Russell, Survivor and April Fools

People that know me know that I don’t listen to Christian radio a lot, as I’m much more likely to tune into some sports talk when I’m in the car. But since the B99 (that’s Wendy, my wife and Better 99% for all you TBC newbies) isn’t really into sports talk, I’ll almost always put the station back onto K-Love before I get out so that she’ll have it on when she gets in the car after me. Yes, that does make me a very good husband.  No, I won’t do it for you, too.

All that to say this: as I pulled into the driveway a few mornings ago and selected FM1 preset #2, I heard the middle of an interview on K-Love with Krista Klumpp. If you’re a Survivor fan, you already know that Krista was a contestant on this season’s show who was recently voted off.  If you’re not, then you’re trying to picture which character she was in Nutty Professor 2. The fact that Krista lives in Columbia, SC, (where the B99 grew up) made me like her, but when she whipped out her Bible on Survivor and had a conversation with Matt on Redemption Island that actually included the name Jesus and not some generic reference to God, The Man Upstairs, or a Great Power, I was even more of a fan.

So, I’m sitting in the driveway in the B99′s minivan listening to the interview on K-Love, and I heard something that almost made me spit coffee onto the windshield.  The interviewer asked Krista about her alliance with Russell (who we’ve always enjoyed watching play the game even though CBS always loves portraying him as a total jerk) and how someone who carries her Bible on Survivor would end up siding with arguably one of Survivor’s most infamous villains.  After a chuckle or two, Krista said that Russell was a believer.

That’s when the near mishap with the coffee almost happened.

Now, let me say right up front that I don’t know Russell Hantz, and have never had any conversation with him, so I can’t (and wouldn’t even if I could) refute what Krista said.  That’s not the point of this post.  He may very well be a strong believer in Christ, but the fact that hearing it caught me by surprise is what I want to focus on here.

When I was in high school, we had an assembly that featured a band that stood on the stage with really big hair and tight pants that sang covers like “Working for the Weekend,” “I Love Rock and Roll,” “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me”  along with every hit Huey Lewis and the News ever recorded.  Yes, both of them.  The music was good, and as much as the hair was unforgettable (most 80′s hairstyles were!), it was something that they said about 45 minutes into the set that has stayed with me to this day.  As the reverb died on a Chicago love ballad, the lead singer looked out at us and said, “Hey, uh, we just, uh, wanted you to know that we all, uh, all of us up here, well, we love Jesus.”  It was perfectly timed and led right into the keyboard intro to REO Speedwagon’s power ballad “Keep On Lovin’ You.”

The only problem was that it seemed so fake.  I wasn’t even really following Jesus and I couldn’t get out of my mind how these guys had just spent 45 minutes looking and sounding one way only to think that in one sentence they could prove that they were different from what they had just appeared so similar to. That stuck with me, because there’s nothing worse than people being surprised by our faith in Jesus, and that’s what got me during the interview on K-Love.

I can’t say whether or not Russell loves Jesus.  Maybe he does; maybe he doesn’t. But what I know for sure is that the thought of him being a believer made me glad and confused all at once, and I felt like I was back in the auditorium of Albemarle Senior High School watching a handful of middle-aged guys rocking out for Jesus to tunes that were never written with Him in mind.

That simultaneous feeling of elation and confusion is the point, and it is something we should try to avoid others from feeling about us.

I get that there are hours and hours of footage at CBS that we’ll never see, and some of it could shed a lot of light on the real Russell, and that for the most part CBS is in control over how they “brand” Russell.  But there were hours and hours of footage that I never saw of other contestants, and they never left me wondering where they stood with Jesus.  Leslie Nease comes to mind when she basically sealed her Survivor fate by not taking place in a ritual in a Buddhist temple because, in her words, “it felt like worship.”  I do think it is possible to live our faith consistently, even when we’re being edited.  At least, I’d hope it is.

Perhaps there is a deeper issue here.  There is a lot of banter in the Christian community today about freedom, and I’m glad that there is.  I think that freedom in following Jesus is crucial if we’re to be successful from staying away from the hardened, crusty, religious legalism that so many of us have experienced, especially here in the very religious South.  But there is a danger lurking and I think it is in the fact that the current brand of Christianity seems to have made “freedom” synonymous with “anything goes,” which raises two questions:

What’s the difference?

Glad you asked.  There has always been this tendency for people to kind of do whatever they please, and then cover it up with the blanket God statement.  Stuff like professional athletes wearing WWJD bracelets around their wrists and displaying them proudly by flipping people off comes to mind, as does a singer producing an album with a parental warning on the front and a line in the credits thanking God for blessing them. Those may seem like straw men examples, but I’ve seen my share of people not living consistently and then using the magic “freedom white out” to claim that they were free from the truth when shown it. Paul even said that we shouldn’t use our freedom to do whatever we want, mainly because we don’t live for ourselves alone (1 Cor. 8:9).

What’s the problem?

Hypocrisy at best; lunacy at worst.  Here’s what I mean.  To be a hypocrite means to pretend to have something you don’t, and so living inconsistently on purpose wouldn’t be much different than the game play we see weekly on reality shows where “say one thing, do another” is just part of the game.  It becomes easy to separate who we are in one venue from who we are in another.  There’s the “Survivor” me and the “At home with my kids on the couch” me. A hypocrite knows that those two are different, and also knows which one is real.  But that’s not the worst problem.  The worst is what happens when we can’t see the difference and believe that living the separation is okay, and as a result we grow blind in the areas where seeing is the most critical.

It’s one thing to pretend.  If I made a fake lottery check and our family pretended to be winners for a night at home, no harm.  It’s another to deceive, which would be like me telling my wife we won the lottery and allowing her to believe it even when I know it’s not true.  That’s hypocrisy, and it’s bad, but not the worst.  Worse yet is lunacy.  That’s me taking a fake lottery check to the bank and getting mad because they don’t believe it’s real and I do.  People get locked away for that kind of stuff, because they’ve lost the ability to see the difference between reality and fantasy.

That is where I fear our Christian culture is heading, and if it is, we’ve bought into the worst April Fool’s trick ever.  We’ve believed a lie and can’t even see that it isn’t true, and the end result of that is a total loss of reality, which means we’ll have lost the ability to impact the culture around us that so desperately needs that line to be drawn.

It is time to end the lunacy and return to the truth that has been made plain to each one of us (Rom. 1:19-20).  There has never been a more critical time to close the gap between what we say we believe and what we actually live.  If we don’t, we run the risk of standing in front of a culture that is waiting for redemption with nothing to offer except the emptiness of an April Fool’s joke and being even more irrelevant than 5 guys with mullets dancing around in tight pants in front of high school students.