Over on JPGB this morning, I argue that Skyfall is the first ever deeply profound James Bond movie:

Skyfall is about why the 21st century needs James Bond. Here’s how I would summarize it:

1. All your fancy modern technology and advanced civilization will not save you if you are not the right kind of person.
2. If you have forgotten how to be the right kind of person, look to your elders and return to the place where you came from.
3. Do not hesitate to use all your fancy modern technology to blow the place you came from to smithereens if that is what being the right kind of person requires.

The two great errors of our age are, on the one hand, to think that it doesn’t matter what kind of people we are (“dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good” – T.S. Eliot); and, on the other hand, to be so afraid we’ll stop being the right kind of people that we cling to the old and traditional even when it has stopped cultivating us in the right ways. To look both backward and forward – to carry the past into the future, not by preserving it, but by allowing it to form us into the right kind of people and then forming the future accordingly – that is the only hope.

Special bonus: A field guide to all 23 Bond movies, composed for a friend looking to find out which ones to watch first.

Recently, Rod Dreher over at the American Conservative posted a fabulous article entitled Sex after Christianity, where he argues that Americans have largely rejected any moral authority other than themselves. Notions of a god have become passe and competing moral authorities, such as when my ideas conflict with yours, are not considered by our post-modern culture to actually contradict. You can be your authority and I can be mine.

Dreher’s article was still tumbling around in my mind last night as I watched Donald Trump’s The Celebrity Apprentice on television. One of the celebrities still on the show is comedian and magician Penn Jillette, who according to his own admission is “beyond atheism.” Atheists, he claims, don’t believe in God. He, on the other hand, believes there is no God. Instead, Jillette holds to Ayn Rand’s objectivism “with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute (from Atlas Shrugged).” While we can certainly debate how many Americans actually care about the latter two parts of this definition, it is pretty obvious from observation and Dreher’s article that most Americans do base their moral decisions on themselves and their own happiness.

The vast majority of the laws made in this country are to protect one’s happiness. That also seems to be the greatest argument being made in the homosexual debate. What right, so the argument goes, does the government have to stop my free choice of consensual homosexual behavior if it makes me happy? The government does have responsibility to protect non-consensual behavior (as that would violate someone else’s happiness), but since morality is based on individual happiness, everything else is morally okay as long as one does not violate someone else’s happiness.

In many ways, this seems very close to existentialism. In fact, Rynd considered that name rather than objectivism, but the name was already taken. In existentialism, the highest good is not happiness but authenticity to self. Elements of this can be seen in the homosexuality debate as well as proponents argue that this is who they are. Current thought and feeling towards morality seems to be that any theistic or transcendent worldview is antiquated. Yet, instead of falling into nihilistic depression, American culture has jumped past nihilism into a twisted self-actualizing form of existentialism based upon one’s own happiness.

But there in lies the open door for discussion. American’s are not truly basing their morality upon what makes them happy but upon what THEY THINK makes them happy NOW. For instance, smoking in public places is all but banned in most parts of this country because of the health concerns. Yes, smoking makes you happy now as the nicotine slowly poisons your brain, which leads to great unhappiness later. Thus, the work of so many against cigarettes, including the US Surgeon General. The same is true of so many behaviors that would be Biblically classified as immoral. They do offer a fleeting, immediate gratification of some desire, which gives an immediate sense of happiness. But the end result is anything but. Instead, our lives are torn apart by our immoral decisions and we discover too late that it was a false happiness which we gave in too.

The truth is that many people, including homosexuals, are trapped in the happiness lie which offers nothing but a sham. They think they have found happiness, but it will not last. True joy is found in following God and His guide for living.  And because all Americans are looking for true joy, Christians have the opportunity to show that happiness does not come from listening to ourselves and our own moral determinations but from following an absolute morality which is interwoven with the created natural order of our world. And, as we share with those around us that we were created as humans for true joy, we can also point out that sixty years of supposed hedonist pleasure in this lifetime pales in comparison with an eternity of unhappiness.

