So, if you’re at all interested in pop-culture, then you probably have a general awareness of the “art festival” in the Nevada desert known as Burning Man. The festival has gone on for decades and grown in popularity from a few dozen people in San Francisco to 80,000 folks in recent years. The camp-out has generated a subculture of a subculture, with its own governing body, and dozens of books dedicated to the cultural phenomenon that are all positive enough for said governing body to promote them on its website!
However, given the very high cost of the event, and the fact that it has been viewed as a bacchanal for yuppies, this means that it’s been either below or above the radar of normies. As at many events considered “art festivals” sexual perversion is high on the to-do list of attendees. There is, in fact, a large air-conditioned building known as the orgy-dome. No research needed, it is what it sounds like.
While Burning Man itself, as an event, has rules and regulations and is governed by the US Bureau of Land Management, it attempts to govern itself with its 10 guiding principles that were created by the Burning Man founder Larry Harvey in 2014:
Radical Inclusion
Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.
Gifting
Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.
Decommodification
In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.
Radical Self-reliance
Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on their inner resources.
Radical Self-expression
Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.
Communal Effort
Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.
Civic Responsibility
We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws.
Leaving No Trace
Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.
Participation
Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.
Immediacy
Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.
Now, I could go through this list of principles and point out the hypocrisy rife in much of it. I mean, turnabout is fair-play, right? If pagans can attack the church for the hypocrisy of Christians, can’t Christians point out the hypocrisy of pagans? It’s interesting that there are guiding principles of gifting and decommodification. But you have to buy tickets, right? And you have to buy ice and coffee, right? Like with money, not as a present. And as the Reno Gazette Journal points out:
Burning Man may not be about money on-playa, but it deals with a lot of it off-playa.
The nonprofit organization last year raked in about $3.7 million in revenue minus expenses, according to the organization's 2017 federal tax documents posted Wednesday evening.
It goes on to list the salaries of the top 10 earners from Burning Man:
Nearly 40 percent of Burning Man's money, more than $15 million, was spent on salaries and other employee benefits, an increase of about $2 million from the year before, according to the 2017 tax documents. The top 10 salaries from 2017 are:
Marian Goodell, CEO: $261,000
Larry Harvey, President: $211,000
Theresa Duncan, Director of philanthropic engagement: $187,000
Harley K. Dubois, Director: $176,000
Ray Allen, General counsel: $174,000
Doug Robertson, Director of finance: $161,000
Heather White, managing director: $160,000
Kim Cook, Director of art and civic engagement: $156,000
Charlie Dolman, event operations director: $151,000
Crimson Rose, secretary: $145,000
I mean, these people are all earning significant amounts of money…not gifts…and the fact that they have a CEO and President and lawyers and all these other people involved in business seems to make the “decommodification” principle seem like a rule-for-thee-but-not-for-me kinda thing.
Again, I could go through the list and point out the hypocrisy—and that would be fun. But I’m not sure how helpful it would be after the first few laughs we had.
Similarly, we could all laugh and mock the dirty hippies getting stuck in the rain and having a harrowing ordeal this year. We could say that it was the vengeance of God—or if not the vengeance of God, the delightful sense of humor of God. Other people have done this and it’s funny—but again, I’m not sure that it actually helps us to understand the culture we’re in and how Christians can live victoriously in it.
The purpose of this broadcast is to apply the Word of God to current events. Burning Man is certainly a current-event and a social phenomenon, and it is also a social phenomenon that is indicative of much larger phenomena: rising paganism and the corporatization of paganism as well as the paganism of our social-elites.
Because while there is the tendency of normal people to look at a bunch of naked, stoned, hippies in the desert doing yoga at an orgy bonfire and think that it’s just a bunch of perverts letting off steam before they have to go back to designing webpages or being college DEI administrators or whatever these people do—that would be to miss the point.
In fact, the hypocrisy of Burning Man is kinda the point. Burning Man offers people not a real community or a real society but a simulated society. And this is obvious. The Burning Man ethos is about radical self-reliance, but the attendees this year couldn’t radically self-rely on themselves to deal with less than an inch of rain! They can’t radically self-rely to deal with a lack of coffee or ice or air-conditioned orgies. There are no gardens or farms—or potable water—everything needs to be trucked in. This isn’t a society. It's a camp-out posing as a society.
Which is what a religious ceremony is. It’s a simulation of a lifestyle that can’t be perpetuated, but is intended to be inculcated. Or, let me put that another way. A religious festival is a gathering that cannot go on indefinitely because it’s an interruption, and a deliberate one, of the normal patterns of life. However, in religions like Christianity, while the festival cannot go on, the message of the festival is to be carried out in real life.
For example, think about Christmas. Getting together in the snowy cold to sing and have plays and overeat sweets and ham and give lots of expensive presents isn’t something we can do all day every day. But the message of Christmas—that God became man and that we should live with hope, and trust that God reaches out to us and seeks us by coming to us, and that likewise we should show love and compassion and kindness to others: this is an ethos we can live out every day.
The Ancient Jewish Festivals, take Tabernacles—people can’t live in poorly constructed tents and not work all day, every day, forever. But you can recognize your radical dependance on God.
But Burning Man doesn’t work that way.
What Christianity does in our celebrations is takes the kind of life we need to live and gives us an amped-up version of it. We need to love one another, we need to be of one mind, we need to share eachother’s burdens, and so our religious ceremonies allow us to do those things in an intensified way.
