Pop Culture

I was doing some research for a post I’m writing about Christianity and culture when I discovered this article by Douglas Wilson. It deserves a post of its own.

Wilson bases his discussion of pop culture on the framework supplied by Ken Myers of

• high culture,
• folk culture and
• pop culture.

High culture and folk culture transmit “permanent things” from place to place and time to time. Pop culture, in contrast, focuses on the temporary. Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame.

Rebellion against God can be expressed in each of these forms of culture. But pop culture presents the greatest threat to the average person.

High culture can express rebellion against God at a high level, but it is not the greatest threat to us, because when the avant-garde goes stupid virtually no one else pays any serious attention.

Rebellious high culture only presents a problem to really smart intellectualoids—the only ones in the world actually vulnerable to the really stupid idea, as modern architecture shows us.

Pop culture, however, it more closely connected to the desires and aspirations of the average person. For this reason, it is much more dangerous.

Wilson lists three principles:

1. Pop culture is not sinful in itself just because it is pop culture.
2. When sin is expressed in pop culture, the fault lies in the human heart not in the particular medium in which it is expressed.
3. All human actions have a moral component and a direction.

This third point requires some explanation. An action is either right or wrong. This is the moral component. But there is another factor that must be taken into account. Each action moves us toward greater or lesser maturity. Wilson argues that “cultural issues are always maturity issues.”

Often we ask, “Is this wrong?” If the answer is that it is not wrong, then we conclude that it is OK. But just because something is not morally wrong doesn’t mean that it is good. There must be a second question, “Does this lead to maturity?” I would ask the question like this: “Does this lead me toward becoming the person God created me to be?”

To this point Wilson and I are on the same page.

Then he gives an example of a young man with purple hair. He says that the issue is not the color of the hair but what the purple hair means. He asserts that purple hair means rebellion.

I would argue that purple hair often means rebellion but it can also mean something else entirely. It could mean “I don’t buy in to the cultural definition of beauty.” It might mean “I am one of you.” Or perhaps it could mean “I am a walking object lesson that obedience to God does not equal conformity with society.”

Wilson says, “A constant diet of pop culture is only legitimate if you don’t want to grow up.” Then he adds, “Pop culture represents a full-scale revolt against cultural maturity.”

He starts off with several insightful observations. But then he twists them to justify a traditionalist position that discounts all pop culture as worthless.

Pop culture, as a category, means things that are transitory. But the things that are now folk culture and high culture were once pop culture. Some of the things that are currently pop culture will eventually be promoted to folk culture and even high culture.

He says, “This critique is aimed at the direction of the whole enterprise.” Then he argues that the rock culture is “in high rebellion against the God of heaven.” Even if individual songs might have redeemable qualities, the overall meaning of rock music is antithetical to Christianity. Therefore, in his opinion, the whole enterprise should be avoided.

He maintains that there is nothing in pop culture that will be handed down to future generations.

High culture, he argues, places demands upon the consumer. It takes more “effort” to listen to Bach than the Beetles. He says, “More than one rock guitarist is an impressive virtuoso, but the fingerboard display makes no demands on the hearer, other than a willingness to be blown over. The listener to classical music is impressively engaged; the devotee of such rock music is left, with a ringing in his ears, right where he started.”

I suspect that Wilson has never learned to play the guitar.

Just because a guitar solo only sounds like so much noise to him does not mean that listeners cannot be engaged at a level similar to hearing Bach’s “Minuet in D minor.”

Wilson argues that the ultimate sin of pop culture is that it displaces true culture by catering to the undisciplined. “In a biblical culture, a man expects his great-grandchildren to read what he has read, sing what he has sung, listen to what he has listened to. In an evanescent culture, like the one that surrounds us, a man expects to have all his ‘cultural’ experiences buried with him.”

I suspect that there were people making the same arguments about opera in the 18th and 19th centuries. I’m sure that at the premier of Roméo et Juliette in Paris on April 27th, 1867, someone was saying, “Why do we need a pop culture treatment of this classic by Shakespeare? In 150 years, no one will remember Gounod’s vapid tunes. The masses are seduced by this nonce art form called opera.”

As R. Wesley Hurd points out, “It is a difficult to see through one's own cultural habits and preferences; it is difficult to admit that one's own cultural comfort zone is irrelevant to the gospel's universal truth.”

He reminds us, “As believers, we must understand the gospel well enough to dis-enculturate it from our own religious culture in order to be able to offer it with clarity to our generation.”

Wilson seems to think that there is a “Christian culture” that encourages spiritual maturity and that is friendly to the gospel.

But, as Hurd points out, “We are often not aware of the ideas and beliefs that lie hidden from us under the cover of our own Christian culture.”

Leslie Pollard from Loma Linda University makes a powerful statement: “Those who in light of the Bible cannot articulate a biblical critique of their culture of origin’s cherished and transmitted values are not qualified to objectively evaluate another culture.”

In other words, if you cannot see how your own culture stands against the truth of the gospel, you have no business telling other cultures that they are unbiblical.

Pollard says, “Almost without exception, culturally incompetent persons assume that their culture of origin is superior to the culture under their microscope. Once the subject of culture is raised, many well-meaning believers immediately move to condemn what they view as culturally unacceptable in someone else’s cultural group.”

(Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek explains in this lecture how even the design of toilets reflects deep cultural assumptions.)

Pastor Rod

“Helping you become the person God created you to be”