He is and has been representative of a form of faith that betrays, to the best of my discernment, the essence of the Gospel. It's brassy and loud and materialistic, celebrating and centering wealth and power in a way that is utterly alien to Christ's teachings. It puts pastors on gilded pedestals to be adored and showered with lucre, and as such is indistinguishable from hucksterism. It's an Elmer Gantry cosplay, far as I can see it.
But in pitching out a post noting Copeland's newly found political focus, I bumped into an oddity.
Right after the mess of the last election, videos circulated of Copeland laughing maniacally at the notion that Biden had actually won. It was, as presented, more than a little insane, as he and his congregants howled and hooted. I mean, here. Watch this:
It's...well...demonic. Like the cacophony of the possessed, creepy as hell in the most literal of ways.
As I dug about for a version to pitch into my last post, though, I came across this, from the Independent, a British news outlet. It's from the same event, only with a tiny and important snippet of context added. Copeland leads in to the cacophony by noting a Johns Hopkins study that suggests laughter alleviates pain. Watch this:
It's still politics from the pulpit. It's still validating a false narrative. It still gets...weird.
But it makes what we're looking at seem less like demonic possession or insanity. It's more like a masterful act of rhetorical manipulation. First, there's a clear on-ramp for his right-wing listeners, something to gain rational assent. It's a Hopkins Study! Laughter, even faked laughter, alleviates pain! He's set the stage, offering an appeal to authority, and any reservations or rational objections are lessened.
Then he's faking laughter, being intentionally obvious about it, so that it's clear to his audience what he's doing. He's not possessed. He's clearly in control, and being silly. They laugh at that, of course, both in on the joke and caught up in the joke. He's got them. The endorphins and the crowd dynamics kick in, and they're utterly, willingly, in the palm of his hand.
Is Kenneth Copeland a charlatan? Of course. But he's good at it. Smart about it, even. It's a talent, a craft, a skill, one shared by hucksters and demagogues alike.
Humor is odd. The things that we human beings laugh and snort and giggle at tend to be those that strike us as incongruous, the combination of one thing with another thing to absurd effect. Laughter in homo sapiens sapiens is typically stirred when something is utterly absurd, when our expectations about causality are shattered, when our social norms are transgressed against, or when someone emits a flatus.
My wife, for instance, simply could not stop laughing when I showed her Russian Rick Roll guy, whose video is above. I also may have chortled at it a time or two. It's so utterly absurd, so impossibly jauntily doofy, that I swear she was in peril of passing out. My boys often accuse me, on the other hand, of being without a sense of humor. It's true. It's hard to get me to laugh, particularly at jokes. I'm too cynical. I know what to expect. On the other hand, I find collections of bloopers and videos of people falling down to be insanely funny
This Sunday, on the way to church, I wondered at humor and God. If we find the unanticipated and the peculiar to be amusing, then it seems impossible that God might have a sense of humor. How can you ever find anything surprising or unanticipated if you are Alpha and Omega? It seems unlikely. And yet I'll often hear, as faithful folk encounter some of the more ironic and bizarrely coincidental events of life, that God must have a sense of humor.
Like, say, this Sunday in my service. I was reading the passage from 1 Timothy 6 about the dangers of wealth. My entire sermon challenged the ethic of consumerist aquisitiveness that defines our culture. Yet as I prepared to read it, I discovered mid-service that my Bible had...well...it's an old Bible. It's kinda falling apart. And at some point over the week prior, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus had just plain old fallen out. They weren't there.
So I had to get up in front of the church and read the scripture condemning our idolatrous hunger for possessions from the screen of my shiny new iPhone 4.
Though I don't for a moment imagine that the Numinous Font of All Being was snickering, for in His Radiant Glory He Snickereth Not, I certainly appreciated the effort.
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