April 20, 2008 — Mona Charen, one of the better wordsmiths to grace editorial pages with disciplined thinking and limpid exposition, recently quoted the late humorist George Burns: “Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that you’ve got it made."
The famous stogy-puffing comic might well have been talking about preaching.
There is an old canard about a preacher who one Sunday inadvertently left his sermon notes on the pulpit. They were found by the ladies straightening up after church who regaled the congregation with the revelation that at one place in the margin was scribbled, “Point weak here, pound pulpit and shout.”
I came to preaching via what might be called the Southern Tent Revival School. We used to hone our homiletical style by reading to each other lists of names from the Tupelo, Mississippi telephone directory. Among my contemporaries, Ernest T. Campbell was the acknowledged master persuader. That’s probably why, after kicking the toxic Bob Jones College addiction, he became a successor to the legendary Harry Emerson Fosdick in the pulpit of iconic Riverside Church in New York City.
All preaching is theatre. All preachers are actors, not to be equated with insincere or phony. Some of them (us?) do have actor-sized egos. Look at the church ads on the church page of newspapers: the number of wannabe major prophets whose photographs appear alongside their sermon topic printed in bold 20 point type.
One time I preached to 3,000 people in the same building at the same time. For a 19-year-old kid that was heady stuff. It is very hard to avoid the “God-wants-me-and-the-world-needs-me” syndrome.
The purpose of preaching, we learned at STRS, was not so much to convey truth or ideas, but to evoke a visceral response. The frequency of ego-stroking after-service comments like: “that was a powerful sermon, preacher” was directly related to the number of listeners who had wept, shouted, fainted, twitched, got saved, or otherwise given evidence of having been smitten by the Spirit via the preacher’s words. Style was everything, content was interchangeable.
No one learned this better, or has employed the practice more effectively, than Billy Graham. His substance-shallow but splendidly orchestrated meetings make for a low calorie sermonic diet, which is not to deny that they have been a source of spiritual sustenance for many.
Don’t knock it! Given a choice, I much prefer an emotional binge to the dignified, mind-numbing verbal narcotic that passes for preaching in too many pulpits, or the eight-minute sermonette currently in vogue in my denomination.
Speaking of which, the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, which stipulates every word and movement in the liturgy, is the ultimate in intentional religious theatre. Essentially unchanged since it was scripted in 1549 by Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, the BCP is one of the best-known, most revered and frequently used books in the English language. That’s because it lays out, in elegant and eloquent words, the almost universal elements of public worship, far superior to the ad-libbed, off-the-cuff, extemporaneous colloquial language of everyday discourse. Add the colorful vestments worn by Roman, Anglican, and some Lutheran worship leaders and it is teatro supremo.
George Burns knew that sincerity can indeed be convincingly faked. He may have known that most preachers can do it if necessary, and some preachers do it quite well and all the time. Perceptive TV watchers laughed or retched when Jimmy Swaggert, having been caught en flagrante with a bimbo in a Cadillac convertible, sobbed out a melodramatic confession and returned to his very lucrative business as usual.
Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign speeches are great theatre. More sermons than political statements, they are aimed at the emotions rather than the minds of his hearers. He is a superb preacher. The absence of substantive material in his riveting discourses would qualify him to head up his own TV mega-church if he trips up on his journey to the White House.
Editor's note: W. Jackson "Jack" Wilson is a psychologist, an Episcopal priest, a sometime academic and a writer living in Colorado.
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