Pop Goes ChristianityThe deep contradictions of Christian popular culture.
Posted Monday, May 5, 2008, at 7:43 AM ET
One night, a couple of years ago, I walked in on a group of evangelical college boys sitting on a bed watching The Daily Show. I felt alarmed, and embarrassed, as if I had caught them reading Playboy or something else they had to be shielded from. Jon Stewart, after all, spends at least one-quarter of his show making fun of people like them. But they eagerly invited me in. I soon learned that they watched the show every night it was on, finals or no finals. So strong was their devotion to Jon Stewart that I was tempted to ask: If Jesus came back on a Tuesday night at 11, would you get off the bed?
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StumbleUponOver time, I came to understand this as a symptom of a larger phenomenon: evangelicals' deeply neurotic relationship with popular culture. Whether or not they were the butt of all of Stewart's jokes seemed irrelevant to them. The point was that the high priest of political comedy spent a lot of time thinking about them. Once, after I'd met Jon Stewart, they all crowded around and asked the same question: What does he really think of us?
At this point in history, American evangelicals resemble the Israelites at various dangerous moments in the Old Testament: They are blending into the surrounding heathen culture, and having ever more trouble figuring out where it ends and they begin. In politics, and in business, they've mostly gone ahead and joined the existing networks. With pop culture, they've instead created their own enormous "parallel universe," as Daniel Radosh calls it in his rich exploration of the realm, Rapture Ready! A Christian can now buy books, movies, music—and anything else lowbrow to middlebrow—tailor-made for his or her sensibilities. Worried that American popular culture leads people—and especially teenagers—astray, the Christian version is designed to satisfy all the same needs in a cleaner form.
The problem is that purity boundaries are hard to police in the Internet age. Show a kid a Christian comedian, and soon he's likely to discover that the guy is a pale imitation of this much funnier guy—Jon Stewart—who's not a Christian at all, and doesn't even like Christians. Which might then lead to a whole new set of anxieties, such as: Why are Christians so constitutionally unfunny? And, what is the point of Christian culture, anyway?
In the '80s, Christians were known as the boycotters, refusing to see movies or buy products that offended them. They felt about commercial culture much the way a Marxist might: that it was a decadent glorification of money and meaningless human relationships. Then, sometime during the '90s, when conservative evangelicals started coming out of their shells, they took a different tack. The boycotters became coopters and embarked on the curious quest to enlist America's crassest material culture in the service of spiritual growth.
Most non-Christians are aware that there is something called Christian rock. We've all had the slightly unsettling experience of pausing the car radio on a pleasant, unfamiliar ballad until we realized … Ahhh. That's not her boyfriend she's mooning over! But few of us have any idea of how truly extensive this so-called subculture is. Reading Radosh's book is like coming across another planet hidden somewhere on Earth where everything is just exactly like it is here except blue or made out of plastic. Every American pop phenomenon has its Christian equivalent, no matter how improbable. And Radosh seems to have experienced them all.
At a Christian retail show Radosh attends, there are rip-off trinkets of every kind—a Christian version of My Little Pony and the mood ring and the boardwalk T-shirt ("Friends don't let friends go to hell"). There is Christian Harlequin and Christian chick lit and Bibleman, hero of spiritual warfare. There are Christian raves and Christian rappers and Christian techno, which is somehow more Christian even though there are no words. There are Christian comedians who put on a Christian version of Punk'd, called Prank 3:16. There are Christian sex-advice sites where you can read the biblical case for a strap-on dildo or bondage (liberation through submission). There's a Christian planetarium, telling you the true age of the universe, and my personal favorite—Christian professional wrestling, where, by the last round, "Outlaw" Todd Zane sees the beauty of salvation.
At some point, Radosh asks the obvious question: Didn't Jesus chase the money changers out of the temple? In other words, isn't there something wrong with so thoroughly commercializing all aspects of faith? For this, the Christian pop-culture industry has a ready answer. Evangelizing and commercializing have much in common. In the "spiritual marketplace" (as it's called), Christianity is a brand that seeks to dominate. Like Coke, it wants to hold onto its followers and also win over new converts. As with advertisers, the most important audience is young people and teenagers, who are generally brand loyalists. Hence, Bibleman and Christian rock are the spiritual equivalent of New Coke. Christian trinkets—a WWJD bracelet, a "God is my DJ" T-shirt—function more like Coca-Cola T-shirts or those cute stuffed polar bears. They telegraph to the community that the wearer is a proud Christian and that this is a cool thing to be—which should, in theory, invite eager curiosity.
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Notes from the Fray Editor
The term "Christians" doesn't only mean Evangelicals, says tormanator, and many others wanted to make the same point. ExurbanJon looks at Christian music a different way here, and posters wanted to discuss the Jars of Clay and other bands—our favourite recommendation is from swsather: Forever Mercy by the Altar Boys—or to talk about Christian Crossover music. Motives of various music-makers are discussed here. And Arias Montana says "The Church has canonized poets who made loving Christ sound a lot like loving a boyfriend (and without any damage at all to either faith or ballad); you might find St Teresa of Avila illuminating reading." BenK's contribution, below, is part of a longer post, well worth reading in full.
Comments from the Fray
Jesus warned that there would be many false prophets in the last days. The Apostle Peter warned of those that would make merchandise of you. God is loving, yes. But He is also a consuming fire.
--grammyof2
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I've always thought it ironic that a religion that seeks to separate itself from the world--the religion in which its founder insisted that his followers would be persecuted because of him--has spent so much time attempting to become more like the world. Americans love to connect themselves to those Puritan forbears who supposedly came here looking for freedom (a view of history that is utter nonsense), but let's get real: the Puritans, even most of the Founders, would not recognize anything particularly Christian about this pop-oriented culture.
--Anse
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An 18 year old today has grown up in an America that their church really can feel some responsibility for--Bush has enjoyed a level of acceptance from the evangelical community that was unimaginable back in the 90s when the Christian market was becoming a giant industry. Unlike the televangelist scandals of the late 80s, the failures in this decade have been far harder to ignore as "that doesn't happen in my church."
Meanwhile technology has made answers easier to get and therefore questions easier to ask. Also, a teen today connecting with other Christian Ska fans (believe me, only Christian teens like this music) will meet someone who has a different theology or set of values but still meets the criteria to be 'Christian.' All of this means that the Christian media's big money-spending demographic, teens, are also more likely to be aware of, and question, the media they're consuming.
--OhNoNotAgain
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Help the poor, Forgive your enemies! Whatever happened to these simple truths? These are the driving concepts of many of the world's religions and probably the least practiced.....especially the forgiveness part. Art is always in the eye of the beholder and up to the individual to make the decision on what is art. Some may even say that art loses some of its' intrinsic value once a price tag is put upon it. People of faith often fall into the ego trip/trap of feeling persecuted. Don't, it steers you way off course. Just love your neighbor, help the poor and forgive your enemies (all of them) and you will thrive in your chosen spiritual path.
--badbuddha
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The 'Christian community' is much less monolithic than any commentator seems to see. Even the Roman Catholics, perhaps the best unified group per capita, are extremely diverse. Only the smallest denominations (and there are 9000+ denominations in the US alone) can be in any sense uniform, and these rarely are, in part because the entire group comes and goes with the generational changes.
There are lots of ways that one group of evangelicals can be laughing at the foibles of another--or even at their own, realizing better than the comedian how there are tensions and issues within the way they live their own lives--and still not have it pose a threat to their foundational beliefs. If some author believes that Stewart and Colbert laughing about fundamentalists causes evangelical viewers to rethink their positions, they are grossly overconfident in the power of those very funny men.
--BenK
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