Hi and welcome back! I just had to laugh about this thing I noticed in a game I play–and now that I see what’s going on there, I can’t un-see it. Today, join me for the cosmic irony of Christians who have to Jesus-ify absolutely everything they encounter, even if it’s absolutely antithetical to their actual religion’s commands.
(Pixabay.) He’s a model, you know what he means? And he does his lil turn on the catwalk. Yeah on the catwalk, on the catwalk, yeah, he shakes his lil tush on the catwalk…
(Nobody has paid me anything to discuss the game I’ll be discussing below. I play it, but have no formal marketing relationship with it or anyone involved with it.)
Thou Shalt Not Covet.
A slave people need law. . . If we live a life in disobedience to the Ten Commandments, then spiritually we are living as a slave in Egypt. No one can live as a slave to sin and expect to receive eternal life.
The Ten Commandments might just be one of the most important parts of Judaism. And I’ve encountered several Jews who express amusement and frustration when Christians claim that anything at all in their holy book applies to Gentiles. But quite a few Christians (like the fundagelicals over at The Gospel Coalition (TGC)) love to insist that this is the case. It’s been a question for many years for Christians, whose earliest leaders can be spotted arguing about it even in the Epistles.
Suffice to say: At this point, Christians are very long past caring what actual Jews think about the Ten Commandments’ applicability to them.
We’re not sure exactly where the Ten Commandments came from or exactly when they came into being, but we do know that many Christians consider them terribly important. Many of today’s Christians even mistakenly think that the government of the United States is based even a tiny bit on them–and even more distressingly, many of those same Christians think that America needs to become a theocracy based on these laws (and, coincidentally, under their own control).
Sure, most Christians can’t even name the majority of these commandments, much less understand ’em, but dangit, they sure think they’re important.
It’s a popular tactic in street preaching. The guy at 1:20 manages to nail one of the coveting rules.
Thou Shalt Not Covet.
Every time I think about those Christians aching for their very own Republic of Gilead, I think of one law in particular:
Thou shalt not covet.
That’s one of the laws. Well, sort of.
In fact, three of the ten laws involve not coveting stuff. Yahweh ordered his Chosen People not to covet their neighbors’ homes, wives, slaves, animals, or any other property belonging to others.
(BTW: See what I did there? Yeah. You won’t find human rights in the Bible, which might be a big clue as to why America’s founders rejected the idea of basing our country’s laws on it.)
What’s Coveting?
And they covet fields, and take them by violence; and houses, and take them away: so they oppress a man and his house, even a man and his heritage.
Micah 2:2, KJV
You’ll find a lot of references to coveting in the Bible. The word means, roughly, wantin’ to have and take pleasure in that what ain’t yourn. And in the Bible, when people covet, they act out in various ways:
You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. (James 4:2, NIV)
In fact, the only covetin’ allowed in the Bible is over who gets the bestest Jesus gifts:
Have all the gifts of healing? do all speak with tongues? do all interpret? But covet earnestly the best gifts: and yet shew I unto you a more excellent way. (I Cor 12:30-31, KJV)
My old tribe, the Pentecostals, followed a whole bunch of weird dress-code and hairstyling rules (think: Kim Davis by way of Little House on the Prairie). These were meant to circumvent humans’ natural desire to show off their plumage and get attention. The whole idea behind following all those rules was to avoid provoking covetousness in others.
So imagine my surprise when I discovered a loophole in those rules for today’s Christians.
Except If It’s An Actual Game Called Covet.
Covet Fashion (“Covet”) is a casual game made by Crowdstar.
The opening screen. VERY CHRISTIAN.
Long long ago, it began life as “Closet Wars” on Facebook, then went fully mobile and upscale. It’s extremely popular now–#43 in roleplaying games on the App Store. Like many casual games, it’s a freemium one: technically, nobody needs to spend any money to play it.
In Covet, people dress a model in clothes they’ve “bought” for their “closets.” Clothes range in price from reasonable to WTF. They’re given themes and guidelines, as well as requirements (like “wear a pair of yellow sandals”). Then, players vote on whose model looks best. Winners get more clothes as prizes.
The game’s central conceit is that the game’s clothes are actually based on real clothes offered by real designers like Calvin Klein, Camilla, Halston Heritage, and others. So users can go to a piece of clothing’s info page, follow it back to the designer’s actual website, and order that stuff for themselves in real life.
Yay! Top Looks! Holy cow, lookit that purse.
I began playing this game a few years ago because I wanted to learn more about fashion. Seriously. I’d spent the first half of my life thinking fashion is dumb, and I wanted to give it a real chance. Gradually, I began to see fashion as a playful means of self-expression and exploration.
Even more than that, though, slowly I realized that Covet’s actually a very sophisticated resource-management game–not to mention heavily reliant on artistry and clever use of resources–hiding behind a fairly shallow image. So I set to. I curated my “closet” carefully. When voting results came in, I studied the winners’ looks to see how I could improve next time.
And to my surprise, I turned out to be pretty good at this game.
A Parade of Fashion Houses.
One wouldn’t think that Christians would go anywhere near a game whose very NAME is that of a sin they’re supposed to avoid like the plague, not to mention a game featuring clothes that are generally the antithesis of Christian notions of modesty.
