By Russell D. Moore
Touchstone Magazine
Offering one answer to this confusion, many contemporary Christians often speak of the need to “engage” popular culture. What they most often mean by this is that they seek to speak in a language people shaped by popular culture can understand or that they want to “redeem” popular culture for the glory of Christ.
In my world, the world of American Evangelicalism, at least two groups have clear ways to do this. One group wants to imitate pop culture but Christianize it. Another group wants to find ways in which that culture itself presents the gospel. Both want to use pop culture to reach the wider culture, and both find their justification in Paul’s talk on that first-century Athenian hilltop described in Acts 17.
And they are right to try: If Christians are going to speak to people, Christians as well as others, who have been deeply formed by popular culture (as we must) without losing our souls, we’re going to have to decipher how to relate Mars Hill to Rolling Stone.
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Adapting current cultural forms for use as Christians is not, in itself, a bad idea. In fact, in many ways it is unavoidable. If our pulpits are successful in persuading Christians that Jesus is to be the central focus of the believer’s life, we should not be surprised but joyful when young Christians gifted to be hip-hop artists rap about Jesus rather than about pimps and firearms.
Still, there is a danger in a kind of co-option of popular culture for Christian use that does not discern the limits of the evangelistic and apologetic potential of such a strategy. This is especially true when the impetus behind so much of it is not ecclesial or missionary but commercial.
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In this model, one seeks to know pop culture, not in order to imitate it, but first to enjoy it as an aspect of common grace, and second to share a common cultural dialect with unbelievers. You don’t fight a “culture war” with Hollywood, you seek to redeem Hollywood instead, by finding the aspects of contemporary music and film that are consonant with biblical truth. Christians are to highlight these commonalities, and downplay thedivergences.
Again, there is much that is commendable here. These Christians recognize that insights about God, man, and redemption cannot be found simply in the piety of believers. Even at the end of the Scripture story, at the New Jerusalem, the Apostle John tells us that “the glory and the honor of the nations” will be brought into the City, a glory that surely includes expressions of human culture—perhaps even popular culture. Moreover, these Evangelicals wish to avoid a “Christian ghetto” in which Christians are unable to speak the same basic cultural discourse as the people to whom they are called to bring Christ.
The pitfalls with this approach also include a commercial Christian industry that by its very nature, perhaps unintentionally, militates against wisdom, discernment, and balance. As with the “Off Brand” market, money is involved here, too. It’s just subtler. The younger, cooler wave of Evangelicals would never fall for a Christian version of the Backstreet Boys, much less the crass evangelistic showmanship of the last generation’s Petra or Carman musical acts. Instead they consume anti-consumerist Evangelical acts, such as Derek Webb.
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Christians seeking to “engage popular culture” point to the Apostle Paul’s speech before the Areopagus, in which he cited the lyrics of pagan poets and the architecture of pagan temples. Christians, they argue, should follow Paul and use popular culture to “build a bridge” with its consumers, finding in popular works a “common ground” through which we can attract their interest and later communicate the gospel.
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But is this what Paul is doing on Mars Hill? The answer is no . The Apostle might say, “God forbid.” Often those pointing to Acts 17 wish to begin with Paul’s address itself, which starts in verse 22. But we must look first at how Paul found himself on the Hill in the first place. He was summoned there because of a controversy he evoked among the populace “because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection” (Acts 17:18).
Paul did not start speaking in Athens with a “common ground” idea of a generic god, and then reason along to Jesus. He started with the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth, proclaiming among the Gentile philosophers exactly what he had proclaimed among the Jewish rabbis: that God had raised him from the dead. Where Paul starts is also where he ends: with the guarantee that God will bring about judgment found in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead (17:31).
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He points to the altar of the unknown god to demonstrate that the Athenians themselves acknowledge ignorance. How can you pontificate about the nature of the divine, he is asking, when even you tell me that there’s something important out there you admit you don’t know?
Paul does not find in the poets some form of “redemptive analogy” he can use among a people who don’t acknowledge the authority of Scripture. He uses them to demonstrate that Athenian philosophy and culture are self-contradictory.
How can you claim that these temples house the gods, he asks, when even your own culture-mavens say the divine can’t be housed in edifices made with hands? The poets lead him not to finding “common ground” with his hearers but to calling them to repentance on the basis of a scripturally revealed storyline of humanity (17:26–27,30–31).
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Paul’s discourse on the Areopagus is strikingly different from many Christians’ attempts to be relevant to popular culture. He points to the Athenians’ culture not so much to bring out what they know as what they deny.
Paul systematically unhinges key facets of Hellenic thought: the multiplicity of gods, their representation by images, their dwelling in temples, Greek racial superiority, the distance of the gods from humanity. He boldly challenges the Greeks’ tribal pride in being “sprung from the soil of their native Attica” (in the words of the New Testament scholar F. F. Bruce) by pointing to the common ancestry of humanity from “one man,” with God determining the “bounds of their habitation” and “removing all imagined justification for the belief that Greeks were innately superior to barbarians.”
