Month: May 2025

The right kind of secrets

The right kind of secrets

There’s a scene near the end of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan in which Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) finally locates the long-lost James Francis Ryan (played by a young Matt Damon). Damon’s character is in shock, after learning that his three brothers have been killed in action.

After years apart, he struggles to visualize their faces. So Hanks’ character suggests a trick he uses to recall his old life before the war:

Well, when I think of home, I… I think of something specific. I think of my, my hammock in the backyard or my wife pruning the rosebushes in a pair of my old work gloves.

Ryan tries it, and a risqué story follows about the brothers before they left for war. When the men stop laughing, he asks Captain Miller, “Tell me about your wife and those rose bushes.”

“No. No,” Hanks’ character replies, “that one I save just for me.”

THE SECRET PLACE OF THUNDER

I thought about that scene as I read John Starke’s book, The Secret Place of Thunder: Trading our Need to Be Noticed for a Hidden Life with Christ.

Starke’s claim is that we have entered an age of “performative individualism.” In this context, every moment of our lives—traumatic events, acts of service, sitting down to read a book—is curated for the gaze of others, usually online. (And as I type that, “curated” feels like one of the sadder words in our cultural lexicon.)

The vehicle is social media, but the driver is an age-old longing to be noticed, affirmed, and validated. Cue Ron Burgundy: “Hey everyone! Come see how good I look!”

“We have internalized the idea,” writes Starke, “that the markers of ‘being okay,’ of having an admirable life and enviable success, are primarily visible.”

Pics or it didn’t happen.

Ironically,

A deep loneliness comes for those who live off a curated image. … We can have many followers but few friends, lots of comments but no communion.

YOU HAVE RECEIVED YOUR REWARD

Into the performative rat race, Jesus offers a word of warning: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people to be seen by them” (Matthew 6:1). To do so is to have received your reward. God is interested in virtues done in secret—not because the homeless get less if I vlog my service at the local soup kitchen (though they might, if I’m preoccupied with my smartphone), but because I do.

Starke notes that in this passage Jesus doesn’t warn against flaunting our wealth, our power, or our giftedness; he warns against trumpeting our virtues: praying, fasting, giving to the poor.

And in our day, the “virtues” includes a kind of performative vulnerability: “I cried for hours… and then I wrote this.” (Use code #vulnerable for 10% off.)

I’ve thought a lot about what this means for ministries and Christian non-profits that manage online spaces, especially since sometimes what seems required for “marketing” often sounds like what Jesus told us not to do. I don’t have easy answers there, but it deserves some thought.

THE RIGHT KIND OF SECRETS

In the end, let me be clear about what I’m not saying: It is obviously beautiful and good to share our lives with one another, including certain deeply personal moments. It is also wrong to label every act of online sharing as “performative.”

My point is more limited and unique to your own life and personality.

It comes down to this: We need the right kind of secrets. Not the kind that fester and metastasize because we refuse to share them with the right person in the right place: the addiction, the struggle that needs community to heal. Rather, we need the kind of secrets that retain their beauty and formative power precisely because they are known only to God, us, and perhaps those closest to us.

To share those things (whatever they are) may be to cheapen and commodify both us and them. As in the famous double slit experiment from quantum physics, the act of (constant) observation changes us, and not always for the better. In that way, the old indigenous taboo is right: the camera has the power to steal part of your soul.

I’m not sure what that looks like for you; and I don’t pretend that it looks the same for all of us.

Still, the longer I live in a performative age, the more I side with Jesus and John Miller: “No. No… That one I save just for me.”

Hello friends. Please subscribe on the homepage to receive these posts by email. This is especially helpful since I’ve decided (mostly) to uncouple the blog from social media. Thanks for reading. ~JM

Are students customers?

Are students customers?

A common refrain these days in (Christian) higher ed goes like this, “We must remember, students are our customers.”

The logic runs as follows:

  1. Anyone who pays for a good or service is a customer.
  2. Students and parents often pay (a lot) for education.
  3. Viewing students as customers is not just accurate but important, since it helps colleges take things like student satisfaction, institutional accountability, and appropriate return on the investment (ROI) seriously.

To be fair, I’m sympathetic to parts of the argument. And its intention can be good.

It’s absolutely right to say that universities must continually evaluate whether they are caring for and training students well. And parents have every right to inquire as to whether the cost of a particular education is worth it. That involves not just how much money a student may earn upon graduation, but the kind of spiritual formation and integrity fostered at the school. Christian colleges that don’t get deadly serious about those points will disappear, and they deserve to.

That said, I reject the idea that students should be viewed primarily as customers.

There are good reasons to believe that points #1 and #3 are wrong, at least in certain cases.

EDUCATION AS DISCIPLESHIP

At its best, Christian education is a form of discipleship.

Jesus was a teacher. And his teaching ministry was funded, at least partly, by students. Luke’s Gospel makes special mention of some female disciples who paid to keep Christ’s teaching ministry going—Mary (called Magdalene), Joanna the wife of Chuza, Susanna, “and many others.” These women, the Gospel tells us, supported the Lord, “out of their own means” (Luke 8:1–3).

Yet if someone were to approach Jesus and refer to these female apprentices as his “customers,” I suspect he’d have harsh words for them. (He might even pull out one of his trademark Jesus-burns that he could get away with, on account of being sinless, but sounds egotistical and mean when I try it.) The reason is self-evident: to speak of Jesus’ disciples as “customers” sounds profane, and it cheapens the relationship between a rabbi and his students.

The problems persist when we turn from Jesus’s teaching ministry to ours.

I currently serve as a Teaching Pastor at a local church. Parishioners (myself included) give monetarily to keep that teaching ministry going—and a portion of that money pays my salary.

Yet that exchange of funds would never drive me to refer to my parishioners as “customers.” To do so sounds odd, it commits a category mistake, and it risks making a pastor-teacher more like false prophets from the Old Testament who espoused the formula, “The customer is always right.”

I’m well aware, of course, that there are differences between the teaching role of Jesus, that of a pastor, and that of a college professor. Yet the above examples are enough to prove that there are indeed spheres of life–one of which is Christian education–in which one invests funds in education without being viewed primarily as a customer or consumer. To the extent that we reject that precedent, Christian ed is secularized. And to the extent that is secularized, it ceases to have sufficient reason to exist.

CONCLUSION

Once again, none of this changes the need for professors and universities to step up their game. And one way to do that is to remind ourselves of the financial cost of college as we strive to go above and beyond for students. That’s right and good.

Yet if the telos of learning is more about formation than consumption, then the student-as-customer model runs contrary to a Christian view of education. It does so, in part, because it wrongly assumes that the only way to serve a person well is to view them as consumers. Yet as Neil Postman argued long ago (see here), that’s precisely the modern heresy we must overcome.

In the end, the problem is not that the student-as-customer approach goes too far in seeking to train and mentor students with excellence, but that it does not go far enough.

It cheapens the nature of the relationship, commits a category error, undermines the purpose of learning, and fails to grasp that there are spheres of life (like family, faith, and education) that must not be flattened by the all-reducing language of the market.

Hello friends. Please subscribe on the homepage to receive these posts by email. This is especially helpful since I’ve decided (mostly) to uncouple the blog from social media. Thanks for reading. ~JM