Is the Richard Armitage religion idolatrous?

Disheveled [g]-d?: Richard Armitage with Todd Snyder, tweeted by Snyder, April 26, 2013.

Continued from here.

This post doesn’t really have a beginning. I can’t tell you precisely when I started thinking about this question, though it was early on. All my thoughts were inchoate and seemed unworthy of a discussion. I’ve decided for the purposes of blogging to leave them impressionistic rather than to try to develop them fully, mostly (although I’ve read a ton of Weber in my time) because if I got into twentieth-century sociology of religion discussions I’d get jammed up with footnotes and never get to the interesting stuff. And twenty-first century religious studies questions whether religion is even a category. I’m sooooooo not going there.

Youthful [g]-d? Richard Armitage, while at the Birmingham Rep, photo tweeted by Andrew Whiteoak, April 18, 2013.

Richard Armitage religion questions I’ve had

I can find fragments of discussions in my diary; for instance, when Dear Friend asked me, about five months into my blogging journey, if what I was doing is the contemporary version of what girls did with Elvis in the 1950s or the Beatles in the 1960s, and if that activity bears any relation to the behavior of young women who were visited by Marian apparitions in the period I studied as a scholar, and earlier.

About the time I was wondering that, I was noticing that a lot of the fangirls I was becoming acquainted were focused not only on Richard Armitage, but also on other actors or celebrities — and I was wondering whether, if fandoms are like religions and their objects are like deities, if fans who admired multiple celebrities intensely might be seen as polytheists. We used to joke off and on about polyamorous fangirling. We talked a lot as well, around the time I started blogging, about “celebrity worship syndrome” and whether we might be suffering. Do we “worship” Richard Armitage in more than the rather loose sense, metaphorical of the term? Is the reason I’ve only ever been interested in Armitage with this intensity somehow related to my other monotheistic relationships?

I can find a reference in my diary to musing that from my perspective there seems to be much less stigma visited on fandom in Japan than in many other places, and that it seems legitimate to develop a more (for lack of a better word) emotionally intimate or intense relationship with the object of one’s affection there than it does here. Adding that to the religious line of thinking, I was musing around the question of whether one of many reasons Japan might be friendlier to fandom is that it has not had a strong monotheism. In other words, I was wondering about whether a society that had been either polytheistic or (as Japan is now) largely non-identifying with religion would be friendlier to celebrity fandoms than societies with strong monotheisms, which would potentially always be concerned about idolatry, particularly in the case of a fandom focused on a single individual. (Lest you worry, although I am not talking about it today, I’m not going to leave the commodification component out of all of this — I read recently that British actors have repeatedly been marketed in Japan as a sort of package, or “boy boom.”)

Richard Armitage religion discussions we’ve had

Those questions together have inter alia both a psychological component (“is intense fangirling emotionally unhealthy?) and a religious one (“is intense fangirling idolatrous?”). So it wasn’t surprising when, about two years after that, someone who described herself as a new fan raised the question of fandom, parasocial relationships, and the extent to which certain practices in the fandom might transgress the demands of ethics or religion. I, quite frankly, think the parasocial label is at best judgmental, at worst, useless for describing what many fans experience and what the meaning of the object of the fandom could be in the daily life of a fan, and I said so, elliptically but rather controversially. Some responses to the veiled implications about fan idolatry were vehement. As much as that discussion had a subtext for a lot of its participants related to what was happening in the fandom at that specific moment, it was the kind of question that had been simmering in our thoughts for a long time, particularly because every now and then someone would actually peel off with the explanation that they thought they were over-involved and needed to separate themselves from Armitage. I used to get a question about that from time to time. Or someone would leave with the explanation that her partner couldn’t handle her involvement with our favorite actor — which raised in addition the question of whether a celebrity crush is like a crush on someone you know, or whether a celebrity is a real challenge to a romantic relationship, or — as is often charged by those who make fun of fangirls — a celebrity crush takes the place of a real relationship to the detriment of the crusher.

Deus ludens? The man in question plays foosball with Jamie Edwards.

I’ve never really liked these questions. First, even if mental illness sometimes manifests itself via fandom, I don’t think fandom, even intense fandom, is a cause or even necessarily a sign of mental illness. Second, I don’t think a celebrity crush occupies the same potential emotional space as a crush in real life, or even a real life romantic relationship. And then there’s the religion question. To me these questions are tied together, but I’m going to start unraveling on the “loose thread” of the religion term.

