Andy Crouch is a writer for Christianity Today and a former Harvard campus minister with Inter-Varsity. Last year he wrote a book entitled Culture Making. One of his tasks was to record different postures toward culture among professing Christians. They are as following: Condemn, Critique, Copy, or Consume. In his mind, all of these postures have their place, but Christians must go further and also create culture.
In the following excerpt he discusses Christians’ consumption of culture. This section has stuck with me for a few weeks, especially the devastating final sentence:
Consuming Culture: Evangelicalism’s Present Tense
Perhaps because of discomfort with this lingering sacred-secular split, but probably also because of CCM’s tremendous commercial success, which has included a fair number of “crossover” acts that have successfully abandoned their Jesus quotient and gone mainstream, it has become fashionable in many Christian circles to make fun of CCM. The truth is that like critique and even condemnation, copying culture is a posture toward culture that is alive and well in American conservative Christianity. But it has been superseded by a simpler approach: simply cutting out the Christian middlemen who repackaged cultural forms for Christian consumption and going straight to the source, “secular” culture itself. The dominant posture among self-described evangelicals today toward culture is neither condemnation nor critique, nor even CCM’s imitation, but simply consumption.
The fundamentalists said, Don’t go to the movies. The evangelicals said, Go to the movies – especially the black and white movies by Ingmar Bergman – and probe their worldview. Experimenters in CCM-style film would say, Go to movies like Joshua, soft-focused retellings of the gospel message using cinematic form. But most evangelicals today no longer forbid going to the movies, nor do we engage in earnest Francis Schaeffer-style critiques of the films we see – we simply go to the movies and, in the immortal word of Keanu Reeves, say, “Whoa.”
We walk out of the movie theater amused, titillated, distracted, thrilled, just like our fellow consumers who do not share our faith. If anything, when I am among evangelical Christians I find that they seem to be more avidly consuming the latest offerings of commercial culture, whether Pirates of the Caribbean or The Simpsons or The Sopranos, than many of my non-Christian neighbors. They are content to be just like their fellow Americans, or perhaps, driven by a lingering sense of shame at their uncool forebears, just slightly more like their fellow Americans than everyone else.
2 Comments
Colin,
Crouch’s observation is excellent. In my evangelical days in New England I saw a number of my fellow Christians who seemed to be obsessed with the notion of being cool–so cool that the lost would want to get a piece of the cool action in Jesus. That was the driving force behind the early days of CCM (back when we just called it “Christian rock”).
I later began the practice of referring to evangelical thinking as “groovier than thou.”
I also saw a lot of evangelical stereotyping of fundamentalism–the assumption, for example, that anyone on the right was necessarily in the “Condemn culture” camp (something that Crouch seems to fall into above). I found that to be very much untrue in my personal journey from evangelicalism into fundamentalism. In fact, my fundamentalist colleagues were in the “Create culture” camp decades ago, as a careful reading of Ron Horton’s *Christian Education: Its Mandate and Mission* (http://www.bjupress.com/product/058586) will show.
I’ll quickly admit that fundamentalists have done relatively little to create culture on a noticeable scale; reasons for this would be worth investigating. But some of them, anyway, were philosophically in that boat long before it was being actively expressed on the evangelical side–perhaps even before evangelicalism became distinguishable from fundamentalism in the 1940s.
It’s interesting that engaging in either consumption or condemnation for the sake of itself leads to the opposite of the virtues sought by those who worship either modus for its own sake: cultural irrelevance and an inability (or stubborn refusal) to think critically. Someone who has to insist that he or she is “hip” is, well, not. And someone who condemns based solely on a party line (the left or the right) has declared himself free of the burden of hard questions. Let’s rather rejoice in the freedom which is in Christ, and sweat and strive hard for fair and honest thinking under the constraints of his purifying love.
PS-No evangelicals or fundamentalists were (intentionally) maligned in the making of this comment; I meant a general exhortation to those who earnestly seek to follow Christ, whatever banner is flying highest at the moment ;o)
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