Popular Culture • General Superficiality

In the first chapter of his book, The Culturally Savvy Christian, Dick Staub describes the popular culture in which we live as having four dynamics: General Superficiality, Soullessness, Powerful Influence, and Spiritual Delusions. In this post I'll discuss what he says about General Superficiality, and will deal with the other dynamics in future posts.

General Superficiality

Staub describes popular culture as divisionary entertainment and mindless amusement. Too much of our time is spent in front of the computer or television, minds turned off, absorbing media that is free of useful knowledge or edifying messages—free, in fact, of anything that is good, beautiful, or true. More and more, we exist to be entertained. With every passing moment of this divisionary entertainment and mindless amusement, our real lives are disappearing into a bottomless pit of entertainment.

Reality television has, in fact, managed to marry divisionary entertainment with real life. “As we increasingly morph real life into entertainment and vice versa, entertainment is becoming our central reality, and real life is becoming subsumed in our entertainments.” (7) There is no longer a line between real life and entertainment, reality and fantasy. In a recent seminar at USC, Bill Nye the Science Guy collapsed while approaching the podium. Rather than rushing to his aid, every student in the room pulled out their cell phones, tweeting and updating their facebook statuses about the events unfolding before them. Although a man’s life was in danger in their physical presence, these students were so disassociated from physical presence that they could not distinguish between reality and entertainment.

The superficiality of popular culture is most clearly expressed in our obsession with celebrity. These days, you don’t need to do anything great to become famous; people are known for being known. One young woman described our celebrity-centered culture this way: “Those of us who are fans, we use these celebrity lives in ways that transform our own. I sometimes think that these are our gods and goddesses, these are our icons, and their stories become kind of parables for how to lead our lives.” (10) The pervasiveness of our superficial, celebrity-driven culture demands that we consider it thoughtfully. “What are the implications of knowing more about what’s going on in the personal lives of celebrities than we do about our neighbors, coworkers, or, worse yet, our own family members?” (10)

The superficiality of popular culture, coupled with its gluttonous consumption by the masses, is retarding the moral, spiritual, intellectual, and creative development of the majority of individuals within our society. We do not know how to think. We do not know how to behave. Our art is shallow and derivative. We believe in only ourselves. Popular culture has convinced us that our lives are not part of a Greater Story, but that we are the masters of our destiny, if only we would believe in ourselves and follow our hearts. It has removed robust theology and philosophy from the public discourse, replacing them with the paper thin platitudes of self-absorbed emotionalism. Reason has been abandoned for waffling, relativistic pragmatism. We are drowning in kiddy pools.

Christianity-Lite

I've just finished reading Dick Staub's excellent book, The Culturally Savvy Christian. The tagline for the book declares it to be "a manifesto for deepening faith and enriching popular culture in an age of Christianity-Lite", and indeed it is. Staub's thesis centers around Evangelicalism's capitulation to the ways and forms of popular culture, which has resulted in a weak, insipid form of the faith he calls "Christianity-Lite". The way out, he postulates, is to deepen our faith and become deeply well, enriched people who are then able to enrich culture.

This is such an excellent book that, rather than giving it a one-time review, I'd like to spend more time with the material. I'll begin with this quote from the Introduction:

We've arrived at a crossroads in faith and culture. The Christian community has degenerated into an intellectually and artistically anemic subculture, and the general population is consuming an unsatisfying blend of mindless, soulless, spiritually delusional entertainment. We are caught between a popular culture attempting to build art without God and a religious culture that believes in a God disinterested in art.

The American Music Awards were on TV this past Sunday, and I watched some of it with my wife. The terms mindless, soulless, and spiritually delusional apply nicely to the dreck I saw celebrated that night. Neither a note of the music nor a syllable of the lyrics was true. It was all false--an ecstatic, hedonistic, autotuned Bacchae exalting the worst and most deceptive elements of our culture. And this is the culture to which Evangelicals seek to be relevant--to imitate and sanctify, if such a thing were possible.

