Secular Saints or Cult of Personality?

John Lennon: Not a Saint

I ran into an article from Canada's National Post about the phenomena of dead celebrities being afforded devotion by fans once reserved for Catholic saints. The piece focuses on a woman doing her PhD dissertation on the topic, using John Lennon, Johnny Cash and Jimi Hendrix as examples. My only surprise is that it took so long for someone to figure this out. Elvis was probably the first "dead celebrity saint," with Graceland became a pilgrimage spot rivaling Lourdes almost immediately after his death in 1977. One could make an argument for James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, but I see them as precursors to this cultural trend of raising deceased actors and musicians to the secular altars. The public may have had a lingering fascination with Dean and Monroe, but Elvis was, and still is, thought of in messianic terms by the true believers in The King (of Rock and Roll, that is).

Elvis, was a hero to most...but he sure wasn't a Saint

In my life, I haven't been immune to this reality. I was a wee lad when John Lennon was shot, and remember being terribly effected by it, even though the Beatles broke up when I was a toddler, and Lennon himself had been sort of semi-retired from the music business for five years before his tragic death. I got over that pretty quickly, but soon found myself being swept up in the Jim Morrison revival of the early 80's. Why, I'm not really sure. I know that going into high school I grew to dislike the direction popular music was taking. I didn't like synth-pop, preferring guitar driven rock, but thought heavy metal too harsh and morbidly cartoonish. So I fell back on the old stand by's like the Stones and the Who, bands my older brothers listened to, and discovered the Doors pretty much on my own. I read No One Here Gets Out Alive, the Morrison biography (that I learned later no one associated with the Doors thinks is accurate). I bought a greatest hits album, had a poster of Morrison on my wall, and set out to discover whatever other vintage "classic" rock I could. My older brothers always taught me to separate the music from the individuals making it, so my hero worship never went too far. Nonetheless I have to plead guilty to at least being a fellow traveler in the Cult of the Lizard King. 

James Douglas Morrison: Oh boy, he wasn't a Saint

I never gave the Dead Rock Star Cult too much thought until a controversial biography of John Lennon came out in 1988. Albert Goldman, in The Lives of John Lennon, basically accused the late Beatle of everything from misogyny, in it's various manifestations, to excessive drug use and homosexuality. The book was roundly condemned as a poorly researched hatchet job on a dead man who couldn't defend himself. I never read the book, but did read the Beatles biography by Bob Spitz, a friend of Goldman's who actually paid for access to the now dead author's notes in preparation for his own book. Spitz also condemns Goldman's book, but laments that the much maligned research was actually full of valuable information that, if used properly, would have given a much fuller picture of John Lennon the man and artist. Instead Goldman cherry picked the most salacious material for publication, leaving the rest for the archives. In the end Albert Goldman couldn't show his face in New York and L.A., and died in 1994 while preparing a bio of Morrison.

Johnny Cash: A man of faith, but I'm not sure even he thought that he was a saint

I set this up because I'm not defending Albert Goldman, but seeing the scorn heaped on him by the press, especially in an interview by Steve Croft, I began to scratch my head. OK, this guy wrote a book to cash in on John Lennon. Is Goldman a noble figure? No, he is not. Does he deserve some of the push back he's getting? Yes; fair is fair. If you're going to go on record accusing someone of something, especially someone who's dead, and really just to make a buck or two, you need to be ready to take the heat. But the vitriol directed at Goldman seemed wildly out of proportion. It's not like he was attacking Muhammad, Buddha or Jesus. He wasn't even questioning the virtue of Mother Teresa or Pope John Paul II. He was writing a tell all about a pop star. All I could think of was, big whoop. 

Even by the 80's I was use to all sorts of books or articles accusing Jesus shacking up with Mary Magdalene and Pius XII helping the Nazis, all with less back up than Goldman had for his book on Lennon. If you questioned the appropriateness of these claims, or their veracity, you were accused of being closed minded and dogmatic. Yet depicting Lennon as anything short of a martyred genius was, and still is, considered heresy in the popular culture.  I understood the scorn being heaped on The Lives of John Lennon and its author, but not the religious fervor with which it was being inflicted.

