It is something we do as an extra to our already busy lives that makes us feel better.
Just as our society drinks Coke as an “it,” as something that makes us feel good but has little substantial value as a drink, so we practice these beliefs as something we add on to our lives – not as something we need to live. They are tied to behavioral practices that we engage in but they bear little or no connection to our lives in Christ for His Mission in the world. They are ideological banners that we assent to.
As a result, the inerrant Bible, the decision for Christ and the Christian Nation mean very little for how we live our day-to-day lives as evangelical Christians. As American society advanced, and our lives became busier and ordered towards American affluence, we practice these same beliefs but they have become disconnected from what they meant several generations ago. For fifty to seventy-five years, these articulations of what we believe served us well but also evolved and become hardened. (these were the ways we thought about the authority of the Bible, conversion into salvation and the church’s activity in society). In its beginnings, the inerrant Bible, the decision for Christ and the idea of the Christian Nation articulated beliefs for evangelicals that helped connect them to the realities of our life in Christ in the face of several cultural challenges. Many of evangelicalism’s beliefs and practices have become separated from the concrete reality around which they first came into being. Taking some liberties with Zizek and his excellent illustration, I believe the Coke metaphor works for understanding some things about evangelicalism as well in the present period of its history.
Diet coke caffeine free#
Zizek uses the caffeine free diet Coke as an illustration of how capitalism works.
In Zizek’s words, we ‘drink nothing in the guise of something …” It is “in effect merely an envelope of a void.”(22-23). In essence, all that remains of what was once Coke is a pure semblance, an artificial promise of a substance which never materialized. We drink Coke because “Coke is “it”” not because it satisfies anything material. It plays on the mysterious enjoyment we get out of consuming it as something to enjoy in surplus after we have already quenched our thirst. Nonetheless, it is the most consumed beverage in the world. Today, Coke has become a drink that does not quench thirst, does not provide any stimulant and whose strange taste is not particularly satisfying. The two reasons why anyone would drink anything: it quenches thirst/provides nutrition and it tastes good, have in Zizek’s words “been suspended.” Over time, however, its sugar was replaced with sweetner, its caffeine extracted, and so today we are left with Caffeine-Free Diet Coke: a drink that does not fulfil any of the concrete needs of a drink. Soon it became a popular drink during prohibition that still possessed those medicinal qualities (it was deemed “refreshing” as well as the perfect “temperance drink”). It was eventually sweetened and its strange taste was made more palatable. Zizek narrates how coca-cola was originally concocted as a medicine (originally known as a nerve tonic, stimulant and headache remedy). There I use Zizek’s Coke illustration to ask questions about the current state of evangelicalism in N America. It’s an example I use in the intro to my upcoming book The End of Evangelicalism? Discerning a New Faithfulness for Mission. Of course I was referring to philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s famous cultural analyses found in his book, The Fragile Absolute (chapter 3). Last week or so on facebook, some friends were giving me a hard time for comparing evangelicalism to an ‘empty’ Caffeine-Free Diet Coke.
0 kommentar(er)
