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Christian Network

Pop culture is the ‘coin of the realm’ in America. My generation’s shared memories often come from television cartoon shows we watched when we were children and the rock and roll music we listened to when we were teenagers. In the case of the latter it has occurred to the author that much of his pre-Christian ‘worldview’ was shaped as much by lyrics from pop songs as anything else. The only ‘Stairway to Heaven’ that I knew then was the one the rock group ‘Led Zeppelin’ sang about.

Much has been written about the effect of popular culture on the Church here in America. The usual appraisal is that too many Evangelical Christians have ‘sold out’ to worldly entertainment. It is difficult to argue against that charge, especially when believers gather and the buzz is not about how we have encountered God this week but rather about some new movie with plenty of sex and violence that everyone seems to have seen. As I have written elsewhere the ‘Rated R Church’ continues blithely down the world’s road pretty much condoning at least the occasional ‘walk on the wild side’. In fact we like to think of it as a healthy flouting of legalism. (Of course none of us want to be known as a ‘legalist’, socially that’s the Christian equivalent of ‘the kiss of death’. The problem is that the term has come to refer to anyone who has the gall to suggest that a fellow Christian or Christians might be doing something wrong.)

What has to be reckoned with is that pop culture is here to stay. The world has become one huge electronic hive in which every kind of communication media incessantly broadcasts the lowest common cultural denominator. The masses now frame their lives by what they see and hear on TV, in movies and on the radio. For better or worse this is where people are now finding a significant part of their identities and that is why popular culture is increasingly becoming our cultural currency.

In light of this individual believers need to grapple with the question of how to interact with that culture while keeping their quest for holiness intact. The Bible tells us to focus on that which is excellent, lovely, beautiful, praiseworthy, etc. Unfortunately it is becoming more and more difficult to do that when the high culture that produced a Mozart, Michelangelo, or Shakespeare has pretty much been relegated to the past. Some advocate the promotion of a classical education for our children through Christian parochial schools or through the rapidly growing homeschool movement. But one has to wonder how they will put such an education to use in a world that could no longer care less about what the philosophers, composers and artists of antiquity had to say about the human condition.

How then, as Chuck Colson would say, shall we live? First of all not all pop culture is evil just because it wears the label ‘pop’. There are some excellent TV shows, movies and music out there if we will take the time to watch and listen with some discernment. As in so much of the Christian life the answer is to chew the meat and spit out the bones. We must take that which is good in contemporary culture and leave the rest. Beyond that perhaps it really is time for some of the 50 million Evangelicals purported to live in America to not only adopt classical culture as our own but to try to re-introduce it to the population at large. Of course that would involve what some might call a distraction from preaching the Gospel. What they forget is that the high culture we would be championing often embodied Christ. One thinks of Handel’s ‘Messiah’, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel or Pascal’s ‘Pensees’. We would very often be promoting the Gospel by promoting persons such as these.

In the end a people never rise above the level of their culture. As Christians and as Americans we need to make sure that we do not give ourselves over to the lowest common denominator and follow the rest of our nation into cultural suicide.