Christians and Cultural Mediocrityby
Bill Barnwell Last week Time magazine revealed that the 2006 "Person of the Year" award goes to "You." The rationale is that "we" as a collective entity have used the World Wide Web to change the way people interact like never before. The stunning success of Wikipedia, Myspace, and YouTube – where millions of average people interact and disseminate information on a daily basis – were examples given by Time of "our" role in shaping society in a mighty way. This caused me to ask myself, "When was the last time in recent history that Christians have made a large scale contribution to the culture at large?" Unless I’m missing something, I am not having many examples come to mind. Historically, Christians contributed significantly in many areas of scientific advancement, the humanities, and literature. In terms of Evangelical Protestantism, where I consider my theological home, our most recent significant pop-culture contribution appears to be the fictional Left Behind novels. Unfortunately, its pop theology is rather dubious to say the least and the practical implications that flow from it are the exact opposite of cultural progress. Rather than progress, this type of popular Christian fiction leads to paranoia, militarism, and escapism. It seems that in the quest for cultural advancement, many Christians are being, well, left behind. Indeed, the most influential factors leading to cultural change and development are movies, media and other forms of technology that play such a pivotal role in people’s everyday lives. Note that it is not typically sermons and the mere existence of church buildings that is most effective at reaching people. The average teenager in church can much more easily recite the lines to various Top 40 songs on the radio than they can recite the themes of recent sermons they’ve heard or even the songs they sing in church. Plenty of Christians will bemoan this fact and show just how compromised Christianity has become and how horrible it is that the culture has affected their children. To a degree this is correct, but it ignores the facts that both teens and adults basically have to interact with the culture every day and will naturally be affected by it or will affect it themselves at some point. It’s all around us. We live in it. Unless Christians want to wall up their children or themselves in caves, they are going to be exposed to the unseemly virtues of the popular culture. Therefore, they best be strong enough to know how to handle it and/or use it to their benefit. This, Christians, is a fact. Deal with it. Many Christians do their best to simply cut off the popular culture from their lives. They refuse to watch movies or listen to secular radio. They are unable to sift through various forms of entertainment and discern what is and isn’t edifying within it, opting instead to just toss it all out. Unless a particular movie is explicitly Christian or a G-rated film, plenty of Christians want nothing to do with it. It’s hard to deny that there are plenty of films and songs that have nothing edifying within them whatsoever and are basically culturally harmful (even most honest non-Christians would have to agree with this!), but if some Christians had their way their kids would be watching Barney until they were 21. Plenty of well-meaning Christian parents who want to shield their kids from the bad influences of the world have produced kids who are even more dependant and less socially adjusted than their secular counterparts. Their parents baby them to ridiculous degrees and as a result they have inadequate social skills or life experience. No wonder so many of these same kids grow up and either become rebellious or buckle under pressure and temptation when faced with things they were shielded from their entire lives. They have no idea how to respond to it. Rather than offer their own ideas and contributions to the popular culture, many Christians instead have thought it a great idea to build their own counter-culture. Since they consider secular movies and music to be wholly bad, they figure, "Why not just make our own movies and music just for us!" The only problem is that much of it is absolutely terrible. I’m talking about the low-budget, direct to DVD Christian movies with terrible acting and cheap production that fail to entertain even many Christians. Then there is Christian radio, whose stations can usually be found somewhere in the 88 or 89 FM frequency levels in most cities. There are some great contemporary Christian songs, but again, much of it is of poor quality. Dated beats, hokey singing, and low-budget production is a very bad combination for any song by any genre of artist. If Christians are supposed to be doing everything for the glory of God and to the best of their abilities, is this really the best they can churn out? I know the talent is there. Christian colleges and even your average everyday churches are filled with some of the best vocalists you’ll find out there. Unfortunately, their gifts and abilities are not reaching anyone outside their small social circles and it’s just as much or more because of Christians’ own indifference than it is the secular culture discriminating against them. If secular entertainment bosses think they have a good product from a religious producer, they will put it out there. They aren’t going to forego a profit just because it’s a Christian putting out the product. The recent interest in religious themes in the post-Passion era is proof of this. Much of the problem is that many Christians are told that the arts are evil and need to be avoided. I know that on a mass cultural level, however, that a gifted Christian artist can reach far, far, more people than can the average pastor (and I say this as someone who is a pastor). If you go to church, when’s the last time you heard a sermon calling Christians to the "high calling" of the arts? It’s not at all that I think pastors and missionaries serve no good purpose, but in this day and age those in the media and arts are more effective in charting the course and direction for our culture than the average preacher is. But unfortunately, this is a "mission field" that many Christians have abandoned. In terms of the economy, there have been little economic or technological innovations by Christians in recent years. There are