By now, she's had a good number of first-hand experiences with her chosen beat. Hanna Rosin, author of God's Harvard, offers a review of a recently published work that surveys the rapidly expanding consumer industry surrounding the American evangelical culture. The work is Daniel Radosh's Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture. Hanna's review is here: Pop Goes Christianity.

Hanna's comments are poignant because the emerging generation of evangelicals are not of their parents' "boycott-Disney-World-and-Hollywood" mentality. Many evangelicals are following the logic of their historic identity (throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, evangelicals were known for their activism and populism) by looking to reclaim their place amid the American mainstream of culture, politics, music, literature, and media.

What is disconcerting about such an evangelical/American synthesis is precisely what Hannah points out in her closing comments:

quote:

The new generation of Christians is likely to be a different kind of audience. Raised on iPods and downloadable music, they find it difficult truly to commit to the idea of a separate Christian pop culture. They might watch Jon Stewart or Pulp Fiction and also listen to the Christian band Jars of Clay, assuming the next album is any good. . . . The creators of Christian pop culture may just adapt and ease up on the Jesus-per-minute count, and artistic quality might show some improvement. But in my experience, where young souls are at stake, Christian creators tend to balk. It's always been a stretch to defend Christian pop culture as the path to eternal salvation. Now, they may have to face up to the fact that it's more like an eternal oxymoron.

While the implications of an "eternal oxymoron" may take about that much time to tease out, it is worth listening to Rosin's point: How closely connected are pop culture and the things of salvation? I am not ready to say that Christians have no stake or legitimate interest in pop culture. As human beings, we are all naturally a part of and keepers of culture, low and high. But perhaps what is missing in the current form of evangelical engagement is an inability to see different levels of culture and to identify the increasingly complex obligations of higher forms of art, music, and literature. To parse out these different levels would require an understanding of two concepts that are not common among our modern American self-understanding: the need for hierarchy and the appreciation of artistic mediation.

These two concepts, however, are common in the history of the self-understanding of the Christian church.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Samantha Clark,

Christian Rock, going back nearly to the beginning (with say Larry Norman, or Resurrection Band, or Petra) was very preachy. At its best it was like Neil Young at his most shrill with only about half the artistic sensibility. Which is all to say music (of any kind) doesn't preach well.

But evangelicals come from a Culture wherein the sermon is (largely) the centerpiece of Christian worship, i.e., it is their cultic center--their only "sacrament", and therefore the only way, or principal way, or first best way to participate in "God's work". Iconoclastic in the extreme, evangelicalism's reads the silence of Scripture as a tacit prohibition against the development throughout (post-bibilical) history of various "accoutrements" (liturgy, prayers, doctrine), which largely defined Christian cultures (even conservative low-church-polity cultures) up to about 1950.

Witness also the strong push to utilize CCM (music designed to sell records principally for entertainment) in the Christian Liturgy (evangelical term: "Worship Service"). The practice is so widespread, that it hardly even questioned in most evangelical churches. This is symptomatic of an almost complete flattening of the distinction between sacred and secular in the Evangelical mind. I remember as a young Evangelical being asked by some old fogeys with their pinkies still jammed in the dike, "Would you listen to that kind of music in church??" At the time, the un-uttered and supremely ill-considered response of my generation was, "Sure, why not?" To make a short story long, those old fuddie-duddies are mostly gone now, and those that remain are separated by a great barrier from mainstream evangelicalism.

So what you have in the Stereotypical Christian Pop/Rock Artist is an insoluble tension between two competing impulses: 1)the desire the make great art, which throughout human history has fostered and been fostered by a love of and commitment to particular culture; and 2)evangelical quazi-dogma that eschews culture qua culture (art as art, tradition as collective pre-rational attachment), and instead sees culture (in whatever form) as a mere tool to spread the Message.

In general this is a recipe for either bad art (high Jesus-per-minute counts), or art not well received by its intended audience (low Jesus-per-minute counts). Of course, the lower the Jesus-per-minute count goes, which is to say the more layered and nuanced and less "preachy" the art becomes, the more one has to question the ontology of Christian Entertainment: Does such a thing really exist? Ought such a thing really exist? I mean aside from being a great money-making venture.

Perhaps a differentiation between pop culture and folk culture is in order to answer Samantha's question of whether a connection exists between pop culture and the things of salvation.

I am ready to say that pop culture has very little, if any, place in the believer's life, and is separate (and even the enemy of) the things of salvation. My reasoning becomes more clear when one examines the nature of pop culture, and the reason for its existence. Perhaps we could argue, firstly, that "pop culture" (the term is an oxymoron - "pop culture" is in fact anti-culture), at least as we know it today, did not exist before the 20th century, and was entirely a product of the industrial revolution. Prior to this, "pop culture" and "folk culture" were one and the same. Steve is correct when he notes that CCM is a money-making venture - so is all of our current "pop culture," otherwise correctly viewed as entertainment. Rarely, if ever, does it serve another purpose, and even when it does, that purpose is often accidental. By participating in the popular culture, as it exists in the 21st century west, we simply pay a fee to be entertained. This is an inherent evil when it parades as salvation (the one recorded case of Jesus becoming violent, let's remember, was when he chased money changers from the temple with a whip), but that's another debate. For now, we can at least establish that this entertainment distracts us from the things of salvation, and we must always be suspicious of these things.

Folk art is quite different. Though indirectly, it does point us toward salvation by commenting on the human condition, and it also can quite effectively entertain (perhaps the greatest humor is that which effectively comments on the human condition; folk examples of this abound), though this is not its primary purpose. Rosin's review makes an astute observation about this difference between folk culture and CCM when she comments about CCM musicians feeling used because they are essentially forced to advertise Jesus in every song - this "confines their art," she says. And she is exactly correct. What these musicians perhaps fail to understand is that salvation and great art are not mutually exclusive - far from it. Great art, even "low" art, always points us to salvation. CCM, a cheap imitation of pop culture, gets the worst of both worlds, since it sacrifices artistic quality in an effort to promote a kitschy view of Jesus, and sacrifices salvation to generate income.

Samantha is correct in pointing out the need for hierarchy and the appreciation of artistic mediation as necessary for defining the different levels of culture. For the reasons outlined above, however, I do not believe that what we know as "pop culture" has any place in that hierarchy.