But one would be wrong.
In fact, TONS of Christians play Covet. And they’re not ashamed of their involvement with the game, either. Oh no. They cluster together in Fashion Houses (clans, guilds, etc) to chirp in chats about Jesus while they dress models up in clothes that are usually anything but modest.
I found a huge number of active Christian houses, including:
- Jesus Freak 107
- Jesus lovers
- The God sqaud [sic]
- SouthenChristians [sic]
- Teen Christian House
- The Christian Closet
- Outcast GayChristian [:(]
- Christian Horses
- ChristianCoveters
- Christian Ambition [uh oh!]
- The Modesty Struggle
- Modest is beautiful
I didn’t look at or record inactive houses, only the ones that seemed active.
(Active, defined: 45-50 members, with 50 being the max for the game, and a decent average purchase for this season. Houses with very few members or $0 average for Spring 2020 were ignored. If I’d counted those, we’d be looking at many hundreds of Christian houses.)
But Y’all: They’re EVANGELIZING, Y’all.
Most of these groups feature the same rules (G-rated chat) and the same recruiting pitches. Here are some of them, punctuation and all:
This is a fashion house for teen Christian girls. If you are a teen thinking about becoming a Christian you are welcome too. This is going to be fun. [Teen Christian House]
This house is for Coveters who want to meet other Christian fashion lovers & for players who are searching for Christ & want to learn more about Him! [ChristianCoveters]
Join if you are Christian or looking to be Christian! we will accept anyone. be surrounded by positive people! we will help guide you to Christ! [Christian house]
That said, I doubt many of them run into a whole lot of “seekers” wanting to join up.
(To check myself, incidentally, I also looked up atheist Covet groups and found about six active ones. There were also about a dozen active pagan groups of various sorts. By far, Christians outnumbered any other religious group I checked.)
I Blame the Jesus People.
Long, long ago Christians didn’t need to Jesus-ify absolutely everything in their lives.
In the 1960s, that began to change. Maybe it changed because America’s cultural revolution began to challenge Christian dominance. Whatever happened, by the 1970s many Christians wanted to inject Jesus flavoring into every single part of their lives. Super-popular Christian “Jesus People” musician Keith Green sang songs that resonated with them:
Make my life a prayer to you
I wanna do what you want me to
No empty words and no white lies
No token prayers no compromise
In response to this growing need to visibly identify as a Christian, religious bookstores sprang up offering not only books, but also swag and home decoration kitsch. If you’ve seen that Portlandia sketch “Put a Bird On It!”, that’s exactly what happened in Christianity.
“Put a Bird On It!” And much the same thing would happen to Christians if a Jesus flew into their homes.
And sure, I get it. When I was 16, my mom got mad at me for drawing my boyfriend’s name on my jeans leg. I defy anybody to say that impulse isn’t markedly similar to Christians slapping a Jesus on absolutely everything they own.
This Jesus-ification has another effect, though.
The Jesus Bubble.
Encouraged by all these products, Christians “put a Jesus on it” on everything they could–from their homes to their bodies to their cars to their kids. After a while, Christians could wake up in the morning, go about their day, and go to bed at night surrounded entirely from start to finish in a gauzy swathe of Jesus-ified products and without once encountering a single entirely-secular flat surface.
And it’s led to some real silliness, as I noticed in my casual game.
I can completely understand why Christians might congregate into groups in any game. They can use their gibberish jargon and redefined words without confusing outsiders. As well, their beloved habit of policing language can fly free and unfettered in these groups, where more secular groups would probably reject much of that control-grabbing.
Then, too, there’s Christians and then there’s Christians. With tens of thousands of flavors in the religion, obviously many flavors will be way less strict about stuff like the Ten Commandments than other flavors are. It’s a mistake to level all Christians to fundagelical literalists.
So I’m not disapproving because Christians form groups in games. There’s no real difference between Christians and non-Christians. Obviously, both groups play the same sorts of games.
Rather, I’m laughing because this particular game’s name and nature seem to run so counter to even the most liberal, lovey-dovey interpretation of Christianity. It’s a game based on runaway consumerism, outdoing others with clothes, and often finding the most striking and alluring looks within a given theme. It is hard to imagine a game that’s less compatible with anything we could call Christian virtues.
A Magic Transformation.
Ah! But what do we expect Christians to do? Not indulge one of their desires?
My goodness! Perish the thought!
No, Christians know very well by now how to tame and defang anything they want. They have a magic transformation act that renders the forbidden innocuous and safe.
See, Christians know that if they can just slap enough Jesus-es on something off-limits, it magically becomes perfectly allowable! At that point, if anybody raises an eyebrow about it they can sniff about how they totally prayed and Jesus said it was fine and how dare we.
Sure, it destroys their credibility just a little bit more, but what are they gonna do, not play what they wanna play?
NEXT UP: LSP! Then, we look into toxic positivity, which pervades much of modern Christian thinking. Next week we dive into its effects on Christians and their various dysfunctions. Plus, we’ve got to have a Super Special soon! See you next time!
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Yes, that’s really my diamond count in the Covet screenshots linked.
And before ya go…
SNL: Fashion Coward.
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