begin with.
To take just one example: Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley, Jr., is a talented comic writer: but he jettisoned his Christian faith. And decided to vote Obama in 2008. For whom was he writing last? The Daily Beast.
Now, could we harness the talents of a PJ O’Rourke and an Andrew Ferguson (whom COMMENTARY wisely snatched up)? Possibly. Ross Douthat doesn’t need a “Christian” NY Times because he was snagged by the original one.
And we would have to stop thinking in terms of a “Christian” version of X altogether. That in itself smells of the second rate, the knockoff.
Mark B.
October 13, 2012 at 6:04 PM
Thanks for engaging the questions.
Yep, understand that knockoff thing. It would have to be sui generis. (Don’t know the whole story, but when Rod Dreher originally went to Templeton I was intrigued from an editorial standpoint, but that crashed rather fast.)
I understand the talent point. But those are already brand names (except maybe Ferguson). Where any new venue would be at is the ground level of finding the talent and giving them a space where they didn’t need to jettison the faith. It would probably also mean scrambling the Neuhaus quadrilateral a little. Theologically Orthodox, culturally open, politically pragmatic and economically literate(?). Really exploring what culture, politics and economy might a modern orthodoxy create. That is undefined in my head. And that would allow the tapping of talent from different pools.
The real problem to me would the crossing of “certification lines”. When you found the talent, it wouldn’t come with the correct pieces of paper. It might say Wheaton or Grove City or Pastor X instead of Yale, Harvard or Fr. X, SJ.
Anthony Sacramone
October 13, 2012 at 6:36 PM
Forget colleges. That was one of the problems I had getting on the Letterman show. When that started, the head writer was a woman named Merrill Markoe, who liked my stuff, but had just hit the end of her budget. She gave me her office number to keep in touch in the event of an opening. But when she left the show, I never had a chance: it became Ivy League only. And I was NYU.
As for Grove City or Wheaton or Hillsdale or Patrick Henry, again, I wouldn’t care one way or the other. Give me the high school dropouts. If I were editing a fresh publication, I’d flip open the transom — ferret out the talent from the inbox. If they have tear sheets (or the online equivalent), fine. Otherwise, I wouldn’t care if they were in prison or rehab and looking for a second chance. If they understood what we were trying to do, let them sell me on their talent.