Is the Richard Armitage religion idolatrous?

The “idolatry” label for how fans treat Armitage never really resonated with me; it didn’t even make me angry because it so missed the point. In part, I think it doesn’t intrigue me all that much as a thought because I am a rather religious person and what I experience with G-d is even now rather different than what I experience around Richard Armitage. There are similarities, even significant ones, but my feelings about what I understand my relationship with G-d to be are laden with all kinds of other matters that have to do with culture and obligation and morality and family that don’t enter into my perspective on Richard Armitage in quite the same way. Hence I’ve never felt afraid that I’ve been putting Richard Armitage before G-d or even into the same category. On the contrary, it seemed as if, as Armitagemania took on intensity I was able to recharge particular elements of my relationship with G-d (this has to do with the experience of flow, but that’s something for later).

g-d as boyfriend? Richard Armitage and Sophie Lapin, Australian tv host, in Spring 2013 during the Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey press tour. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

Of course, maybe that’s just me and others are experiencing something idolatrous. I’m doubtful, though, and I ended up thinking that we were dealing, as so often in fan policing, with a case of displacement. Still, do we treat Richard Armitage like G-d?

I still tend to say “no.” A lot of Richard Armitage fans are somewhat to very (conventionally) religious and don’t seem to have any problem managing all of their allegiances. Then, too, most of the use of pseudo-religious labels by fans seems to be tongue in cheek; we are laughing at ourselves, not truly engaged in shrine-building or pilgrimages in their original senses, for instance. In terms of things that we might associate with “inappropriate worship”: Many of us feel that our experiences of Richard Armitage have changed our lives, of course, something which is highly significant — but this experience is not solely a religious one. Teachers change our lives, as do certain experiences. Although I have heard a few pseudo-“miracle stories” attributed to Armitage over the years, they’ve always been shared confidentially and privately, which to me suggests that the people telling them are aware of the idolatry “problem,” conscious of avoiding it, and aware that they’re dealing with something other than G-d when they encounter Armitage. If they were really engaging in idolatry, I don’t think they’d be hiding what they were saying and experiencing. Someone once told me she thought that G-d was working powerfully through Armitage, but she stopped short of saying he was a prophet, and the Bible tends to suggest that G-d can work powerfully through many kinds of people, not just prophets or judges but also ordinary people. There’s also the question of images and the use of images to generate certain kinds of feelings or represent types of relationships, but as the Catholic Church has long recognized, the mere possession or use of an image does not necessarily imply that one is worshiping the image, and I don’t think the way that I (at least) or most fans use images of Richard Armitage does more than slightly approach the definition of dulia, let alone latria. That, too, should be the subject of a separate post in this series, because I know many fans look at pictures of the crush for particular purposes — and so have I, over the years.

The Richard Armitage religion + irrationality (?)

Also from Australia. Because stuffed animals are not real.

The last piece of this that connects at least tangentially to religion and has come up a great deal in the last year or so in the Armitage fandom is the question of why we believe things to be true about which there is little solid evidence and which cannot be proven either way — and just as interestingly, why we are willing to fight tooth and nail over them. Religions are often said to involve a necessary belief in the irrational, the supernatural, or the unprovable (an interesting article discusses this phenomenon for religion from an anthropological point of view.) Another fan friend and I spend a lot of time puzzling over this question, and what finally got me to start publishing these posts was a discussion over an article she sent me over the weekend, about fans who believe that Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart are secretly married. I don’t find much of this article all that convincing (all fans, not just those who believe in odd or apparently false ideas, are heavily emotionally involved; it’s not clear exactly how hostility to authority plays a role in embracing a false idea when there is no authority; and the explanation that participants in these discussions are pedantic or bored is just plain judgy and condescending, given that most fans have those moments and outsiders in general don’t understand why fans find it important to argue about things they consider unimportant. What both of us found interesting, though, was the suggestion that the people who police conspiracy theorists (whichever you understand to be the policers and whichever the conspiracy theorists) are just as emotionally involved as their counterparts.

Admitting those problems, this article and the discussion we had finally points in the direction of what I want to say about what many intense fans including me and possibly or probably not including you are doing with and about Richard Armitage — we are constructing a tulpa. Although I am going to use that term very loosely, this process explains both the kinds of activities we are engaged in and the intensity of our attentions, along with the religious or quasi-religious features of the fandom.

Next — what is a tulpa? and what does it have to do with Richard Armitage?

Next post.

~ by Servetus on May 20, 2015.