Why TED talks are far less interesting than revival sermons

I like good oratory. I teach public speaking regularly. I source and buy or download examples of great (imho…) examples of the genre, from business, politics, cinema, and the church. I watch the best of them over and over, making notes on why they work. I go over videos almost frame-by-frame with classes and seminars, pointing out this hand-movement, that inflection, the use of eyes, the deployment of silence, and of course two dozen or more classical rhetorical techniques, which I name easily in Greek and English. I like good oratory. A while ago, at a dinner party, the conversation turned to TED talks. I admitted, truthfully, that I have never yet watched to the end of one. It turned out that another guest was VP of a firm that sponsored one of the regional conferences, and so the conversation became slightly awkward… …I remember, however, not so much the awkwardness as the realisation. It had not occurred to me until I said it over that table, but it is the case that I have never yet watched to the end of a TED talk. I’ve begun to watch several dozen – over a hundred perhaps. I’ve learnt from many of them. In several cases I’ve bought the speaker’s book. But I’ve always clicked the close button before the presenter received her/his applause. On reflection, this is odd. I like good oratory. I study good speakers obsessively, watch them repeatedly, pause the video, go in slow-mo, rewind, replay. But every TED talk I have clicked on, I have clicked off soon afterwards. This week I tripped over an NYT op-ed entitled The Church of TED, proposing that TED talks are the revivalist sermons of yore. This made me think again of my awkward conversation. I have heard and analysed great revivalist sermons; they are a world away from what I see on the TED video streams. When I teach public speaking, I stress one point regarding purpose: the stand-up monologue is, demonstrably, a fairly poor way of communicating information. It excels as a way of communicating vision. To use the form effectively, the speaker should not aim at the mind, but at the heart. A good set-piece speech is not about changing ideas, it is about changing desires. All of this is extensively demonstrated in the literature on public speaking. Of course, this makes sense of preaching. When I speak to experienced preachers I ask them to summarise the message of their last sermon in one sentence (if it was a well-constructed sermon, they will have done this before starting to write it of course). Then I ask them to estimate how many of those who heard the sermon would not have already known that idea. 5% is rare; 10% almost vanishingly so. Preachers repeat endlessly truths their congregations know well, with the hope and prayer that at least some of those congregated might this time be inspired to live what they profess to believe a little better. They aim at hearts, not minds, seeking to change desires, not ideas. The TED talk – classically; no doubt there are exceptions – proposes new ideas to the hearer; it aims at communicating information, not redirecting desire. Generally in my (I freely admit, limited) experience, the informational content of a TED talk is fully conveyed in the first three minutes; however interesting and arresting the talk, there is no need or purpose in watching beyond that. I confess to a very short attention span – no; let me rephrase that; I confess to a very low boredom threshold. I can give weeks to working slowly through an obscure Latin text if it continues to offer me something new, but a videoed speaker who has said his piece gets about twenty seconds more, and then is dismissed. Revivalist sermons told their hearers nothing new, but convicted them of the need to act on the things they professed to know. They aimed at desires, not ideas. This is, simply, the right use of oratory. And in politics and in business this is visibly the successful use of the set-piece speech. I play my students a speech Bill Gates gave, full of technical specs, rich in information, instantly forgettable, extraordinarily boring. Then I play them Steve Jobs’s keynote from a few weeks later, launching the MacBook Air. He said one thing: ‘it’s thin.’ Oh, there is a pile of numbers and pictures and comparisons to make you realise that he means, ‘no, really, it’s thin!’ And there is of course a powerful message about desire: ‘thin is beautiful; thin is desirable; you want this computer…’ But the informational content of the speech? ‘It’s thin.’ The speech is aimed at hearts, not heads; it is about desires,...

