I’VE RECENTLY NOTICED a type of ad popping up on social media. It hooks you in as a personal testimonial, from an expert or a deeply experienced source, with statements like: “I’m a parasitologist, and I couldn’t understand how Koreans eat raw fish regularly without getting parasites, until I learned their secret.” Or “I tried every single possible way to get rid of that musty smell after washing my clothes, until I realized it was coming from something none of the go-to cleaners target.” Or “Everybody always asks me why my face looks 25 when I’m actually 40. You wouldn’t believe how simple my nightly routine is.”
If you are curious at all, you want to hear more. And—spoiler alert—the secret is always something that only this one company sells in their proprietary formulation. You must spend money to access it.
The act of luring people in with the promise of secret knowledge is an act as old as humanity. In the context of early Christianity, it popped up as gnosticism. Gnostics believed this world was created and governed by lesser gods, not the one, true, good God. These demigods aimed to keep the divine spark within some of us trapped in the material realm. The only way to escape this nasty, physical reality was to receive secret knowledge through divine revelation.
Christ embraced our regular, embodied lives as worthy.
Today’s ad masters take cues from ancient Gnostics on a number of levels, primarily through a disdain for everyday lived experiences. You can’t trust your senses or your grandma’s folk wisdom for getting yucky smells out of clothes or treating your indigestion. Only this singular source on Instagram or YouTube holds the key to unlocking the next level of your best life now. But instead of induction into a secret society, the key is cash—being willing to pony up your credit card number to get a plastic-wrapped package of what you could never attain on your own.
The result in the time of the original gnostics, as it is now, is a bifurcated society of haves and have nots. Those select few with the divine spark or, in our case, those who can afford regular $50 supplements or a Face Yoga app subscription, are “in” and the rest are out of luck.
Gnosticism was eventually rooted out of the early church, which affirmed that Christ was not just God pretending to be human, but fully human. Christ embraced our regular, embodied lives as worthy. This is such good news for those of us who have been cast to the side by those who would form exclusive societies as a way to feel better about themselves. It means there is no need to look elsewhere—to the self-appointed Instagram gurus or the folks who say their church is the only one that gets it right. If someone is making you feel your current life isn’t up to snuff—beware. They usually have an agenda that doesn’t include your good. Instead, follow the way of Jesus, who didn’t escape, but dwelled within. Christ found goodness, love, and openings to the divine right here, in our ordinary human existence. And none of it came from listening to a social media ad.
Liuan Huska is the author of the children’s book My South American Classroom and Hurting Yet Whole: Reconciling Body and Spirit in Chronic Pain and Illness. She works as director of communications for A Rocha USA.
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