STYLE, STYLE, STYLE !
A reason we no longer think in America
B. Spencer Nix

Style, style, style,- style is the leading currency in the modern society, or what some have called "the river of life for American consumerism", the main artery of American identity and belonging. To define style is to grasp a wet water balloon, the term itself from the Latin word for stylus or pen. It came to refer to the distinctive matter in which someone wrote, and therefore signified the distinctive manner of expression used by anyone or anything. At its core, style is a term of identification, as substance is. However, style and substance are in direct contrast. Substance is a matter of who or what someone or something is; style is the manner through which that distinctiveness is presented or perceived.

Today, style has become an end in itself. No longer expressive of substance or inner character, style is all that matters now. No longer enduring, it is transitory, erratic, and fashion oriented. Any glimpse at a checkout aisle will show, style is the number one mantra of the twenty first century America (even more than sex). To be up to date and in touch with one's style is essential, to be out-of-touch is unforgivable. Identity is now a matter of perception and presentation, and style is the art of skillfully presenting illusions as we walk down the corridor of images that make up modern society. Style is the leading idiom of the image of one's choice- the desired sense of projected meaning and belonging. Style, image, and consumption are foundational to modern identity and discourse. Style itself is the ultimate in human self-advertising. Diana Vreeland's (editor of Vogue magazine) motto was "FAKE IT. FAKE IT". She said, "Never worry about facts, project and image to the public." The art of success is to create a world "as you feel it to be, as you wish it to be, as you wish it into being."

So, I rhetorically ponder, has America's mania for style and image affected thinking and discussion? Substance has become unimportant, style is what counts. Permanence is outdated, ceaseless change alone endures. Creation and creators are beside the point, consumption is its own purpose. Essences are ignored, only surfaces matter. The tried and true are of no interest, only the novel and the new posses allure. The meaning of things does not count for the style's concern is look, touch, sound, scent. Intrinsic character is nothing, exterior personality is everything. Who we are takes the back seat to who we can become and who we appear to be.

While there are many application to Christian thinking, three are most prominent. First, the preoccupation with style reinforces the trend toward trendiness. If change and choice are the two absolutes in modern society, then we slip toward a state described by French critic Roland Barthes as "neomania". This is the cult of the-latest-is-the-greatest and newer-is-the-truer. The pursuit of relevance for its own sake quickly leads to superficiality, anxiety, burnout, and compromise. Secondly, obsession with style undermines Christian speech of all kind. Christian speaking on both the individual and public levels was once the art of communicating the understanding of ideas and truth. Now, it has become a matter of performance and even deception. Thirdly, preoccupation with style is a major ingredient of the emptiness in modern culture. It affects the drive to sex and violence, which is the prime compensation for emptiness in a culture that has only one sin left- boredom. The modern world that is crammed with images and hysterical with changing styles is a hollow world, but is too dazzled to see it. And as one great Christian thinker once said, "hollowness is the disintegrative disease of weightlessness brought on by our crisis of cultural authority."

As Friedrich Nietzsche (not exactly a Christian thinker) predicted, "it would seem for a time as if all things had become weightless." Artificiality was once connected with city-life, but now it has shifted from the cityscape to the image-scape. "A corridor of images and a hall of mirrors are hardly the place to discover truth, substance, and that weightiness that is the essence of the glory of God."

The result of style upon much of Christian thinking has been a momentous blow. Unlike television and advertising, style is something many Christians are barely aware of. STYLE- always in the background and always changing, its real significance is that is destroys all significance. And in the process it profoundly assaults our minds too.