Part I: Red Flags

If you’ve followed the news at all lately, you’ve seen the story of actor Will Smith rising up in defense of his wife during the Academy Awards ceremony to slap comedian Chris Rock on stage, then returning to his seat to continue his outburst with explicative-laced “exhortations.” Well, I’m not here to pile on, but maybe I am. I’m certainly here to make an observation about something that’s at least closely-related.

If you know much about the Smiths (which I didn’t until quite recently), you’d probably know that they have what is called an “open” relationship. This means that they’re “married,” but they can also have sexual relationships with other people (this is a simplified version of what is probably much more complex).

And this is kind of what has me puzzling. I thought it odd that Smith won’t honor his wife by being faithful to her (nor she to him), but would rather “defend” her honor by resorting to public violence and profanity over a joke. I can’t help but pity the man in a way. It seems he’s truly lost his way.

And why not? It turns out there’s a clue in an interview he did last year, in which he said:

“What she [Michaela Boehm, Smith’s “intimacy coach”] was doing was essentially cleaning out my mind, letting it know it was okay to be me and be who I was. It was okay to think Halle [Berry] is fine. It doesn’t make me a bad person that I’m married and I think Halle is beautiful. Whereas in my mind, in my Christian upbringing, even my thoughts were sins. That was really the process that Michaela worked me through to let me realize that my thoughts were not sins and even acting on an impure thought didn’t make me a piece of [crap].”

There it is, and I’ve been talking about this for years – Will Smith, like the rest of us, is just an inherently selfish human being. He only plays the sacrificial hero in movies. In reality, he’s all about “being me.” And we know what that means now – it means sleeping around on his wife (and letting his wife do the same to him); it means walking up and smacking people on stage; it means cursing people out. It also means being given a major award and running off to dance the night away at a party like none of that ever happened.

Still, we shouldn’t be surprised. This is the world’s message now. Just look at what Disney serves up these days. The number one guaranteed story line you’ll see out of them isn’t that you need a hero to save you, it’s that you’ve got to “be yourself.” And now even more so. Their latest goes even further to say “Be yourself, even if you’re an overbearing, angry, rebellious jerk who lets your emotions get the better of you” (sadly, this doesn’t appear to have made it into the cultural zeitgeist in time for Smith’s outburst to be brushed off).

Notice something else though about Smith’s interview. He’s (unsurprisingly) come to the conclusion that it’s not really his fault. “[I]n my mind, in my Christian upbringing, even my thoughts were sins.” Why, yes Will. Yes, they are. Jesus said so in his Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. ” Smith is so kind as to prove that for us in the next sentence of his interview: “That was really the process that Michaela worked me through to let me realize that my thoughts were not sins and even acting on an impure thought didn’t make me a piece of [crap] [my emphasis].”

 He couldn’t have said it better, proving exactly what I think Jesus was getting at – we believe (again, giving ourselves the benefit of the doubt) our thoughts are safe, but every single escalation begins with a thought. Really — notice how he went so easily from realizing his “thoughts were not sins,” to the qualification that “even acting on them didn’t mean I was a bad guy.”

So yeah. Chalk one up for Jesus. If he wasn’t God himself, I’m sure he’d be perpetually rolling his eyes at us all. But what I’m really wanting to point out is this: why is it that one’s “Christian upbringing” is so often the thing to get the short end of the stick? When Smith’s wife said, “I believe in open relationships so I’m going to have sex with other men,” (or something along those lines), why was it Smith who ended up tossing his beliefs out the window? Why wasn’t it his wife dumping her beliefs. I think the answer is pretty obvious. When faced with being faithful to one’s wife versus having as much sex as one wants with any woman one wants, which one do you think is going to win out? It’s so much easier to fall on the side of our own feelings and desires (just like Disney tells us to do!), so, in the end, it’s always “the hard stuff” that has to go, and it’s always “the stuff that makes me feel good” that gets to stay.

Except maybe this time, “the stuff that makes me feel good” looks to have let Smith down. He certainly wasn’t feeling good enough to be consistent, turning to his wife and saying “you do you, I’ll do me, and we’re gonna let that joke slide.” But it seems there are limits in that marriage after all. That’s the only way to explain what he did. He lives in a world where “I don’t have to respect you enough to be faithful to you. You don’t have to respect me enough to be faithful to me,” and “You don’t have to honor my upbringing and change for me. I have to honor your upbringing and change for you.”  No wonder he ended up hitting Rock. Apparently, there’s a line in there somewhere that can’t be crossed, and Smith is so confused about where that line is that he went from laughing at a joke to smacking the man who made it in a 10-second span.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Because it turns out there really is something to the whole “Christian upbringing” thing. It involves something called a conscience, and when we constantly push that aside under the guise of being “true to ourselves,” we’ll find that it’s not necessarily “love” that’s going to make us do crazy things (as Smith later claimed). It’s the complete confusion about what’s really right and what’s really wrong that’ll have us acting like fools.

But what would we expect in a world where there are as many rights and wrongs as there are self-centered, emotional people?

I’m hoping that tomorrow I’ll give you more of the better way. Stay tuned for Part II.