A Brief Note Before a Jump in Time

If we want to launch an exploration of the future, we need a long historical runway.

Sebastiano Ricci, The Marriage Feast at Cana, photo by Aaron Long, courtesy of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Over the past three posts, you’ve seen how the big three American auto makers’ (that’s Ford’s, GM’s, and Mopar’s) car commercials have animalized vehicles since the 1940s. And if you’re a subscriber, last week you were invited to a series of threads, the odds and ends left over from my car commercial research, that show that both Japanese and German auto makers also animalize their products.

There’s a range of purposes to these animalizations. The three I’ve considered—generating wonder, playing on emotions, and populating imaginary worlds used to sell things—are just a few of many. But taken together, they reveal just how propagandistic commercial advertising really is. Sit with that a minute. We’ve been propagandized into a specific view of what our culture’s future should look like. Sometimes, as in this ad for the 1982 Pontiac Firebird (yeah, okay, I still have a few odds and ends left), the future is distant. But every ad implies a near-term future in which you might decide to consume what it’s selling, which is to say that every ad is a little time machine trying to transport us to the moment of purchase and the subsequent evanescent period of shallow satisfaction.

Over the past week, I’ve done some reflecting and I think we need a longer view of where this objectification of nonhumans came from. From the advertising strategies of the Big Three American auto manufacturers emerges a three-faced rubric: wonder, pathos, and imagination. I think these threads are worth tracing through time because tracing them shows us they weren’t just nuances to three companies’ ad strategies, they’re actually major themes in the modern history of human thinking about animals. So get ready: in the weeks to come we’re going back in time.

But I also have questions about the shape of Christianity’s thinking about nonhumans. Here’s a litmus test: when was the last time you heard a sermon in which the pastor, priest, or preacher said anything about animals’ role in the created order, their moral agency, God’s providential use of them as characters in His story, their share in the liberation from sin offered through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, or their hope for redemption in him? I ask because, having been raised in Evangelical churches and attended fourteen churches since leaving the one I was raised in, I’d never heard such a sermon until I happened into my current church, where one of our pastors was raised by a zoologist.

This, by the way, is the difference between a message of salvation and a message of redemption. If the life, death, and resurrection of Christ means the forgiveness of sins for humans on a person-by-person basis, such that forgiven sins meant fire insurance for life after death, then you heard a message of salvation. Whoever believes that expects their immortal soul to be saved from the destruction of the earth by fire. If, on the other hand, the life, death, and resurrection of Christ means the advent of a new kingdom in Creation wherein all that has gone wrong is being put right—including humans but also far more than humans—then you heard a message of redemption. Whoever believes that expects not only a renovation of their being, but a setting-right of many other wrongs, which may include environmental damage, inter-species conflict, yes, human sin, but also perhaps the dismantling of human constructions that have violated the order of Creation God put in place for both human and nonhuman flourishing. The longer I live and the more I study, the less convinced I am that Christ’s life counts only for individual salvation. I think he came to redeem the world—to mend its hurts, to set the crooked straight, and put wrongs right. Otherwise, why would he have bothered to feed the hungry, heal the sick, raise the dead, and critique the powerful?

And so, unless we work from some sense of what Christ put in motion, I don’t think we operate from a paradigm that fully grasps the significance of wonder, pathos, and imagination, because all of these are at stake in redemption. Part of my silence this past week has been due to grappling with how to address this fourth thread. I’m still working on it and if you have ideas, questions, or resources, now I am—we all are—just a DM (or still a comment) away.

Dr. Aaron M. Long is a Lecturer in English at a flagship state university, and in Philosophy at a historied regional art school. He has published articles in Twentieth-Century Literature, The Nautilus, and Science Fiction Film & Television, among others. You can find him on Twitter (yeah, yeah, on X) or LinkedIn, and his website is here.