Read More

Christianity, Cameron, and Rev

David Cameron’s several interventions during Easter week concerning his own faith and his perception of the UK as a ‘Christian country’ aroused much interest, and more derision; by contrast, in it’s third series, the BBC2 sitcom Rev has apparently reached that level of popularity which requires newspaper columnists to take pot-shots at it (see Tim Stanley in the Telegraph and, much more interestingly in my estimation, James Mumford in the Guardian). Unravelling the various lines of a media and social media feeding frenzy like the one that surrounded the Prime Minister’s comments is not easy. His narrative of his own faith journey, which has clearly deepened in recent years following the death of his son Ivan, deserved much more respect than it got – a judgement I base simply on an ethical commitment to decency and respect in the face of personal tragedy; his line about a ‘Christian country’ was a soundbite that was largely meaningless without further specification of what a ‘Christian country’ might actually be; it successfully baited a predictably shallow response from the rent-an-atheist crowd, whilst inviting more thoughtful writers to propose potential meanings for the term and to test them against the evidence (see the present Archbishop of Canterbury here and his predecessor here). One, seemingly repetitive, feature of this furore offers an interesting contrast with the portrayal of Christianity in Rev: although neither term fits entirely comfortably with a good understanding of the essence of Christianity, the debate around the Prime Minister’s various remarks generally constructed Christianity in terms of ethics, whereas Rev constructs the faith in terms of spirituality. David Cameron wrote in the Church Times of ‘the Christian values of responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion, humility, and love’; of course, I do not doubt that these are ‘Christian values’, even if I would be happier with the word ‘virtues,’ and with a slightly different list (adding things like faith, hope, justice, prudence, courage, and temperance…). To define Christianity, however, in terms of these values is to elevate a part to the whole, and in particular to elevate effects above causes. The debate that followed offered some – fairly unkind, in general – words about the Prime Minister’s personal morality, and the morality of his government’s agenda. Most of this commentary failed to offer any rounded judgement or nuanced analysis, but even if it had, it constructed claims to Christian identity in terms of the achievement of certain moral standards. The Prime Minister’s original construction of a Christian country as one full of people committed to doing good was contrasted with a more corporate vision of a Christian country as one in which the government is primarily tasked with doing good; the notion that Christianity should be equated with doing good went largely unchallenged. (Danny Webster on Threads was an honourable – and energetic – exception.) Tim Stanley’s criticism of Rev (link above) constructs it on similar grounds: it, he claims ‘depicts a vicar trying to be kind to his parishioners – with hilarious consequences’. That does not ring true as a description of the show I have watched; Adam’s relationships with Colin, Adoha, Mick, and (perhaps particularly) Ellie are much more complex than ‘trying to be kind’ – ‘trying to be good,’ perhaps, but even then only with the qualification ‘and regularly failing’. The heart of the show, though, is not in Adam’s attempts to be good, but in Adam’s attempts to be Christian. Almost every episode through the three series turned on a moment of prayer, during which Adam realised what he must do, or after which events turned out for the better; the climax of the first series came when Adam’s fairly spectacular personal collapse was arrested by a dying person’s request to see him; in a powerful affirmation of vocation he re-dons his collar, quoting Isaiah 6 ‘The Lord said, who will go for us? And I said, here am I; send me.’ Prayer and vocation are not primarily about ethics; they are about spirituality, about a relationship with the divine. (The last episode of the third series again used clerical vestments as a metaphor for vocation; it’s not my tradition, but I can recognise and understand it.) It was this, I suspect, that made Rev so popular with so many Christians, and particularly with so many ordained ministers. Yes, the acting was wonderful (I’m slowly coming to the view that even an episode of Top Gear with Olivia Colman in it might be worth watching; she really is that good. And Tom Hollander is not very far behind); yes, the observations of inner-city church life, which I have known first-hand, and (I am told) the observations of the inner life of the...

Read More

Theological thoughts about the Leveson report

Tomorrow, the House of Commons will vote on Lord Leveson’s key recommendations concerning press regulation. Is there a theological perspective on this subject? Let me answer as a Baptist… A commitment to protecting freedom of belief has always been a central concern of the Baptist movement, albeit expressed in various different ways. (I trace some of them in ch. 6 of my Baptist Theology, looking at Thomas Helwys, Roger Williams, Isaac Backus, E.Y. Mullins, and Nigel Wright along the way.) The commitment is, for Baptists, profoundly theological, and also pragmatically inevitable. Baptist theology (I there argue) focuses on the direct address of Christ to each particular human person, and so the primary responsibility of every human person for her own religious commitments. As Helwys famously had it, in 1612, ‘…man’s religion to God is between God and themselves. The king will not answer for it.’ And nor will priest, bishop, pastor, prime minister, or anyone else. Anyone, in any role, who attempts to coerce belief is trespassing on the office of Christ himself, and so (in the classical Baptist theological logic) is simply and precisely an antichrist. Pragmatically, Backus put the point well, if rather waspishly: ‘The business of laws is not to provide for the truth of opinions, but for the safety and security of the commonwealth, and of every man’s goods and person; and so it ought to be; for truth certainly would do well enough if she were once left to shift for herself. She seldom has received, and I fear never will receive, much assistance from the power of great men; to whom she is but rarely known, and more rarely welcome…’ Legislation simply cannot change what I believe to be true; this is obvious; and so legislating to try to change my – or anyone else’s – beliefs is clearly idle and futile. From freedom of belief, it is not difficult to derive a commitment to freedom of speech – the state cannot coerce my belief, and should not force me to perjure myself by saying things I do not in fact believe (civic prayers and oaths were the great sticking-point for Williams). There are some potential issues at the edges of this commitment: public speech that might serve to destabalise the commonwealth, or to provoke violence or discrimination against an individual or group; Baptists would traditionally err on the side of defending even dangerous speech, finally for theological reasons (the security of the commonwealth is in God’s hands, not the governments’…); we would also traditionally insist on freedom of (religious) practice, which potentially raises more difficult issues (when the state judges my religious practice to be harmful to my children, or otherwise unethical, for example). What of the issues addressed by Leveson? The freedom of the press has – rightly – been a noble and tenaciously-held ideal; in its classical form, however, it offers protection in one direction only, and that direction is now, probably, the wrong one. The history of Baptist calls for freedom of conscience that I have sketched makes this point well: it is striking, in reading early Baptist calls for the freedom of belief, to observe that they assumed that totalitarian regimes were normal. The early Baptist discussions were offered by writers who, although deeply counter-cultural in their vision, nonetheless assumed that the power negotiation ran between the magistrate and the subject, with no other centres of authority at work. In the context of nation-states in which the (state) church was an agent of the totalitarian regime – which is to say, the whole of early-modern Europe, more or less (this is obviously true for any Protestant nation, including England; I think it remains true in subtlely different ways for each Roman Catholic nation, but I omit here the necessary lengthy discussion about negotiations between prince and pope in different contexts) – the gradual development of a press was the establishment of a subversive, non-establishment, voice, and a subversive and non-establishment voice that could actually be heard. (In England, the point was made powerfully in the language of the ‘three estates’: clergy, nobility, and commons were united in preserving the regime; the rise of the ‘fourth estate’ – the free press – was a fundamental challenge to, or at least check upon, the established order.) The press therefore had a privileged moral position, from a Baptist perspective: its was the voice that challenged the government whenever the government mistook itself for God. No doubt one does not need to be a Baptist (or other dissenting Christian) to applaud the rise of an estate that questioned, rather than upholding, the established order, but Baptists have an...

