What makes us certain we are saved? Or, better yet, what is salvation? A wonderful and disturbing article in the Wall Street Journal highlights a common approach: I know I'm saved when I get what I want, particularly financial and social success. It turns out that Lady Gaga (along with a host of other performing artists from Elvis to Eminem) tend to hold and publicly affirm this belief. Lady Gaga apparently deeply feels that there has been a “higher power that's been watching out for me.” As the venerable Snoop Dogg puts it when speaking of his triumphs, “God makes everything happen.”
I want to first thank the author of the WSJ article for pointing out that these statements are less religion than belief. He calls it “competitive theism, a self-styled spirituality that can be overlaid on any religion...” However, I want to go a little beyond his critique. These statements are theological, they make claims about God and how God interacts with humans. Furthermore, they resonate with a certain simplistic equation of the happenstance of life with Divine Plan that has plagued Judeo-Christianity since its inception and which reaches a real height in a simplistic pseudo-Calvinism that often tries to dominate American Protestantism. From the mouths of stars they sound like the statements of all believers.
They aren't.
In fact, it's pretty poor theology and it is relatively easy to see why:
Let's start by exploring what “God wanted me to be famous” says about God. If Lady Gaga is right, and God intends for her to be famous, then the flipside must also be true. Those who are not famous are intended to be un-famous by God. Suddenly we have a God who is deeply invested in human fame and fortune. Why God would give a hoot about human fame and fortune is beyond me, and, indeed, beyond most traditional theology and any rigorous Christianity. Lest we forget, the more basic belief is that God has “cast down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly” (Luke 1:52). This doesn't sound like a God with a high opinion of human concepts of success.
The implications get worse. If your fame and wealth is due to God's plan for you, then the poverty of millions must be due to God's plan for them. This idea is repugnant, and, I and many others would argue, not supported Biblically. I lean on Liberation Theology here. I'm much more amenable to the idea that poverty is actually contrary to God's intention for creation than I am to the idea that God wants some of us to be rich.
If Lady Gaga (and Eminem, and Elvis, and Mr. Dogg) do have some latent memory of Calvinism in mind, it's pretty poor Calvinism. Calvin's main concern was an understanding of our standing before and relationship with God. As any good Protestant with a true Protestant Ethic will tell you, God's plan involves your soul and being – are you in right relationship with God; saved in the sense of being beloved of God? Personal financial success, while possibly related to that, is no conclusive indicator of it. Indeed, Calvin would be sure to point out that you do NOT know if you are favored by God – Ms. Gaga, et al. - fame or no fame. I'm not a big Calvinist myself, I've got enormous issues with the idea that God controls every minute detail of creation, but if you're going to sound like a Calvinist, you should at least know what you are talking about.
Ultimately though, the fundamental problem with Gaga Theology is that it only works when you are riding high on the hog. Only seeing God when you are successful, only finding God when you have material well-being, equating salvation with fame, leaves you pretty bereft when success eludes, when fortune turns, when fame is lost (or never found), when you suffer or when you become attuned to the pervasive sufferings of others. The trick is not to see God, thank God, or praise God only when you are successful. The trick is, as liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez points out, to find a way to speak of God in the midst of suffering. The trick is to avoid “...a religion of calculated self-interest, a cynical outlook that forgets the suffering of others...” (1).
To do so forces us to rethink our cherished understanding of salvation and to make the painful step of thinking beyond our selfish wants. It makes us consider that perhaps, just perhaps, salvation might consist of something beyond our own comforts. That maybe salvation is at once more fundamentally related to me – to my soul and not my social status – and at the same time beyond me, involving all of creation. Doing so opens up our possibilities in a wonderful way that Gaga Theology closes them. If salvation is not simply my own material well-being, we can also rest in the knowledge of salvation even in the midst of suffering. This strikes me as a far more wonderful gift than even fame itself.
Reference:
(1) Gustavo Gutiérrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent. Translated by Matthew J. O'Connell. (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1987), 93.
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