Popologetics: Engaging Popular Culture from a Christian Perspective

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A response to:

Media Awareness: Do we really understand the news, the movies and the contemporary music? – Lars Dahle

This essay is a reflection on the need within the Christian community to develop a critical awareness of the media world around us. The Lausanne Movement’s Cape Town Commitment addresses this need in section II.A.4.A.[1] It is a typical evangelical response to media: it can be good (“gospel-friendly”), or it can be bad (filled with sex, violence, consumerism, etc.). So we need to be aware of it.

However, there is much more to be said. To get a truly critical understanding of media messages (and I will focus on entertainment media, that is, popular culture), we need to do more than draw lines in the sand and say, “This one is good, this one is bad.” This has been the standard evangelical response, and it has resulted in an evangelical community that is largely out of touch with popular culture, concerned only with protecting its own children (largely unsuccessfully) against being morally stained by media messages. The situation is, however, more subtle and complex.

The statement does say that we ought to be aware of the worldviews motivating media messages. This is a good start, for popular culture operates largely on the level of worldview. But there are a other crucial concepts to grasp about popular culture from a Christian perspective that will give us insight into how popular culture works and influences us. Once we understand how it operates, I think the appropriate critical response will come into focus.

1. The first concept necessary for understanding popular culture is that popular culture influences worldviews by creating “worlds.” Popular culture is, above all, creative; it creates imaginative narrative worlds for us to inhabit. When we watch a movie, play a video game, listen to a song, read a novel, even watch a Youtube video, we are invited into the imaginative, creative “world of the work.”[2] For a while, we live in its world and see through its eyes. Quite literally, we are invited to take on its world-view. And during that visit, that way of being in a world not quite our own, of seeing the world through alien eyes, we change. The change may be slight or drastic, but it is inevitable, as any visit to a strange place always is. Not that we must fear and avoid such visits at all costs, but we should be aware, and be prepared to engage these worlds critically. Popular culture influences worldviews through the creation of “worlds” for habitation.

2. Second, the worldviews proposed by popular cultural worlds are ultimately religious in nature. Though they sometimes might seem trivial, the implications of the imaginative worlds created by popular culture invite and instruct us to worship. Not that popular cultural worlds build elaborate ritual systems (sometimes they do, especially video games). Rather they elevate some aspect of reality as the thing worth living for, whether that is “having a good time,” or “family,” or “sex,” or “being free and taking control of your own destiny.” The possibilities are endless. Any time an aspect of created reality is elevated as the ultimate goal of human existence, it is idolatry, for it displaces the worship due to God alone. In this way, sinful humanity suppresses the knowledge of God all around them and trades the real God for false ones (Romans 1:18-25). Popular cultural worlds enable that dynamic. Popular cultural worldviews are religious in that they present to us idols and invite us to worship them.

3. Third, popular cultural worlds are not simply about idolatry. They are also messy mixtures of grace and idolatry, truth and lies. Often, Christians see only the negative, the lure of idolatry, the sinfulness of popular culture. But popular culture would have no allure if it did not also contain common grace, gifts of God that point ultimately to him (see Acts 14:17). Popular culture attracts us to its idols by using these gifts of God (beauty, truth, justice, etc.). Consider the idols mentioned above. Is “having a good time, “family,” “sex,” or “freedom” sinful? No. They are God’s gifts to us. But each becomes an idol when it becomes ultimate, the thing that makes life worth living. In this way, popular cultural worlds are complex and conflicted, made up of both grace-fragments and idolatry. Why? Because human beings are complex and conflicted, made in both the image of God and drawn irresistibly towards rebellion.[3] So in our engagement with popular culture, we must be prepared to understand both the good and bad, the truth and truth-twisting, the beauty and beauty distorted, the justice and justice perverted.

If what I have said about popular culture is true – that it influences us through the imaginative worlds it proposes, that the worldviews woven into these worlds are religious in nature, and that this popular cultural religion is messy mixture of grace and idolatry – the only appropriate response is an apologetical response. Therefore, I offer for your consideration “popologetics,” a worldview apologetic adapted especially for popular culture. It proposes five heuristic questions to help understand and respond to the imaginative worlds of popular culture:[4]

1. What is the story? Most popular culture narrates in some way because humans are peculiarly sensitive to stories. We understand our lives through story. Worldviews are essential stories through which we see reality. So the first key step is to understand the story (presented or implied): plot points, characters, and so on.

2. Where am I (the world of the work)? This question interrogates the particular media and genre styles that shape the imaginative worlds popular culture (e.g. use of lighting and camera angle in a movie, instrumentation and rhythm for a song, etc.). You also want to get a feel for the moral and spiritual landscape of this imaginative world. To do that, you ask questions: What counts as salvation? What counts as damnation? What makes relationships work or fail in this world? And so on.

3. What is good and true and beautiful here? Here, you look for those “fragments of grace” that make popular culture attractive. Where does beauty and truth shine in this piece of popular culture? When you find those common grace elements, recontextualize them within God’s story. That is, don’t just say “It’s good,” but “Given what I know of God and his dealings with men, how does this piece of grace connect?” What does the goodness of sex reveal about God? The goodness of family? The goodness of freedom?

4. What is false and ugly and perverse here (and how do I subvert that)? Here, you search for the idol, the “way of salvation” proposed by the popular cultural world. Further, you subvert the idol by showing how it cannot account for those good things that it pretends to give (the “fragments of grace”). You call the idol’s bluff and show that it is like the “Emperor without Clothes.” Look for the contradictions and absurdities in the idol’s worldview, how it cannot offer what it claims to offer.

5. How does the gospel apply here? Finally, show how the things the idol pretended to give really are provided by the God of grace. We must understand “gospel” in the widest possible sense; not simply as personal justification because of Jesus’ death and resurrection (the core of the gospel). Rather, we must understand the implications of Christ’s death and resurrection to all aspects of life, the new creation. What is sex from a new creation perspective? What is family? What is freedom? In this way, we make clear the relevance of the gospel to all of life.

In this way, I believe we can understand and critically engage popular culture, and have something to say back to the worldviews of unbelief besides “No, you’re evil. Stay away!” Popologetics gives us a tool that will draw us into the ongoing conversations of our friends, colleagues, and family about popular culture. And we will have something worthwhile to say on behalf of Christ’s glory.

 

[1] Lausanne Movement, The Cape Town Commitment: A Confession of Faith and a Call to Action, 2011, section II.A.4.A, available online at http://www.lausanne.org/en/documents/ctcommitment.html#p2-1 (accessed 5th November, 2012).

[2] On the notion of the “world of the work,” see Paul Ricoeur, “Metaphor and the Problem of Hermeneutics,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, edited and translated by John B. Thompson (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 178. What Ricoeur asserts is true of a literary text, I assert is true of popular cultural texts as well. See also Ted Turnau, Popologetics: Popular Culture in Christian Perspective (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2012), chapter 2.

[3] This is the tension or ambivalence in media that stems from “humanity’s dual character” that Lars Dahle refers to in his advance paper for Cape Town 2010, “Media Messages Matter: Christ, Truth and the Media,” available online at https://lmconversation.wpengine.com/en/conversations/detail/10514 (accessed 5th November, 2012).

[4] For a more detailed explanation of this apologetical method, see Ted Turnau, Popologetics, chapters 10 and 11.