Christians and culture: from Bob Jones to Keanu Reeves

One last post on Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling by Andy Crouch (previous posts here and here)...

In the chapter "Gestures and Postures" Crouch describes and critiques the three dominant postures that Christians, in particular 20th and 21st century American conservative Christians (of which I am one!), have had toward culture(s). These are condemnation, critique and copying. The thing is, each of the three will be a part of a holistic approach to cultural engagement. There are aspects of culture, especially our popular media culture, that cry out for condemnation and from which we should separate ourselves from. The bad old "Bob Jones fundamentalists" weren't wrong about everything. In other cases culture needs to be engaged and critiqued through a Christian lens, sometimes it can even be fruitfully copied or repackaged (Crouch gives good examples of each). However, as a knee jerk reaction or default posture each is seriously lacking.

Then there's a fourth approach which is the worst of all possible worlds, and which Crouch argues (and I think he's right) has become "the dominant posture among self-described evangelicals today...simply consumption." Christians have embraced mere consumerism, becoming just like the world around them in the stuff they buy, the music they listen to, and the TV shows and movies they watch. Too many of us have adopted the Keanu Reeves approach to cultural engagement.

The fundamentalists said, Don't go to the movies...But most evangelicals today no longer forbid going to the movies, nor do we engage in earnest Francis Schaeffer-style critiques of the films we see—we simply go to the movies and, in the immortal word of Keanu Reeves, say, "Whoa." We walk out of the movie theater amused, titillated, distracted or thrilled, just like our fellow consumers who do not share our faith. If anything, when I am among evangelical Christians I find that they seem to be more avidly consuming the latest offerings of commercial culture, whether Pirates of the Caribbean or The Simpsons or The Sopranos, than many of my non-Christian neighbors. They are content to be just like their fellow Americans, or perhaps, driven by a lingering sense of shame at their uncool forebears, just slightly more like their fellow Americans than everyone else. (p. 89)

This is the worst of all worlds because it's capitulation. It's the furthest thing from fulfilling a creative Christian calling in the world.

Of all the possible postures toward culture, consumption is the one that lives most unthinkingly within a culture's preexisting horizons of possibility and impossibility. The person who condemns culture does so in the name of some other set of values and possibilities. The whole point of critique is becoming aware of the horizons that a given culture creates, for better or worse. Even copying culture and bringing it into the life of the Christian community puts culture to work in the service of something believed to be more true and lasting. But consumption, as a posture, is capitulation: letting the culture set the terms, assuming that the culture knows best and that even our deepest longings (for beauty, truth, love) and fears (of loneliness, loss, death) have some solution that fits comfortably within our culture's horizons, if only we can afford to purchase it. (pp. 95-96)

As he does throughout the book, Crouch shows here his ability to offer a devastating critique that goes beyond the surface of things, and do it in a way that doesn't come off looking harsh or arrogant.