Let’s get this straight: I believe the kingdom of God to be a radical alternative altogether to the politics of the world. I get very nervous when politicians on either side attempt to co-opt the Church for political purposes. I get nervous about civil religion in any form. It is very important to me to maintain the “over/againstness” of the kingdom to both right and left.
That said, I’m a student of rhetoric. I love speeches in general and preaching in particular. It’s art to me. I love to hear speakers of all kinds, because I’m always looking for ways to sharpen my craft. I’ve taken notes from everybody from Martin Luther King to Chris Rock on what effective public speaking looks like. And from a rhetorical perspective, whether you love him or hate him, agree or disagree with him, Bill Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention this year was frankly stunning. That wasn’t just a speech; that was jazz. It was Michael Jordan in game six in his last finals with the Bulls. It was Picasso at the height of his talent. It was everything that has ever worked about Clinton speeches on steroids—folksy, charming, funny, perfectly paced, combative—throwing punches and pulling them when needed.
Before you write me that scathing email, I am making no value judgments as to whether or not he was right. You may have hated every word, found it disingenuous, disagreed with the policies. But there was one thing in particular about the Clinton speech I loved that I find to be a glaring issue in contemporary preaching, and it makes me wish every preacher I know watched it. It’s just this simple: Clinton doesn’t talk down. Clinton doesn’t patronize his audience. Clinton talked substance last night. For all the rhetorical flourishes and homespun charm, that was a speech chock-full of statistics, facts, ideas—in a word, content. And you can put facts in quotation marks, question the math, say he took things out of context—have at it, I really don’t care. What I’m saying is today, after the fact, people are doing a remarkable thing: they are talking about whether or not they agree or disagree with the content of his speech. These days, that’s a novelty.
What makes contemporary politics so insulting to me right now is the shameless parade of sound bites. Both sides do it all the time. Politics have become reduced to sentimentality. You say the right word to the right crowd (“Jesus,” “the wealthy,” “the poor,” “the middle class,” “values”), and nobody cares about whether or not there is an agenda or a plan—they respond emotionally to the words. In political conventions in particular, when folks are playing largely to their party base, real content is conspicuously absent. We have never been dumber. We are accustomed to being talked down to, we are used to being patronized. So it is honestly surprising these days when anybody attempts to engage us with anything like actual ideas.
And while I’m sad to say it, this is just as true about preaching in this day and age. We preachers, like everybody else, largely play to the lowest common denominator. Preachers speak in buzzwords and sound bites. Preachers don’t talk to people as if they are intelligent.
This is getting worse, not better, because most people don’t care and aren’t going to know the difference. In a culture that values style over substance, you can get a sermon to go over just fine without challenging a congregation. We are far past the days when preachers were prophets who painted an alternative vision of the world. We are not expected to be visionaries but mere marketing experts. We don’t have enough “prophetic imagination” (in Brueggemann’s phrase) or, for that matter, real content to actually shape culture.
Part of what makes Clinton so effective these days, beyond decades of just honing his craft, is he really does traffic in ideas. I’ve listened to multiple interviews with him post-presidency where he was downright brainy, almost frustrating to interviewers in his insistence to talk substantively about the issues. Whether or not you agree with him, you can’t deny he is a guy who does his homework. No wonder he can go off script for roughly 40 percent of a speech that big and be so effective—he’s practiced enough and researched enough to trust his instincts, and there has been enough discipline to bring freedom in delivery.
