Australian Idolatry

If you are into golden calves, Guy Sebastian—the singer promoted as our “Australian idol”—was as comely as they go. With cute good looks, self-confessed virginity and athletic vocals, Guy won out in televised contests that gradually eliminated rivals. From thousands who auditioned, a dozen were selected as finalists by three judges, with Guy winning in a phone poll. As the show’s hosts were wont to remind us, “Australia, this is your idol!”

Ours is an age of media “heroes”— instant idols and saints. Every day, television and the pulp press feed us someone to worship for their bravery or heroism, for their celebrity or plain old sex appeal. For good looks, for being famous or for simply doing their job, a “nobody” can be packaged and presented as “hero.”

Some 2000 years ago, Propertius, a Roman poet, declared that “time gives increase in the tomb and then a name comes greater on the lips.” Not so, now. Ours is an era of instant fame and overnight idols who are here today and gone tomorrow—the TV soapster, the videogenic star, and the singing sensation among them. Even in Christendom, the fading pope has canonised more saints than all prior popes together. The Vatican has come to recognise the value of a more international field of candidates too. As if making up for lost time in a post-Christian reality, church leaders recognise that the historic bias toward European and Mediterranean saints is of diminishing appeal.

But back to Guy Sebastian. He’s interesting because he was openly presented as a born-again Christian. This made it difficult to challenge the worth of an “Australian idol”—and of his being one.

If the winner of the title had been some acid-dropping, Satan-worshipping, heavy-metal screamer, I would have felt more comfortable with this critique. But when the idol is a cute gospel singer, who’s to criticise the man and the media that makes him so? As it turned out, and perhaps there’s another message to the media in this, a fourth placegetter—a young Fijian-Australian woman, Paulini Curuenavuli—is also a gospel-singing churchgoer.
n But should a Christian singer have reservations about entering anything in which they’ll be labelled an “idol”? It seems not. The rationale for Christian pop-lust is to argue that Christians should use the limelight as an opportunity to witness through exhibitions of their talent. Nice in theory, but this reasoning can justify many un-Christian things.

Another defence is that being called an “Australian idol” doesn’t implicate one in indulging the idolatry of others. What’s in a name? they say. We should not mistake substance for mere form, it is argued.

But it is difficult to see how, as a Christian (for whom idolatry is to be abhorred), Guy is not transgressing the boundary between giftedness and self-glorification, praiseworthiness and adulation. That is to say, as he succeeded, his image became currency for the television show, the pulp presses and for their uncritical consumers who feed on such heroes, saints and idols.

Many young women live to “touch the hem” of pop garments. Guy is mobbed in shopping malls, his record hit number one and his TV appearances brought in ratings dollars. He couldn’t go out in public without being treated as pop royalty, provided with requisite security and advance media coverage. Hence, the point of doing and becoming Australian Idol was exactly that: a reality fulfilled by its very statement; a self-fulfilling prophecy that not even a Christian could avoid.

In our postmodern times, the philosophical tension between posing as an idol and engendering a very real idolatry as a consequence, is absent from Christian and public discourse. Most young Christians think it perfectly acceptable to engage pop-lust and the medieval idolatry it brings from the masses in television-land so long as “Jesus is my Saviour.” They see no wrong with bringing good feelings and a little mindless distraction to the public so long as they have a “personal relationship” with Christ.

It would be a neat ethical (and Christian) trick if private persuasion really could assuage the moral uncertainty of whatever evil we do, if our backstage personal convictions could justify whatever actions we undertake in front of them. Unfortunately, they don’t. Honourable motives don’t sanctify indulgences, rather, they are rendered suspect by them.

As for Guy, for me, at least, he’s just one more made-for-the-moment “pop star” rather than my idol.

Extract from Signs of the Times, May 2004.

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