Read More

What the Archbishop of Westminster really said…

The top news story on several UK sites on Christmas morning ran as follows: the Archbishop of Westminster, knowing that his midnight Christmas mass homily would be widely reported,  had used the opportunity given to him to attack the government’s plans to introduce same-sex marriage. Christian comment on (those bits that I see of) FB and Twitter was highly critical, suggesting that – even if he happened to be right about equal marriage, which most people who took the trouble to comment seemed to think he wasn’t – to make this the central message of Christmas was totally inappropriate. All this was rather predictable; also rather predictable was the fact that the media reports were at least highly misleading, if not actually inaccurate, and that the Archbishop was not guilty of any of the things he was charged with by social media commentators. The full text of Vincent Nichols’s homily is available here; his central point is that the fact of incarnation brings earth and heaven together, a fact which means the apparently-mundane activities of daily life are charged with eternal significance. He offered three examples: our daily work is a sharing in divine creativity; love expressed in human life is an expression of the love of God; and – combining these two points – the particular love expressed in marriage is a uniquely creative act, bringing into being a new human soul. He went on to suggest that each of these points is capable of distortion by sin: work can become exploitative, and a ‘corrosive disrespect can fashion the culture of a business and put it in need of refashioning’; charity can be motivated by self-interest, not genuine love; and marriage can be distorted: the Archbishop said: Sometimes sexual expression can be without the public bond of the faithfulness of marriage and its ordering to new life. Even governments mistakenly promote such patterns of sexual intimacy as objectively to be approved and even encouraged among the young. (This was, to be clear, the complete content of his statement on marriage; there was nothing else.) Now, it is fair to say that underlying this is an assumption that marriage is ordered to procreation, and so that same-sex relationships can never be ‘marriages’, but it is not news that a Roman Catholic prelate believes this, and it is left as an underlying assumption, not a point argued for or highlighted. The direct criticism here concerns sexual activity outside of marriage, and governments are criticised for approving of and promoting that. If one wanted to link the Archbishop’s comments to a current news story, the criticism of corporate culture, particularly in the context of corporate tax avoidance and the LIBOR fixing scandal, would surely have been the obvious place to go; equal marriage just was not on his agenda. So, whence the stories of attacks and quotes about the plans being ‘shambolic’? The Archbishop gave an interview to the BBC – presumably on Christmas Eve, although this was not made explicit in any of the reports. In the interview, he was asked about the government’s plans for same-sex marriage and responded; he said, as far as I can determine, nothing that has not been said repeatedly previously by Roman Catholic – and Anglican, and Evangelical, and Muslim – leaders; the press stories that appeared on Christmas Day conflated comments made in this interview with his homily to give the impression that the theme of the homily had been criticism of government plans concerning equal marriage. The BBC story, here, leads with the interview comments, but the story focuses sufficiently on Christmas sermons to give the impression that this was the context for the comments. At one point there is a quotation in a headline ‘”Shambolic” Process’ which is immediately followed by the line, ‘Speaking in his sermon at Westminster Cathedral…’; the word ‘shambolic’ came in the interview, but this arrangement of words appears almost designed to confuse and conflate the two comments. The Guardian similarly located the interview comments within a story that discussed the content of Christmas sermons, and so invited, perhaps encouraged, readers to confuse the two. Does this matter? Yes; it was clear from my FB/Twitter feeds that people I know to be intelligent and thoughtful were misled by such reporting, which surely makes it bad reporting. A festival sermon and a press interview are very different contexts, and to imply that something said in one was in fact said in another is to mislead readers badly. It would be possible to imagine intent in all this: the press were trying to paint the Archbishop in the worst possible light; I am sure...

Read More

Thinking about social media

I’ve been a bit slow in blogging here, over the past few weeks, but I have been writing things elsewhere, particularly in the area of churches and social media. If you’ve not seen them, and are interested, I have three pieces on the Baptist Times website about this: What is ‘social media’? The future of social media A theology of social media I also did a video interview with the American site Ethics Daily on a similar...

Read More
get facebook like button