This post was originally published on April 7, 2016 on my former blog site.

 

In the midst of work and the writing of a fairly large paper for the end of the semester, I just wanted to write something–even just something small–so that this blog doesn’t fall by the wayside once again. So I figured I’d write about something that I’ve been thinking a lot about: Jacques Ellul.

I was introduced to Jacques Ellul by way of a book discussion class at Geneva that my roommate was taking my freshman year, and which I decided to sign up for as well. The book we read, Propaganda, is a comprehensive examination of the messages that permeate our society, and the mechanized, subversive ways in which those messages are disseminated. The book was long, difficult, and convicting: never before had I thought so deeply and with so much trepidation about the very nature of the field for which college was preparing me. Discussion in that class provoked a deep sense of learning and understanding, accompanied by an equal amount of anxiety about what the world was coming to, and how it had gotten there.

Jacques Ellul had written something amazing, I knew, and from that class going forward, I was hooked.

Ellul is a fascinating figure: a French Christian and intellectual who wrote over fifty books in his lifetime, while also serving in government (for a time), teaching at universities in France, and, during World War II, being an active member of the French Resistance. His writing was both theological and sociological in nature, and always comprehensively and concisely argued–one of my professors remarked that he was thinking of having one of his classes read a book of some of Ellul’s shorter arguments on a variety of subjects, and would then challenge the class to try and refute those arguments. We both laughed at this idea, because we knew that it was an incredibly unfair challenge, to say the least. Ellul was a brilliant writer.

Following my first encounter with Ellul in Propaganda, I have now read four of his other books:

• The Presence of the Kingdom – an examination of the disparity that often exists between theology and the lived, common experience of everyday life
• Anarchy and Christianity – a fairly concise argument against Christian involvement in the political realm
• The Humiliation of the Word – a treatise on the pervasiveness of image-based culture in contemporary society, and an argument for why the Word ought to be restored as a living, moving presence in people’s lives
• The Technological Society – an extended, almost overwhelmingly comprehensive description of the influence of technique on society at large, and the implications for society and mankind now that technique has become such an all-encompassing phenomenon

Including Propaganda, these five books have shaped my thinking in a considerable manner, and inspired a great deal of thought surrounding my academic discipline and the film and video work that I do right now. The Technological Society, in particular, has inspired in me a great deal of contemplation surrounding the drive for efficiency that contemporary culture has instilled in me and so many others.

Reading Ellul is to be presented with fascinating and difficult questions on a page-by-page basis. If you think yourself the type of person who has a lot of answers or even a lot of opinions about society, I’d invite you to crack open one of these books–you might find evidence for the things that you believe, or you might have some of your most fundamental assumptions challenged. In either case, you’ll be a better person at the other side of it all.

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