Letter from America

A disease is pandemic not merely epidemic when it affects people over a very wide geographical area. The 1918 influenza was pandemic, as also is the global reach of HIV. Michael Jackson’s trial is an extreme example of a very widespread cultural infection: a crisis of the child.

Michael Jackson, of course, is still most famous for that moonwalk dance and his massively successful Thriller album. Soon enough, though, the decade or more long scandals surrounding his Neverland Ranch and accusations of child molestation in that environment will compete for immediate word association with the Jackson brand name. The ‘Gloved One’ could become ‘the handcuffed one.’

Psychology

Despite all the media fascination with the Jackson trial — what will he wear, will he turn up on time, will he (especially after the defense seems to have closed weakly) testify — for me the real intrigue centres not on the verdict but on the psychology. Jackson has for some while seemed a little ‘strange’ (readers may remember a certain tongue-in-cheek cover of his ‘Bad’ single called ‘Mad’). But over the last ten years or so the extent of his apparent psychosis and, in particular, his fixation on issues of childhood is remarkable. The prosecution produced two books depicting nude boys discovered in a locked cabinet in Jackson’s bedroom. This is all rather gruesome, but even more weird is the inscription (signed ‘MJ’ and, it is thought, in Jackson’s handwriting) on the inside cover of one of the books: ‘Look at the true spirit of happiness and joy in these boys’ faces, this is the spirit of boyhood, a life I've never had and will always dream of. This is the life I want for my children.’

Crisis of the child

The key phrase is ‘what I’ve never had’. Jackson, like many popular performers, has the ability to take an implicit phenomenon in popular culture and project it onto the big stage. He is Western society’s growing crisis of the child writ large, the ‘King of Pop’ indeed. Absentee fathers (or in Jackson’s case a father marketing his children as commercial products), have bequeathed a bitter legacy of generational immaturity. Now even mothers too trade their children into child care for the profit of a career, or to ease the pressure of a mortgage. Given this common parental pattern, is it any surprise that our culture, and many individuals within it, seem psychologically unable to grow up? When John Stott was in New York recently he said that the challenge facing the contemporary church was ‘growth without maturity’. Is that immaturity a reflection of a wider crisis of secular culture? Are our aging rockers, like the Rolling Stones, with dentures and graying hair, signs not of the exuberance or playfulness of our times but of a basic ‘Never Never Land’ psychotic desire to stay young?

God’s family

Some specific themes of the gospel need emphasising if we are to grow up. We tend, in biblical Christian circles, to highlight God’s sovereignty, and rightly so, in reaction to secular society’s tendency to make humanity the be-all and end-all. But as many people in our secular environment have developed essentially father-less, it surely makes sense to underline the distinctive emphasis that Jesus himself taught when he modelled ‘Our Father who art in heaven’. Evangelical Christians perhaps most commonly speak of the church in the New Testament terms of the body or the bride of Christ. But biblically the church is also the spiritual family where we are brothers and sisters. Not by chance does the homosexual community refer to its members as ‘the family’, for it is exactly the lack of the family that is the issue, and which the church is intended by God purely to provide. Paradoxically, while we appeal to people’s adult sensibilities to seek to counter their cynicism about God, Jesus told us that unless we each become as little children we will not enter the kingdom of heaven. That message of regeneration is what Michael Jackson (or any other Peter Pan out there) really needs to hear.

Stressing the biblical rhetoric of the family is paramount in a postmodern era. Our identity issues, our fears, our psychotic (or, put less dramatically, neurotic) inadequacies are answered by a Heavenly Father, a spiritual family of siblings, and the chance to start again by being born again.

Whether or not Jackson is guilty, one thing’s for sure: it’s time to grow up.

Josh Moody,
New Haven, Connecticut

© Evangelicals Now - June 2005
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