Ehrenreich is most effective when she writes journalistically with an eye for the telling detail, such as in this description of Joel Osteen and his wife, Victoria: “In one way, the two of them seem perfectly matched, or at least symmetrical: his mouth is locked into the inverted triangle of his trademark smile, while her heavy dark brows stamp her face with angry tension, even when the mouth is smiling.”
Pastors who serve in quite different settings from the Osteens’ and who interpret the gospel differently than they do may take some delight in seeing them skewered so skillfully. But pastors might not want Ehrenreich to train her eye on their own churches. Increasingly, I encounter churches that have done away with corporate prayers of confession in worship because they are “too negative.” Funerals are now often approached as “celebrations of life,” where death is spoken of only in euphemisms. I have heard far too many sermons recently that substitute a glib positive message for the gospel.
Ehrenreich insists that the alternative to positive thinking is not despair; it is realism. Although she does not make this a theological argument, I think she would appreciate the distinction between positive thinking and the gospel. Positive thinking can be a lulling mixture of illusion and denial. By contrast, the gospel is based on hard realities, like sin and death, but can remain ultimately hopeful because it is also based on the reality of a God who triumphs over both. It seems to me, then, that any attempt to dismantle the shallow optimism that Ehrenreich critiques relentlessly””and, at times, effectively””is in service to the gospel.
The resurrection, perhaps, is not merely a Happy Face. “Over the Rainbow” is not a Gospel Message. The Cross isn’t a veil for suffering, but more like an arrow.
I’ve like some of Ehrenreich’s books in the past, and I’ve heard her interviewed on this one (though I haven’t read it). It seems to me from hearing her that she’s missing a basic insight people learn when they start doing pastoral care: you can’t shortcut the experience. She rejects the whole language of finding gift in a bad experience, but the horror stories she tells seem to be mostly about people telling her to find the gift in the experience *while it’s happening*. To look back at one’s life and find that there’s been a gift in the suffering one’s experienced is a different thing from going into a hospital room and saying, “someday you’ll be grateful for this.” (The latter is just putting a huge extra burden on someone who’s already suffering). I don’t think I’ve heard her make that distinction.
Thank you, MarkP. I read Ehrenreich’s book on job searches and networking, and it sounds like this one is pitching the same insights. She skewers the “positive thinking” culture beautifully. The issue it seems to me is this: when we’re all done with the sarcasm and the sketches, there’s nothing left but vague ruminations about the folks who’ve been marginalized and abused forming a support group, which is, more or less, more of the same. The complete absence of faith, and, with that, the absence of both hope and the gift of the present moment, renders the whole exercise akin to what the Russians called “rosy-cheeked despair”. After all, her books apparently sell well, so she’s OK.