The year I graduated from high school a hot new tennis star stepped out of a white Lamborghini, into the desert sunshine and said, “Image is Everything.” It was a Canon EOS Rebel camera ad. And the tennis pro was Andre Agassi.
What was once an edgy marketing slogan for a brand called Rebel, now sounds passe. Of course image is everything. Image is everything and everywhere. And while we see the shallow and even harmful effects, just about everyone still has a social media image they carefully maintain.
I recently read an intriguing article by Jonathan Haidt citing multiple scientific studies which now definitively prove what we’ve all intuitively known: Social media causes bad mental health outcomes. Our fixation with image is bad. It’s bad for our kids and it’s bad for us.
But as technology advances into unknown frontiers of artificial intelligence and virtual reality, this problem doesn’t seem to be going away. We’re nearing a time where image is not just everything, it’s the only thing. But in Christ we can contend against that. We must.
On Carey Nieuwhof’s podcast this week he interviewed pastor J.P. Pokluda. They talked about Chat GPT, leadership, virtues and vices. And do you know what J.P. said is the number one vice in the church today?
Perception management. Trying to make ourselves look better than we really are. Image curation is tricky and false and fake. And while it may be a recent epidemic, it’s not a new human condition.
Jesus slammed the Pharisees who lived just like this. He said:
“Everything they do is done for people to see…They love the place of honor…They love to be greeted with respect…“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence…Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. (Matthew 23).
Perception management doesn’t sit well with God. He’s not impressed. But what’s the alternative to this hypocritical, image-is-everything culture? How can followers of Jesus show a better way?
Radical integrity. Being the same person online, at home, at work, and at church. Fight the urge to post or behave in a way that tricks people into thinking we’re something untrue.
Radical vulnerability. Letting people see the broken, imperfect, real you. And that can be terrifying.
But we’ve got both science and Jesus warning us to take the risk. And even Andre Agassi would tell you his slogan was a lie. He confessed in his autobiography “Open” that those words “image is everything” became a curse over him, making him feel like a shell, lacking substance. Unseen. Unknown. Unloved.
That is the tragic outcome for any life built on perception management.
I pray we can grow and strive to be a beacon of true, rock-solid reality in a world consumed with image. In God’s strength we can be different. We can have integrity. We can be vulnerable. We can point others to our faithful God. He sees us. He knows us. He loves us. The real us.
