Thursday, November 10, 2005
(10:51 AM) | Brad:
A Field Trip to The Christian Bookstore
I wish to submit here, though I realize it will not be taken as a scandalous or controversial talking point here, considering the background of many of you, that American Christian bookstores (and, yes, perhaps even those few British ones I never entered) operate with a kind of consistency that is itself the causa causans of its even more profound inconsistency. Christian bookstores, for example, are by and large undergirded by an evangelical / conservative Catholic faith whose paramount theme is the transcendence of God, and yet are kept in business by the production and selling of books and theological systems whose aim is nothing less than to reverse the course of Incarnation. God as Man? Please. Man as God. (Nietzsche would be well pleased.)It hasn't been too long, I'm a little shocked to admit, since I was last in such a store. The reason eludes me, but you can be sure it was not a good one. Impious reasons for my visit notwithstanding, I found myself agog by all sorts of novel knickknacks near the door, specifically "Bible Pictionary" ("Oooo, oooo, I know, is it the rape of Tamar?" "No, duh, it's the sons of Noah wanting to rape him!") and the "Adam to Jesus Genealogical Chart". And then there was, of course, "The Wall O' Crosses", whose highlight is the stunning rendering of Jesus' final moments on the cross. The spear had pierced his side, and he was limp with the release of his spirit. A stunning moment, to be sure, made even more stunning by something the Gospel narratives seem to have missed: the garroting of Jesus by a price tag wrapped tightly around his vein-strained throat. Priceless.
And there was the one product I very nearly purchased, one that made me search frantically through the store in search of an available electrical outlet, stumbling over a child playing with a Noah's Ark action figure set in the process: a nightlight. I realize that doesn't sound interesting enough to interrupt a worldwide, cataclysmic flood, but be sure, my friends, this was by no means an ordinary nightlight. In fact, it too was a stunning icon of a religious subculture that has entirely too much money to spend. The nightlight itself was normal enough, but the cover was brilliant because of its incongruity with its function. The bulb was facing a disproportionately large stained glass inscribed with the characteristically biblical scene of a shepherd tending his flock, accompanied by the words of John 10:14-15: "I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me -- just as the Father knows me and I know the Father -- and I lay down my life for the sheep." The sanctified function, one assumes anyway, is the colorful illumination of this image and verse for anyone who might need to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
Maybe this, after all, is the full Americanization of Blake's marriage of heaven and hell.
