Burning Man from the Default World
What a City in the Dust Teaches About the Kingdom That Is Coming

Section IA City That Appears and Disappears

Burning Man began in 1986 as a small bonfire on a San Francisco beach. Today it is Black Rock City, a temporary settlement on a dry lakebed north of Reno with named streets, a post office, a hospital, a newspaper, and neighborhoods with reputations. At its center stands a wooden man taller than a house. Past the last street stands a wooden temple where people go to grieve. On Saturday night the man burns. On Sunday night the temple burns. Then the whole city packs up and drives home to what its builders call the Default World, their name for everything that is not that city.

Most Christians have heard of it, and most have filed it under one of two headings: a drug festival for rich people, or a harmless art party. My new book, Burning Man from the Default World, argues that both headings miss the thing worth seeing. When human beings build a city out of nothing for one week, they reach for a written law. They reach for a center. They reach for a way to welcome the stranger and a way to shame the freeloader. They reach for a place to put their grief. They reach for fire. None of those instincts are new. Every one of them has a name in the Scriptures, and every one of them was already drawn into the plan of a camp in a wilderness three thousand years ago.

The question the book asks is not whether Burning Man is good or bad. The question is what those instincts are pointing at, and whether the people following them have found the thing itself or only a very well built shadow of it.

Section IIWritten From the Outside, On Purpose

I have never been to the event. I say that on the first page of the book and I will say it here, because you have a right to know the vantage point. This is not the confession of a reformed burner and it is not an exposé by a man who went in undercover. It is a view from the Default World, by a man who cannot look at a temporary city in a wilderness, governed by ten written principles and centered on an effigy that is burned, without hearing echoes he recognizes.

Because I was not there, the book is careful about what kind of claim it is making at every point. When it tells you what Burning Man is, when it started, how many people go, and what its ten principles say, it reports the public record and gives you a footnote and a source at the back. When it tells you what a burning effigy in a desert means, that is my reading, and I state it as a reading without hedging it. And where a burner, or the organization itself, would push back on something I say about their city, that pushback is collected in an appendix at full strength, called The MOOP Map after the sweep burners make of the ground once the city is gone. The book argues. That appendix lets the other side answer.

One more thing, because church readers will want to know. The book measures the city by the Sinai vows as they are fulfilled in Christ and written on the heart under the New Covenant, not by a second Sinai. When it says Ten Words it means the terms of the marriage between God and His people, kept now by the Spirit. It does not mean a return to the Law as a covenant of works, and a reader from any church should be able to walk the whole book without being asked to change camps.

Section IIIWhat the Book Sees

Part One walks the city as it is. The Ten Principles posted on a sign at the gate are set beside the Ten Words spoken at Sinai. The gifting economy, where nothing is bought or sold and everything is given away, is set beside the economy of grace and the tables Jesus overturned in the temple courts. Radical Inclusion is set beside the sojourner at the gate, the stranger whom God's law commanded Israel to love because they had been strangers in Egypt. The Greeters who meet every first-timer with the words welcome home are set beside the waters of baptism. Theme camps arranged in an arc around the center are set beside the twelve tribes camped around the tabernacle. Leave No Trace is set beside the stewardship of the land.

Part Two goes to the center of the thing. The week itself, tents in a wilderness with a fire at night, is read against the Feast of Booths. The Man, which the founder said means nothing and which the organization calls a blank, is read against every effigy the prophets ever described, and against the One who was lifted up outside a city. The Temple, out past the last street, where thousands carry photographs of the dead and sit in silence on Sunday night, is read against the Day of Atonement and the sacrifice made outside the camp. The city that looks like Babel from the air and feels like Sinai on the ground is read against both. And Exodus Sunday, the long drive home with the engine idling on Gate Road, is read against a different road home, the one Naaman took with two mule loads of foreign dirt in his cart.

The last chapter tours a different city. It has twelve gates that are never shut, a river down the middle of the street, no temple, no night, and no fire, and the same two words are spoken at its gate to anyone who thirsts.

Section IVWho This Book Is For

It is for the Christian who has a burner in the family and has never known what to say to them. It is for the pastor whose congregation drives past the Reno traffic every Labor Day and wonders. It is for the believer who has felt the same thing the burners feel on the drive home, the flatness of returning to an ordinary week after a week that meant something, and has never been told why that feeling exists or what it is asking for.

And it is for the burner. The book closes with a letter written to you directly, without the footnotes, as if we were sitting on the same tailgate at the end of the week. I am not mocking you. You were right about the Default World; the prophets saw it too, and they called it Egypt and Babylon. You built the right city, and you drew the plan from somewhere under memory, and you drew it well. But the center is empty, and you have said so yourselves more honestly than I could. The city I lay next to yours all through this book has the same plan with the center filled, and the thing at the center is not a figure of timber. It is the Lamb of God, sacrificed once, outside a city, in the open. He arose, and His tomb is empty.

Welcome home is the truest thing anyone has ever said to you, and they said it at the wrong gate.

From the Epilogue · Burning Man from the Default World

Section VRead It Free

The book runs eighteen chapters plus the epilogue, the MOOP Map appendix, a glossary of both vocabularies, thirty-three referenced sources, and an index, with forty-three grayscale plates. The paperback will be on Amazon soon. But I did not write this book to sell it to people who already agree with me. I wrote it for the people who would never buy it, and so the full PDF is free to anyone who wants it. Read it, pass it on, print it, give it to the burner in your life.