I really have no idea why I watched an episode of Celebrity Wife Swap on Hulu the other day. I think it was because I didn’t even know there was such a thing as Celebrity Wife Swap. Or maybe I just couldn’t think straight from my lack of lunch.
Either way, it was a much more thought-provoking trigger point than I expected. And, oddly, it made me think about … worship.
We humans have a built in need to worship. It was given to us by God so we would desire to worship Him. But we often misplace our proclivity, directing it at, historically, idols carved from wood or stone or gold, and in more modern times, movie stars, musicians and awesome athletes. We set these people up on pedestals, casting longing looks in their direction while wondering what it might be like to live in the rarified air that we suppose they occupy.
We work ourselves up, sometimes so much that we scream and squeal when we meet these folks (see: tween girls at Justin Bieber concerts), or we might pay hundreds of dollars for a signed jersey from a certain football player from a certain Broncos (strike that), Jets (strike that too), Patriots football team.
Whether it’s Tim Lambesis from the Christian metalcore band As I Lay Dying (who has now fallen from his perch) or Bono (who hasn’t), we really do think sometimes that these people have something we don’t. That they think in ways we can’t. That they’re smarter than us. That they’re cooler than us. That they’re less in need of daily showers than us.
So as I watched Gilbert Godfried, Alan Thicke, Coolio and Mark McGrath painfully plod through their utterly normal—mixed up with nutty, selfish, silly, odd, ugly, sweet and serious, of course, just like the rest of us—paces on Celebrity Wife Swap, one of a slew of such productions, I was struck with a rare positive side effect of all this silly and often salacious reality TV that swirls around us: It is having the net effect of chipping away at the wall dividing “them” from “us.” It is shortening the height of a few pedestals. It is inadvertently teaching us to not point our need to worship toward other people.
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