But Burning Man doesn’t work that way.
Rather, Burning Man takes a lifestyle that doesn’t work and cannot work in the real world and then amps it up and intensifies it at the religious ceremony. Burning Man is supposed to be about radical self-expression and immediacy…but it’s also about civic responsibility? Which is another way of saying that Larry Harvey has discovered that both the individual and the collective exist but he isn’t sure how to balance the needs of them both.
And normally I wouldn’t criticize that. All societies who wish to recognize the individual as an individual live in this tension.
The problem is that Burning Man is all about transgression and subverting the norms and expectations of civil society—which they call “default world.” You can’t be about transgressing civil society and also try to have rules that will make your society civil. You can be a reformer who transgresses—sure. But you can’t be a true transgressive who reforms. Indeed, in the irony of ironies someone a few years ago burnt the burning man, a giant wooden effigy from which the event gets its name, 4 days early.
I mean, sounds like radical self-expression and immediacy and participation and decommodification to me…but he was arrested and charged with a felony! He went on to serve two years in prison for arson!
The reality is that Burning Man is a religious festival. But it’s a religious festival that doesn’t worship the living and true God and it doesn’t function like Christian worship does. It has many of the trappings of a pilgrimage and a retreat and a feast—and it is those things—but it doesn’t bring people to a knowledge of the truth and its principles can’t work in the real world: they don’t even work in the fantasy world they created! But it’s powerful nonetheless because what Burning Man offers is a Sacrifice of a Scapegoat. It’s no accident that the man burns on the penultimate day. It is standard practice that you have rising tension, climax, and a denouement. Everything about Burning Man when examining the rituals is textbook. And this is obvious to anyone who’s read Rene Girard and Joseph Campbell. You spend 9 days building, abusing drugs, being hot, dirty, naked, engaged in orgies, and all that energy, as well as all that shame, all that guilt, all that knowledge that you’re transgressing that you’re undermining society, that you’re destroying and degrading that which is good—all that energy has to go somewhere. And because there are so many negative emotions, frustrations, hurts, anger, violations—so many wrongs that need righted—a crowd like this needs a substitute to transfer all this power and negative emotion and just plain violence onto. And it also is no accident that they burn the man they build!
What Burning Man has tapped into, and then come up with, frankly, a lot of horsecrap to explain, is the need of fallen humanity to seek revenge and the scapegoat ritual that allows us to take collective revenge without society disintegrating. Fallen people need scapegoats or else society becomes full of vendettas and blood feuds and chaotic violence.
In fact, you almost certainly know about this phenomenon, even if you don’t realize it. Obviously the Bible talks about a scape-goat which is a goat sent off from the community; but just in recent culture there are a lot of versions of the scapegoat idea. There is, of course, Prokofiev’s Rite of Spring which is a ballet about ancient Russian spring rituals that culminates in the sacrificial killing of a virgin girl. More than that there’s Shirley Jackson’s seminal short story The Lottery—which is the basis of a South Park episode, as well as the basis of the Hunger Games stories.
Destroying what you build over the course of an experientially, emotionally, physically, and socially exhausting period of time, given all the other rituals of Burning Man make it clear that the burning man is nothing other than a Scapegoat Sacrifice. He’s an effigy—sure. But effigial violence is still violence and still cathartic.
Now maybe you don’t understand what I’m saying because this doesn’t make sense to you because you don’t have an impulse to commit acts of violence against statues or commit ritual murder in a lottery format…I hope you don’t. And Western Society has been able to repress and satisfy the urge for sacrificial violence, to a pretty large degree, because Western Society, by and large, has accepted the solution to the need for group violence: which is in fact group violence. God’s answer to the needs that individuals and societies have for a sacrificial victim to alleviate the stress and need for vengeance was for God to actually become the victim: the perfect victim who could perfectly restore all broken relationships.
A bunch of dirty perverts get together for a romp and an effigial sacrifice in the desert because they are full of shameful, vengeful, broken, hurt and hurting impulses and guilts and they look to the Burning Man to take on that guilt and shame and pain for them. The burning man becomes their sacrificial lamb—the sacrificial virgin—the scapegoat—Christ.
The problem is that the burning man is not Christ. And he cannot take away sin, and he cannot reconcile victims and oppressors, and he cannot take shame and guilt, he cannot heal hurts, he cannot take away pain, he cannot end the cycle of vengeance and violence. The burning man is the latest, if not last, desperate attempt by Western paganism to get all the benefits of Christ without Christ himself.
Burning Man evidences our need for Christ, and our desire for Christ, and yet our simultaneous rejection of Christ as a society. Christians can mock it and deride it—and frankly, it deserves mockery—but unless there is a turning to God we will simply see more and more of these events. We will see more and more scapegoats.
Because people who reject the lamb always kill the scapegoat.
People are hungry for a greater than the burning man; people are longing for Christ. Let’s share the good news with them.
P.S. There are far too many excellent articles dealing with all the topics addressed here. But here are a few I recommend to function both in helping you navigate some of the ideas I’ve addressed here as well as functioning as a primer for the deeper concepts.
Useful articles about the religion of Burning Man:
https://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1739&context=summer_research
Primer on Girard:
https://mimetictheory.com/who-is-rene-girard/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNkSBy5wWDk
Primer on Campbell: