Thoughts on John Crist + our adoration of people we later learn are abusive:
There is a reciprocal relationship between consumerism and abuse. People who treat others as objects become less human. +
There is a reciprocal relationship between consumerism and abuse. People who treat others as objects become less human. +
There are people you love—writers, authors, pastors, comedians—who, behind closed doors and in private emails and messages, are treating others as objects instead of people. +
In private, many of the people we adore as wildly hilarious commenters on Christian culture or experts on wholeness are treating human beings as objects to collect or crush—depending on whether we are perceived as contributing to or taking from their own fame and acclaim. +
In our social media age, it is increasingly critical to cultivate space in our hearts to always treat people as people instead of sources to fill our incessant needs to feel heard, amused, or inspired. +
On the scrolling end: we have to cultivate enough space away from social media seeing flesh-and-blood faces to remember every YouTube video and pithy tweet comes from a person prone to pride just as much as us. +
When we mindlessly retweet, share, and say wow we are contributing to the adoration, and further, diminishment, of a person into an object. They might want your adoration. It might be a norm to give it. That doesn’t mean it’s good. +
Writers, Pastors, Comedians, etc: we must cultivate enough space away from the crowd, from the place of potential adoration, among the faces who see us as human and flawed, in order to offer our work as love instead of an object to consume or admire... +
None of us set out to use people as pawns to build our own kingdoms of fame. It happens subtly—which is why we have to less-subtly tether our work to the ground by giving ourselves practices + places where we remember our pull toward pride + set down our attempts at adoration. +
Abuse happens when we treat people as objects. (Including ourselves) When we adore a person’s words or charisma, we’re eating them like a cake instead of responding to them like a person. After eating so much dessert, we shouldn’t be surprised we’re all sick, hurting, and empty.