We Christians are, in large part, intellectually and artistically vacuous because we have followed popular culture down the spiraling whirlpool of eros-replacing-agape, emotional sentamentalism, self-defining reality, and the victory of style of substance. We have elevated product over process and justified the means by the ends, which we have devastatingly misinterpreted. Though we set out to transform popular culture, we have been transformed by it. We have turned our pastors into celebrities, elevating them to god-like status while they produce to our liking, but then discarding them with the Paris Hiltons and Brittany Spearses of the popular culture machine when we are done with them. We have exchanged discipleship for consumerism, true community for celebrity-association, and transformation for trendsetting. We have turned the deep and vibrant faith of Augustine and Aquinas and Luther and Lewis into "mindless, soulless, spiritually delusional entertainment."

As a result, we are an insecure and fearful people embracing a decontextualized faith-substitute. We are biblically illiterate. We are theologically anemic. We are intellectually vacuous. We are artistically derivative. We are, in a word, unwell. This is not the way the people of the creating, redeeming, resurrecting God ought to be.

Longings

An excerpt from "Not the Way Its Supposed To Be", by Cornelius Plantinga:

What are some features of this [spiritual] flourishing? As Christians see her, a spiritually whole person longs in certain classic ways. She longs for God and the beauty of God, for Christ and Christlikeness, for the dynamite of the Holy Spirit and spiritual maturity. She longs for spiritual hygiene itself--and not just as a consolation prize when she cannot be rich and envied instead. She longs for other human beings: she wants to love them and to be loved by them. She hungers for social justice. She longs for nature, for its beauties and graces, for the sheer particularity of the way of a squirrel with a nut. As we might expect, her longings dim from season to season. When they do, she longs to long again.

What do you long for?

The point of our lives is not to get smart or to get rich or even to get happy. The point is to discover God's purposes for us and to make them our own. The point is to learn ways of loving God above all and our neighbor as ourselves and then to use these loves the way a golfer uses certain checkpoints to set up for a drive. The point is to be lined up right, to seek first the kingdom of God (Matt. 6:33), to try above all to increase the net amount of shalom in the world.

What is the point of your life?

To glorify God is to do these things, and, by doing them, to make God's intentions in the world more luminous and God's reputation more lustrous. To enjoy God forever is to cultivate a taste for this project, to become more and more the sort of person for whom eternal life with God would be sheer heaven.

Do you long for eternal life with God? Would that be heaven for you?

Heaven

While putting Eisley and Cyrus to bed tonight, I asked them if they were glad that I was back from Charlotte. "Yeah!" they shouted.

"Did you miss me?"

"Yeah, we missed you." Then Cyrus asked, "Daddy, why were you in Charlotte?"

"I had to go to Charlotte because my Uncle David died," I replied.

"Why did he die?" Cyrus asked.

"Well," I stalled, searching for an explanation that would satisfy a 4-year-old. "He got old and sick, and then he died."

"Did he get sick because he ate lots of junk food?" he asked. Mommy is clearly brainwashing him.

"No," I said, "sometimes we just get old and sick, and our bodies can't live anymore."

"Why did he get old and sick?" Eisley asked.

Not wanting to scare her about death or say something stupid like, "Oh Eisley, we all get old and sick and then we die, even Mommy and Daddy"--that would not have gone over well--I searched for an answer but couldn't think of one. So, instead, I said, "Oh, honey, sometimes people just get old and sick."

Then Cyrus asked the clincher. "Did he have Jesus in his heart when he got sick?" What do you say to that?

"Yes he did," I said. But to be honest, I'm not very confident of that.

"Will Jesus heal his body?" Cyrus asked.

"Someday he will," I told him.

"I want to go to heaven with Jesus and God and everyone!" Cyrus said, excitedly.

"I want to go to heaven because Jesus loves everybody!" Eisley shouted.

So then we all prayed; Eisley first, then Cyrus, then Daddy. We thanked God for our friend Sophia, for almond butter sandwiches, and for bringing Daddy safely home from Charlotte. And they asked me to sing "Jesus Loves Me", which of course I did; and for the first time I can ever remember, they both joined in. And we sat there in the dark, singing about how much Jesus loves us. I choked back tears as I thought about Heaven, and how this moment was a little, priceless taste of eternal life.

Charlotte

I'm in Charlotte, NC, today. My uncle David died last week and the funeral is tomorrow. He was a great guy, although I only got to see him about once a year. He was always ready with a joke and I can only remember him laughing and smiling. His health took a turn for the worse about five years ago, and he finally succumbed last Thursday. He will be missed.