Is “hidden holiness” the answer to celebrity culture?
Here is Andy Stanton-Henry at Plough:
There’s another word for “successful saints”: celebrities. There has been a lot of conversation lately about the dangers of celebrity Christianity, and I don’t want to try to close the wound before it has been fully examined. But I have been thinking about the remedy, or perhaps a preventative medicine. In the spirit of the Jesuit principle agere contra (“to act against/contrary”), I’ve been pondering the practice of hiddenness as a kind of counter-virtue to celebrity.
To be sure, there is much in our Christian tradition that calls us to speak up, stand up, share good news, spread our message, and so on. There’s the Great Commission, of course, but also teachings from Jesus like the one in Matthew 5:17: “Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” In this testimony of our tradition, being seen and heard are important parts of Christian practice and important means of spreading God’s kingdom. While it may be a prominent testimony, it’s not the only one. There are “minority reports” that are worthy of consideration, ones that just might “speak to our condition,” as my fellow Quakers say.
The testimony of “hidden holiness” may be the minority report we need. I became acquainted with that term from Orthodox priest and writer Michael Plekon. In his book Hidden Holiness, he spotlights a variety of saints and offers the witness of their lives as ordinary people who simply sought to be faithful to God in their time and place. He invites us to lay aside the “cult of celebrity saints” and see these figures as testimonies to the “the universality, diversity, and ordinary qualities of sanctity in our time.”
Read the entire piece here.
“Hidden holiness” certainly matches some of Jesus’s teaching in the sermon on the mount (though I suppose that famous saints might also appeal to “let your light shine before men…”)
I ran across a book a while back that takes the hidden thing a bit farther: “Secret Faith in the Public Square: An Argument for the Concealment of Christian Identity” (Jonathan Malesic). Only skimmed it, but an interesting thesis…even if not as overtly biblical at least on the surface. The idea (I think) was that in a circumstance where identifying as a Christian brings some temporal benefit the admonishment to hidden holiness might mean not identifying as a Christian. This seems possibly relevant in circumstances like running for office among Christian nationalists, or maybe even saying that one is a Christian plumber.
I wonder if folks would be talking about “hidden holiness” before social media.