some who try to model their company as a "Christian business" but often times the service and quality is poor. Many consumers cringe for good reason when they hear the term "Christian business." There are certainly exceptions to this, but often times the stereotype is proved correct. I myself have received some of the worse service at "Christian businesses." One example is a major Christian Bookstore chain that I try not to frequent unless I have to. I’ve been in several of its stores in several states and each time I’ve visited any of them the service is slow, the employees seem disinterested in what they are doing, and I leave annoyed. I’m not sure why some "Christian businesses" operate this way. Perhaps for the ones that cater almost exclusively to Christians they feel that the rules of good service and hard work change when they are dealing with "other believers." Maybe it’s a matter of, "Hey we’re all Christians here, they’ll understand." Whatever the case, it’s bad for business and reflects poorly on a historically strong Christian work ethic. Technologically, plenty of churches are still apparently learning that there is such a thing as the World Wide Web out there. Church websites are notoriously poor and lack regular updating. Outside of a couple different Christian publications and organizations, Christians on a whole have not yet found a way to use the web to meaningfully engage their communities and the culture at large. While Christians use the web just as much as anyone else, including sites like Myspace, Facebook and YouTube, there have been no similarly influential dotcoms being produced by Christians. Many of these highly influential sites are even being created by kids in their early twenties. Certainly the Christian community can be creative and come up with enough financial backing to put some good products out on the web to engage or do business with people. Even with something like YouTube out there that allows anyone to post anything to be seen by all sorts of people, I couldn’t find much on its pages that was put out by Christians to get their message across. In fact the Christian type groups who were most effective in getting their stuff out there on YouTube – at least from what I saw – were groups that would be considered unorthodox by the mainstream Christian/Catholic community. I did, however, find plenty of well-produced and highly viewed materials by atheists and atheist interest groups. If you don’t believe me, just go to YouTube and compare the search results for "Christianity" with "Atheism." You can even type in the names of the big-wig Christians and mega-churches and still fail to find many meaningful results. As it appears right now, Christians appear to be happy consumers of technological and cultural advancement, but not very good producers. Every day Christians benefit from using scientific and technological information and tools that make our lives better. Ironically and whether it’s fair or not, Christians have the worst reputation of impeding science and/or being indifferent to cultural advancement. They appear content rather just talking about how bad the world is and pat themselves on the back for doing their very best to keep from interacting meaningfully with the popular culture. This simply should not be. Up until relatively recently and contrary to widespread misconceptions, Christians were always on the cutting edge of society and making history. Today "progress" is a word that scares many Christians. They equate it with theological liberalism or a softening of moral standards. This discussion has nothing to do with those things and I certainly have never advocated that. This has to do with Christians and their place in society and whether or not they truly want to influence it. Rather than wishing that we could return to 1955, (an era still reflected in probably most Protestant churches today) Christians need to move forward and realize that the world is changing with or without them on board. Robert Bork warned Christians that the popular culture and society was "Slouching towards Gomorrah." This is in part because many Christians have chosen to abandon it or have no idea how to function in non-Christian circles. Perhaps the greater concern today for Christians should be that they are Slouching towards Irrelevancy. What makes all this most ironic is that Christians just assume the non-Christian world should just adopt their worldview and vote their way on political issues just because they say so without offering much incentive. There is no real reason for many of them to do so right now. Both Christians and non-Christians would benefit from a greater free exchange of ideas and cultural contributions offered by the faith community. Today the areas that could make the biggest difference in terms of influencing popular opinion – TV, movies, music – are areas that Christians ignore (or instead their focus is on substandard Christian countercultural entertainment). The arts should rightfully be seen as a high calling with great potential by Christians rather than something to be indefinitely avoided. Economically, Christians can and should look for ways they can invest into their community and the Internet with products that could make people’s lives better and more interesting (and no, there’s nothing from a Christian standpoint that says people are never supposed to enjoy themselves). With a little creativity, risk, and investment, there’s nothing stopping a Christian from putting his or her own highly popular product on the web for the masses to consume.
December 20, 2006 Bill Barnwell [send him mail] is a pastor and writer from Michigan. He holds both a Master of Ministry degree and a Master of Arts in Theological Studies degree from Bethel College in Mishawaka, Indiana. You can denounce him for his blindness and underestimating the threat of the New World Order though email or by visiting his blog. Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com |
Basically,
it’s time for Christians to think about what they can produce, not
just what they can consume (or ignore). When Christians decide to
move on from the 50’s and become producers as well as just consumers
and apocalyptic cultural dropouts, they will finally rediscover
their historical roots of being influential cultural movers and
shakers in the world that they live.