The God of the Geeks

SNOQUALMIE PASS, Wash., Feb. 24

     Geeks were in the news this week.  My weekly intake of the NPR Wait Wait ... Don’t Tell Me! podcast took place while driving up toward this snow-covered wonderland yesterday—a triple expression of my own nerdiness, since it combined my loves of travel, camp, and NPR all into one.  Would that people with unusual interests always had it so easy.

     Peter Sagal, NPR’s very funny and gifted game show host—and someone whom, as a broadcast major myself, I wouldn’t mind having lunch with someday—was joking about the perceived usefulness of studying art history, a major not known for its post-college earning potential.  Apparently the president had accidentally caused a stir among art history majors for a remark he’d made (he later clarified), and so Sagal was quizzing a listener on the executive misstep.

     It “caused an outcry from art history majors all across the country,” joked Sagal. “They banded together and agreed to not put as much foam as usual on our grande lattés.”

     It was a good joke, one that justifiably got a big laugh from the studio audience.  It speaks to my own experience as an unemployable collegian, too: when I graduated in 2009, most of us journalism students knew, even as our commencement speaker exhorted us to re-make the journalism industry, how hard it was going to be to find jobs in our field during a recession.  I myself never entered it and went to grad school instead.

     But underlying Sagal’s quip is a strange, and quite suburban, assumption that our culture seems to have adopted, often to the detriment of the youth in the pews.  It runs something like this: Success and happiness in life depends upon attaining financial security.  In order to attain it, you’ve got to work in a lucrative field, which requires a good collegiate (or, more and more, a good graduate) degree in that field from a noteworthy school.  As there seem to be fewer rich art historians, poets, philosophers, and painters than I.T. professionals, lawyers, airline pilots, and doctors, we suppose that degrees in the humanities are trivial at best, fiscally irresponsible at worst.

     As a result of that line of thinking, many members of my generation are tempted to enter fields in which they have no passionate interest, or if they do spend their collegiate years studying what they really enjoy, they have to wrestle with the well-intentioned queries of friends and loved ones who want to know “what you’re going to do with your degree”.

     Not that there’s anything wrong with being an I.T. professional, a lawyer, an airline pilot, or a doctor, of course; we should thank the Lord that we have such people pursuing their passions and keeping us, as it were, alive and un-sued.  But when did non-lucrative courses of study—degrees like philosophy, art history, theatre, classics, literature, English, flute performance, and all the rest—stop being intrinsically good, worthwhile ends in their own right?  Have we stopped giving ourselves permission to study things simply because we’re passionate about them, even when it means financial sacrifice, even if it means barista time after college?

     Since these questions speak to the core of what a life worth living looks like, they’re of great consequence for how we minister to the kids in our families, churches, and camps—which pursuits we tell them are Worthwhile (with a capital “W”) in the days after they graduate.  “The study of language, history, and ideas does not appear to be as useful as computer training,” claimed Klassen and Zimmermann’s excellent book, The Passionate Intellect, “but because of the dignity of nature and human nature, they have intrinsic worth, and their patient study honors God’s creation and thus glorifies God.”  Are our kids hearing this from us?

     Jesus put the goal of life as simply to love the Lord with our entire being, and our neighbors as ourselves (Matt. 22:37–40 and parallels), serving the Lord with all of our intellect and passions, everything that makes us “tick” as unique persons created in God’s image (see Gen. 1:26–27).  And we should note that the ideal of “financial security” and “comfortable retirement” appear nowhere in the Lord’s re-telling of the Greatest Commandment.

     To be sure, the Scriptures ask us to take education and wisdom seriously (e.g., Prov. 8, 1 Tim. 4:16), along with the development and stewardship of our talents, resources, and gifts, often including the financial ones (see Matt. 25:14–30, Luke 19:11–27).  What we teach young disciples ought to include those elements as well.  But whenever security, comfort, or access to Western luxury overtake our devotion to Jesus and our diligent expansion of the fascinations and creativities that he has given us (“talents,” in the lingo of Matthew 25), it’s a form of idolatry: remember what the Lord said about the seed choked by thorns, that “the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing” (Matt. 13:22; cf. Mark 4:19, Luke 8:14).

     The church needs to wrestle with this, particularly in how it imagines ministry to youth and children in youth group and at camp, and especially in the ’burbs and the middle class (which, full disclosure, is my own background).  At Lazy F, we try to encourage our staff to “geek out” in their own ways, to live unashamed of their fascinations.  To use real examples from 2013, we had staff with geek-fascinations in group psychology, dance, painting, Justin Bieber’s music, and the ligaments of the human knee, to name a few.  My own fascinations are with airplanes, as anyone on the team can tell you, and road-tripping.  For me, it’s fun to write from Snoqualmie Pass, and it’s fun to listen to NPR, especially when it’s an act of geeky worship to the God who gave me those interests in the first place.  Let’s declare that we’re done with scaring our kids into chasing comfort.  Let’s convey Jesus’ permission to be creative and to explore what fascinates them, whether it’s the poetry of Angelou, the bar exam, the plays of Euripides, the practice of neurosurgery, or the paintings of Van Gogh.  God will provide our financial needs in the long run if we trust God and let ourselves be nerds for God’s glory.  Let the youth geek out.  Long live art history.

    --John Harrell, Program Coordinator

Reflection Questions

•  What’s something that fascinates you so much that you could talk about it for 15 minutes without apologizing, even if everyone else loses interest?  (Could it be a sports team?  A field of study?  An activity?  A person?  Pancakes?)

•  Try this.  Go out on a “geek prayer walk”.  Take a five minute walk—just you and the Lord—and tell God about whatever it is that you geek out about.  Don’t try to sound “holy” or anything: just be yourself and talk about what fascinates you.

•  How can you encourage the kids, teens, and young adults in your life to explore their God-given fascinations—even the ones that might not make them much money?

•  Thank God that God gave you fascinations and passions.  Ask God to give you ways to develop and explore them.