Michael Jackson and the God Feeling

In startling ways pop culture mirrors long-standing spiritual arguments. In an age where the stage has replaced the pulpit—where the line between the two is all but invisible—morality is played out in the lives of celebrities. This is an unsettling phenomenon. Princess Diana slips into the role of Holy Mother almost equal with Mother Teresa. Michael Jackson’s call to “Heal the World” in a pop song spreads to every corner of the planet and probably touches more people than the Pope’s annual Christmas message.

With the sudden, sad death of Michael Jackson, whom I knew well for twenty years, a specific point of theology comes to life and haunts us. I’m thinking of Manichaeism, a Gnostic doctrine born in Persia in the third century, whose central idea is “the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness,” as the Wikipedia entry puts it. Manichaeism pictured the destiny of the world, and each soul, in terms of black versus white, and so potent is the idea that it has permeated race relations, cultural divides, wars, and the whole tendency to demonize “them,” those people who are different from us and therefore exist outside the light.

It’s hard not to see Michael Jackson as a pop martyr to this kind of either/or thinking. His hit song, “Black or White,” insisted that “it don’t matter if you’re black or white,” something he deeply believed in. His skin changed from black to white because of vitiligo, but the public and press mistinterpreted this as a conscious attempt to change his skin and took it as the mark of someone who didn’t know what world he belonged in. But I don’t want to trade in symbols. As a real person, Michael struggled between extremes, and his vulnerability to the shadow side of human nature was very poignant. The tabloids consigned him to the dark side via cheap, sensationalized stories that verged on the ghoulish (stories he fed with behavior that flirted far too much with transgressive behavior). But the other aspect of Manichaeism was also there, an evangelical desire to bring light and healing to the whole world. The paradox of how one person could be so innocent and so disturbing at the same time remains a mystery. Read Article

By Deepak Chopra