I'm still a Doors fan, and have been known to pop the "White Album" on from time to time, but with that episode I officially withdrew my membership in "The Cult of the Dead Rock Star." But the Cult goes on in the wider culture, encompassing now the likes of Freddy Mercury and Kurt Cobain.

In all this I see a particular manifestation of a trend; that as the Church, her practices and beliefs begin to recede from the public square other institutions, practices and beliefs that mimic the sacred creep in. Therapy now takes the place of the Sacrament of Reconciliation (not that I think therapy, in its place, is bad, quite the opposite)-and in a more nefarious way we have seen the rise of the public, electronic confessional known as the T.V. talk show. We still live in a sexually puritanical society, it's just that the morals have been inverted, like in Huxley's Brave New World. If you don't go along with the new morality you may not have to wear a scarlet letter, but you will be ostracized. Government now controls education, social services and is becoming a bigger and bigger source of both employment and, what use to be called, charity. Some have come to equate government with the national and local community: it has been proclaimed by one of our major parties in the U.S. "the only thing we are all apart of." It is true that in the past we emphasized the institutional Church at the expense of her other aspects, but as a culture we've exchanged an institutional Church for an increasingly institutionalized society.

As a Church we have de-emphasized the cult of the saints, as well as popular devotions in general. But there is a pull in us that needs heroes and does believe that there is spiritual a connection between the living and the dead (part of what we used to call the Communion of Saints). In place of role models who spur us on to live more virtuously we have adopted men and women, that though talented and often genuinely innovative in their chosen art form, lived less than virtuous lives and often their lack of virtue led to untimely deaths.

So why do so many of us latch on to these dead celebrities with such devotion? One reason may be that, because they mostly died young, they are easier to idealize. Marilyn will always be shapely and alluring, John Lennon is forever the peace loving hippie, Morrison is perpetually the intense, barechested poet, and Elvis is, well, the King. The problem of course is that this is all a lie. And even these celebrities themselves struggled with their public images. Marilyn Monroe wanted to be thought of as a serious actress more than as a sex symbol. John Lennon always looked with a bit of a jaundiced eye on fame, and spent the last decade of his life trying to figure out who he really was, striving for inner peace more than world peace. Morrison grew a wild beard, gained weight, some think at least partially on purpose, trying to destroy his sex symbol image. As for Elvis, we would need a long time to examine how exactly fame effected his life. But my guess, in all these people's cases, is that if we really bothered to look closely we would find many unsavory things that would shatter our illusions, along with a few pleasant surprises. But we would find people. Talented and maybe unusually so, but people nonetheless, warts and all.

Also, with their early deaths, with maybe the exception of Johnny Cash who died in his 70's, we only have photos and videos of young, vibrant, pretty, glamorous people. We don't have to see them get old or lose their touch. We don't have any late period John Lennon records that may be fine, but just don't measure up with the ones from the old days. There's no the spectacle of a 71 year old Morrison getting dragged out on stage every night begging for someone to light his fire. Gravity never had a chance to work on Marilyn's curves and we get to ignore Elvis' final, bloated days and enjoy the perpetually svelte hip swinger.

And all this is too bad. Johnny Cash did some of his best recording work late in life. The Stones haven't been relevant in the studio for decades, but are currently doing some of their best live shows ever. Clint Eastwood may not be a matinee idol anymore, but he hit his stride as a director in his 70s and 80s. This worship of dead celebrities is tied into our obsession with youth in general, and further blinds us from seeing that life doesn't end at forty; it actually can get more interesting, and we as people have the capacity of deepening in wisdom and insight. All that is lost when we idealize youth and worship image.

As seems to be the case a lot lately, there is more to say about this. I'll be back soon to comment further on this topic, and it's positive side: the Communion of Saints.