Moreover, the very nature of Paul’s message was an affront to the ideological underpinnings of Athenian culture. He constantly returns to the resurrection of the body. Nothing was more alien to Epicurean and Stoic thought, both of which sought to combat the fear of death by separating the prison of the body that dies from the spirit that survives. How different is Paul’s view of death and resurrection from that of, for instance, the Stoic philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius, who in his Meditations compared death with birth from the womb, “when your soul will emerge from its compartment,” the body.
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Contemporary attempts at engaging popular culture are partly right. We cannot ignore it. It affects life in twenty-first-century America far more than high culture, far more, even, than the middle-brow culture of Broadway and PBS.
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The Bible speaks of culture being “redeemed” eschatologically; cultural artifacts seem to be in view as the “glory of the nations” brought into the New Jerusalem in the new creation (Rev. 21:24–26). We shouldn’t demand personal regeneration for artists before we can enjoy their work—whether that artist is Mozart or George Jones.
Christians should ask why culture resonates with the Superman mythology of a hero from beyond the stars who rescues humanity from itself. We should ask why country-music singer Toby Keith sings about the unity-in-diversity he longs for in his song “I Love This Bar.”
We should ask why, as the City Journal’s Harry Stein points out, trashy talk shows such as The Jerry Springer Show always end with a “moral lesson for the day,” despite the fact that the rest of the broadcast has dismissed the very idea of moral absolutes. Why do gangster-rap hip-hop artists sing so much about their rage against an absent father?
We can see in pop culture what we can see also in the ideologies of Marx, Freud, Darwin, and others, even “New Atheists” like Dawkins and Hitchens: the longing for a story that makes sense of the world. In literature, films, and ballads, we can see a flash of what we know to be true—that man does not live by bread alone, or by orgasm alone, or by self-image alone. We are created to find ourselves in a storyline that begins and ends in Christ—even while, as sinners, we kick against the reality of that story.
The Christian analysis of popular culture always proceeds with a knowledge that there is enmity between the idolatries of man and the kingdom of Christ, that we are most tempted to evade Christ by looking to the works of our own hands (Is. 2:8), even, or maybe especially, when these works are culturally effective.
This means we must contrast gospels: the gospel of Jesus is always combated by other gospels—today by one that is often embedded in music, film, and visual art. And these messages are heard by our people in our pews. The people in our congregations are shaped by pop culture, a culture fueled by the advertising industry and a politically active artist guild.
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To contrast the “abundant life” of Christ with the “abundant life” offered by the spirit of the age, we must understand something of what Mammon is hawking.
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We must bring attentive consciences to bear even on (or especially upon) the most subtle pop-culture influences. How do Everybody Loves Raymond reruns, with a scolding, yelling wife and a cringing husband seeking permission to play golf, affect the way people in our churches view marriage? How does MTV’s Pimp My Ride affect the way our teenagers and young adults read the Sermon on the Mount? How do animated Disney films such as The Little Mermaid shape the way children—and adults—hear the command to honor father and mother?
Do we really believe that suspending disbelief long enough to see Morgan Freeman as God in the film Evan Almighty—heavily marketed to Evangelical
Christians—will not affect the way we read the prophet’s vision of the Holy One in Isaiah 6?
This is not being a scold; it is being a shepherd. The shepherd must look at the world in which his sheep live and warn them of its dangers, especially the most subtle ones. But he has an even greater duty. Let us go back to Paul in Athens.
What pop-culture-engaging Christians need to understand most from Acts 17 is the Athenians’ response. Luke tells us that what arrests the attention of the Athenians is not the so-called bridges Paul builds by citing Athenian cultural products. What pricks their attention at the end is what pricked their attention at the start: Jesus and the resurrection: “Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked. But others said, ‘We will hear you again about this’” (Acts 17:32).
Knowing Andy Griffith episodes or Coldplay lyrics might be important avenues for talking about kingdom matters, but let’s not kid ourselves. We connect with sinners in the same way Christians always have: by telling an awfully freakish-sounding story about a man who was dead, and isn’t anymore, but whom we’ll all meet face-to-face in judgment.
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Knowing Andy Griffith episodes or Coldplay lyrics might be important avenues for talking about kingdom matters, but let’s not kid ourselves. We connect with sinners in the same way Christians always have: by telling an awfully freakish-sounding story about a man who was dead, and isn’t anymore, but whom we’ll all meet face-to-face in judgment.
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Too many attempts at reconciling Christianity and pop culture, it seems to me, have to do with being seen as “relevant” by the culture on its own terms. We will never be able to do that. Pop culture is a rolling stone, and it waits for no band of Christians seeking to imitate it or exegete it.
Yes, we must learn to listen to what our culture is saying. We must remember to listen beneath the cool to the fear of a people who know that Judgment Day is coming; it’s written in their hearts (Rom. 2:15–16). We must remember to listen beneath the cynicism to men and women who experience longings that can only be fulfilled in the reign of a Galilean Carpenter-King.
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Christians must make sense of pop culture by judging it in terms of the story we embrace. When that happens, we’ll find ourselves back on Mars Hill. But let’s make sure we’re there because we are, as Paul was, preaching Jesus and the resurrection, not because we’ve started a new business making “unknown god” action figures. We probably won’t be considered “cool” to the culture—whether or not we’re able to sell music downloads to Christians. (more)
