Mars Hill

The current issue of Touchstone includes an article by Russell D. Moore, "Retaking Mars Hill," subtitled "Paul Didn't Build Bridges to Popular Culture." It is an interesting discussion of contemporary Evangelical attempts to engage with pop-culture. The excerpts below don't include important aspects of his argument - especially the point that there isn't very much that relates this effort to what actually happened on Mars Hill between Paul and the philosophers [Acts 17].

Moore identifies two models:

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 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.

The first model of Evangelical pop-culture engagement is that of those I call "off-brand Evangelicals." They seek to take trends in popular culture and reproduce them in Christian dialect for use within the Evangelical subculture, with the hope of making it more attractive not only to those outside but to those within. ....

GQ magazine sent one of its reporters to a Christian music festival in Pennsylvania, to check out what goes on in the "Religious Right" subculture. "Christian rock is a genre that exists to edify and make money off of Evangelical Christians," the author concluded ....

He pointed out that Christian pop music recruits "off brand" performers to ape and mimic current popular artists ....

It's hard not to wince at the magazine's assessment. Christian bookstores often include "comparison charts," pointing listeners to Christian versions of the secular bands and artists they enjoy. "If you like Eminem, you'll love Twisted Fisher." ....

The second model is that I choose to call "South Park Evangelicals." ....

This model is popular among a generation that humbly dares to call itself "the emerging church," although it includes aging baby boomers who have been writing movie and music reviews for Christianity Today and Campus Life since the Partridge Family last had a hit record. ....

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 aspects of contemporary music and film that are consonant with biblical truth. ....

There is much more, and the article is well worth seeking out.

Elsewhere in this issue, an article that is available online, "Writers Cramped" by Donald T. Williams, about Flannery O'Connor and lessons Evangelical writers could learn from her. Among them are insights important for every Christian writer, songwriter and artist:

.... O’Connor found a true worldview, encapsulated in dogma, which constituted a lens that brings human nature and human significance into piercing clarity. “Dogma,” she said, “is an instrument for penetrating reality. ...It is one of the functions of the Church to transmit the prophetic vision that is good for all time, and when the novelist has this as a part of his own vision, he has a powerful extension of sight.”

O’Connor understood that good writers do not simply parrot these insights; they must take this doctrinal understanding and apply it to the concrete realities of human life. “Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.”

When we do not understand this distinction, Christian fiction becomes mere religious propaganda. “The sorry religious novel comes about when the writer supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality.” Doctrine is a light to see human experience by, not a formula to be dressed up in a fictional disguise.

Though O’Connor did not put it this way, the biblical worldview gives us several truths relevant to the writer of fiction or poetry. It teaches us that everything in creation is significant, pregnant with meaning, because it all came from and relates back to the eternal Logos. It teaches us to see life as a drama of redemption in which human choices matter, and to see all of life, not just religious conversion, in those terms.

And it teaches us the value not only of God’s creation but also of our own creativity, for we were made in the image of the Creator. As J.R.R. Tolkien put it in his seminal essay “On Faerie Stories,” “We make still by the law in which we’re made.” [emphasis added] [read the whole article]

Touchstone: Writers Cramped