Vanity Fair

The story of Katy Perry growing up in a strict Christian home and who is now distancing herself from the faith is only unusual in the degree that her fame illuminates the back-story which otherwise--like millions of other stories--would never be told in the pages of Vanity Fair.

From the shackles of parental punitiveness and religious restriction, she is well astride on the streets of Vanity Fair, that place that John Bunyan so imaginatively conceived as an allegory for the world in his novel Pilgrim's Progress. The world that amuses, attracts, fascinates, and ultimate exhausts the wandering soul from finding its home in God's City. From attraction to amusement to distraction and then ultimately to destruction.

Then I saw in my dream, that, when they were got out of the wilderness, they presently saw a town before them, and the name of that town is Vanity; and at the town there is a fair kept, called Vanity Fair.

It is kept all the year long. It beareth the name of Vanity Fair, because the town where it is kept is lighter than vanity, and also because all that is there sold, or that cometh thither, is vanity; as is the saying of the Wise, "All that cometh is vanity" (Eccles. 1; 2:11, 17; Isa. 40:17).

With my perspective on eschatology (see prior post) I have to be quite clear that I am not of the belief that this world is a good place filled with essentially and entirely good people, where I hold a naive optimism about the future and a better world being ushered in by man-made and humanly generated utopian schemes that ultimate disintegrate into nightmares. Christ died for sinners...if the world had been ultimately good, He would have been placed on a pedestal and not a cross. God assuming His rightful throne in His incarnation/coronation.

Yet, I hold great faith that Jesus Christ can transform tragedy into triumph because of His resurrection. And such restoration of individuals will inevitable incarnate itself into institutions. This is not the Social Gospel...this is the Gospel period.

Katy Perry has left the Church essentially, in my estimation, because she was never provided a positive vision for what her talents could do to make the world a better and more whole place. Instead, she is lost in Vanity Fair and has indeed become part of the show. She is now in a different prison...one without literal bars yet punishing all the more.