Those who would follow objectivism or existentialism do not realize that they were made for far more than fleeting pleasure. Instead, a lifetime of true soul-fulfilling joy can be theirs. As many other posts on HT have argued, Christians should do things better, and I would add, they should also do it with more joy, a joy that can be contagious and shared with those around who are truly searching for unending happiness. Let us not leave our neighbors to their unhappy fate but instead be the guides to true joy.

This morning, TGC carries my article on how the war over rights in American culture is an open door for the gospel. I offer some thoughts about how Christians can make sense of all the competing claims over who has a right to what (gay marriage, religious freedom, hair weaving, welfare) and how we can deal with rights-claims in a way that takes justice seriously, benefits our neighbors and helps them understand the gospel.

Christians can explain why people are responsible moral agents who have duties (and therefore have rights). For as long as history records, secularists have been struggling to come up with some kind of argument to justify moral responsibility (and therefore rights) without reference to a transcendent cosmic order. It’s a fool’s errand. We won’t be able to have that whole conversation explicitly every time rights come up; still, the more we can prompt people to think deeply about where rights come from, the more plausible the gospel will seem to them.

I offer the example of two survivors stranded on a desert island, only one of whom has food; they argue over whether the one with food has a right to withhold it from the other. Readers of HT will find their arguments strangely familiar.

FUN FACT about the pop culture image on this post! (90% of a good blog post is choosing the right pop culture reference.) The Beastie Boys originally recorded “Fight for Your Right (to Party)” as a spoof. They were making fun of the emerging trend toward “attitude songs” that are really about nothing, and simply strike a pose in song form. But the 14-year-old boys of America took it seriously and ate it up with a spoon, and the record company milked it for all it was worth. Commented one member of the group: “The only thing that upsets me is that we might [!] have reinforced certain values of some people in our audience when our own values were actually totally different. There were tons of guys singing along to ‘Fight for Your Right’ who were oblivious to the fact it was a total goof on them.”

Here’s a photo of my new employee.

If you haven’t seen Kickstarter yet, you should check it out. I’ve been watching it for a while and I just took the plunge for the first time, dropping $40 into Zack Braff’s new movie. The movie is already fully financed and will be made, thanks to crowdfunding:

“Wish I Was Here” is the story of Aidan Bloom (played by me), a struggling actor, father and husband, who at 35 is still trying to find his identity; a purpose for his life. He and his wife are barely getting by financially and Aidan passes his time by fantasizing about being the great futuristic Space-Knight he’d always dreamed he’d be as a little kid.

When his ailing father can no longer afford to pay for private school for his two kids (ages 5 and 12) and the only available public school is on its last legs, Aidan reluctantly agrees to attempt to home-school them.

The result is some funny chaos, until Aidan decides to scrap the traditional academic curriculum and come up with his own. Through teaching them about life his way, Aidan gradually discovers some of the parts of himself he couldn’t find.

By crowdfunding the movie, Braff retains creative control and can make the movie he wants to make. From what I can see, the movie he wants to make is likely to be another big win for the cultural forces of wisdom and reconstruction, just like Garden State. At least, I think it’s likely enough that I’m willing to venture some dough. By venturing $40, I get a T-shirt; if I’d acted faster I could have put in $100 and gotten a ticket to a private screening, but they were all sold out within a day.

Crowdfunding’s not just for art. My friends at TGC have also started crowdfunding translation of theological resources into new languages. In the hobby board game world, of which I’m a proud member in good standing, GMT Games has been crowdfunding the production of board games since long before the term “crowdfunding” was invented.

Kickstarter and crowdfunding in general will make it a lot easier for cultural entrepreneurs to get their start. People who want to challenge the status quo can get the backing they need without having to kowtow to the traditional gatekeepers – but only if they can make a persuasive case that they’ll be faithful to their commitments and their projects will succeed.

