Welcome to The Square Inch, a Friday newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. This publication is free for now, but please consider clicking on the button at the bottom to become a paid subscriber to enjoy this along with Monday’s “Off The Shelf” feature about books and Wednesday’s “The Quarter Inch,” a quick(er) commentary on current events.
Dear Friends,
Do you know what LARPing is? It is an acronym—well, the LARP part is—that is then “verbed,” which is something the younger generation loves doing. They don’t say, “it is difficult to be an adult.” They say, “I’m bad at adulting.” They don’t say, “So-and-so and I get along with each other.” They say, “We vibe.” I digress.
LARP means “Live-Action Role Play.” I am not sure of the origins of this term, but it refers to games that involve player immersion. The player is a distinct character. It is not like Monopoly; no one plays that game thinking that they are, in fact, a clothing iron or shoe. It is more like Dungeons & Dragons, where players spend an inordinate amount of time crafting and creating their characters—what race? What powers? What personality? And then, when it comes time to play the game, all of the participants are “in character.” The “live action” part is the game, “role playing” is when the player dons a certain fantasy persona.
But that’s just a board game. LARPing is taken to a whole new level with video games. They even call the genre “Live Action Role Playing Game.” It is an immersive experience in which you play a character caught up in some kind of drama. It could be a mystery, battle or war, a post-apocalyptic wasteland fighting Zombies, that sort of thing. Other forms of LARPing would be the folks you sometimes see in a park holding jousting tournaments, all dressed up as Medieval knights and ladies—the Society for Creative Anachronism, I think they call it. Another example would be the popularity of “Comic Cons,” conventions devoted to comic books and fantasy/sci-fi franchises where people dress up in costumes as their favorite characters.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love imagination, and I love immersion, and I love entertainment. But modern LARPing is also entertainment perfectly suited for our postmodern world, which is all about “expressive individualism.” We are all led to believe that we create who we are and create the world around us. It is of a piece with how our social media works; so many people spend so much time “curating” an online image. There are even cartoon “Avatars” that people customize to look like their fantasy selves. Spend enough time fantasizing about and crafting some “ideal” image of yourself and you might just start to believe it to be true.
A lot of young men who play LARP video war games go out and buy the real stuff: the rifles, the gear, the boots, and so forth, and then they imagine themselves to actually be a Navy SEAL or Green Beret. They go out into the woods and, well, live-action role play. They can easily lose themselves in the fantasy that their self-curated image is reality. But usually the truth is that if there was some kind of catastrophic civic breakdown in which one needed a plate carrier and AR-15, most of these guys probably couldn’t run a half a mile to safety (myself included, I assure you). There is, in fact, a difference between being Special Operator and a LARPer.
I am, in an admittedly roundabout way, trying to get at a certain psychology—the psychology of expressive individualism in which we self-create and self-curate our image, our brand, our marketing, and how the line between reality and virtuality can get blurred. It is a bigger problem than just depressed teenage girls who can never quite live up to the image they’ve crafted on Instagram. It’s a cultural problem that runs a lot deeper then that.
Yuval Levin, one of the finest public intellectuals of our day, is fond of talking about this with respect to our cultural and civic institutions. It used to be that one joined an institution—a company, a brand, an organization, a church, a legislative body—because one wanted to join and to serve the mission of that organization. No longer. Now one joins an institution solely as a means—more pointedly, a self-serving means as a performative platform. The organization is there for you to use it to show the world how wonderful and virtuous and great you are. Congress, for example, is barely—if at all—a deliberative legislative body. It is a game in which people LARP. They curate a persona and use their elected positions as opportunities to play a character, and often some of them believe their fantasies so strongly that they become impervious to reality. Stacey Abrams thinks she’s the rightful governor of Georgia. Kari Lake thinks the same thing about Arizona. Donald Trump thinks that about the whole country.
And don’t even get me started on the political industrial complex of PACs and advocacy organizations, which tend to be full to the brim with frauds—people LARPing as “Very Important People,” who are actually not very important at all. Well, they are important as individuals made in the image of God, but not important in the ways they are play-acting as important.
LARPing is found in other institutions, too. The evangelical church has plenty of it. Carl Trueman once found himself on the outs because he called it “Big Eva,” an industrial complex of personalities and organizations devoted to self-promotion, image, branding, and marketing. And think of the number of celebrity pastors who, it has sadly turned out, really were LARPing; live-action role-playing that they were Very Important Thinkers and “influencers.” In reality, some of them weren’t fit for ministry at all. One such leader, at the height of his powers, wrote a book entitled, Humility, and was later fired and disgraced because—I’m not making this up—his leadership was characterized by pride and arrogance. Others believe their LARPing so strongly that even when they single-handedly blow a 5,000-member church to smithereens, they just move to Scottsdale and find a new group of people to con. It amazes me how Mark Driscoll can still gin up an audience.
Self-importance. Self-image. Self-curation of our little fantasy worlds. It is the Age of the Self. And Christians are just not immune to it. “Do not think of yourselves more highly than you ought,” warns Paul. We have a perennial problem with that and, again, the danger is that we often lack any outside perspective, any measuring stick or mirror provided by that thing called “Reality” and we come to believe that our fantasies, our persona, our image, is real. That lack of reality is exacerbated by the fact that so much of this is carried out in virtual reality—social media. A Twitter sandbox fight full of juvenile one-liners cannot provide actual and accurate feedback, but somehow we think it’s the real world. I mean, if I’m “owning the libs” on Twitter, I must really be a persuasive and thoughtful person! This is a temptation and problem for all of us, but I would suggest it is a greater temptation for a certain kind of person with a thirst for popularity, influence, importance—to get inside what C.S. Lewis called the “Inner Ring.”
There is no need to name any more names, but I can think of several younger Christians who are awfully big for their britches. They fancy themselves Very Important Public Intellectuals and spend their whole lives reminding people of that—curating their images and branding it; actual intellectual accomplishments can come later. Others take a more niche approach; there’s a guy who apparently woke up one morning and thought to himself, “You know what? I’m going to put myself out there to the world as an expert on masculinity.” And, voila! A book, a podcast, a video series later and he’s got quite a tribe looking to him for how to be a man. I don’t know about you, but the last place I would look for that kind of guidance is to someone who actually had the thought occur to him that he ought to market himself as an expert on masculinity. I think the same thing of folks who write parenting books when they still have kids in diapers.
Andrew Sandlin posted this Facebook comment:
Our culture values celebrity, image, shock, outrage, bling, glitz, ratings, Twitter followers, and Facebook friends.
God values faithfulness.
Amen, and amen. Too many people are LARPing in their thirst for grandiosity and influence. People need accurate self-assessment; they need reality, and they need to pursue quiet faithfulness in that reality. If you have a real gift and God chooses to bless it by expanding your influence, wonderful. But if you spend all your time hustling and image-crafting and marketing and tweaking your Avatar it will be hard to know whether it is God’s blessing or your own self-serving, LARPing ambition. Here’s what the Apostle Paul says should be our ambition:
make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody. (1 Thess. 4:11-12)
Boy, we could use a lot more of that.
Thank you for reading The Square Inch Newsletter. Have a wonderful weekend!
"For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it." Jesus.
Although I hafta say...
A couple teenage boys who play Call of Duty, then are inspired to buy some airsoft guns and run around in the woods, exhibit more drive and honesty than the LARPERS in Congress, who don't even step up the ladder of pretensies.