Now, granted that the Kickstarter haters are right about two things:

• Substantial amounts of the material on Kickstarter are crap.
• There are no legal guarantees that the people you fund will do what they say they’re going to do.

But the first criticism is true of everything else, too. Substantial amounts of the movies made through the traditional Hollywood system are crap. (Hey, I just won the “understatement of the day” award!) Ditto for everything else on Kickstarter: art, books, games, music, etc. Most of what’s out there in the world is crap. My impression is that Kickstarter beats the traditional world on this metric, if not by much.

As for the second criticism, this is one thing I love about Kickstarter. It runs on trust! People can decide who’s worthy of trust and who isn’t, and then they have the freedom to trust each other. That means 1) people can prove that they’re trustworthy without a safety net, so to speak, and 2) reputations will matter. That’s a good thing; the more we rely on laws and regulation to protect us from cheaters, the less your reputation matters, and over time it degrades the moral character of a people to live in a culture where reputation doesn’t matter. In general I think one of the constructive contributions the Internet is going to make is to bring back a sense that reputation matters; crowdfunding is only one example among many.

So strike a blow for trust and character – crowdfund a cultural entrepreneur today!

Justin Taylor does us a service by the unusual way he approaches the question, “is there a distinctively Christian way to be a bus driver?” Instead of a yes or a no, Justin breaks this question down into a number of component questions:

• Does the Bible teach how to be a bus driver?
• Does the Bible teach how to be a Christian bus driver?
• Is being a non-Christian bus driver inherently sinful?
• Can a non-Christian be a good bus driver?
• Is a Christian necessarily a better bus drive than a non-Christian?
• Is there a distinctively Christian way to think about the particulars of each vocation?

He then gives his answer to each question; some of them are “yes,” some of them are “no” and some of them are more complicated than that!

Building on the idea of two anxieties to be avoided in culture making, I would want to add one more question to this list. It grows from the last two questions on Justin’s list.

Justin asks whether a Christian is necessarily a better bus driver than a non-Christian and answers with a flat “no” – for a variety of reasons, we are not entitled to expect that any given Christian bus driver will be a better bus driver than any given non-Christian bus driver. On the other hand, Justin answers “yes” to the question of whether there is a distinctively Christian way to think about bus driving – the gospel and biblical revelation open up a whole new spiritual world to us, including in our vocations. He points to an emerging field of reflection on how distinctively Christian knowledge can reshape our understanding of fields like philosophy, art and social science, and suggests that the same could be done for less academic professions.

I would hasten to add, however, that it is not enough simply to “think about” our vocations in a distinctively Christian way. The work of the Spirit in our lives empowers us to drive busses and carry out all our other vocations in ways that are shaped by our gospel knowledge, and we are responsible to carry that spiritual power into action. As I wrote in an earlier post:

[The Christian factory worker] should radiate the gospel in both objective and subjective ways. Objectively, he should not only be a highly virtuous worker, he should go above and beyond the predominant ethical expectations that prevail on his factory floor. Perhaps he will take on more tasks or be a peacemaker when coworkers are in conflict. He may need to constructively challenge unethical practices. Subjectively, his bearing, spirit and demeanor should radiate the gospel. His company should taste different to those around him.

This doesn’t mean Christian bus drivers disregard their road maps and instead take a quiet moment of prayer and reflection to determine which way God wants them to steer the bus. It does mean that Christian bus drivers do their work with a different spirit (or rather, “Spirit”), and as a result their performance should change in objective and subjective ways that do, in the most important and relevant sense, make them “better bus drivers.”

So now to my proposed question. Once we’ve said Christians are not necessarily better bus drivers, but there is a distinctively Christian way to understand bus driving, we can then ask:

• Are Christian bus drivers specially empowered for their work by the Spirit, such that they ought to become better bus drivers than non-Christians, who are not thus empowered?

Three guesses how I’d answer.