Illustration by Seth T. Hahne

A high number of visitors to our Web site find us by googling for answers to the question of whether they should be consuming a certain cultural artifact: Is Twilight right for my child? Is Harry Potter satanic? Is Mumford & Sons a Christian Band? Is it okay to watch or play football? All of these questions betray a perennial problem in the evangelical church: when it comes to questions of discernment, our growth is stunted. We rely on the advice of “experts” and set up extra-biblical hedges to keep us from stumbling into something unpleasant or spiritually oppressive.

Our aim at Christ and Pop Culture has always been to short-circuit that mindset by encouraging the reader to engage in basic cultural criticism, what the apostle Paul might call “sober-mindedness.” While our comments may often contain a reader pointing out the “mature” aspects of the shows, albums, and films we cover, we have always been content to place a significant amount of trust in the intelligence of our readers to discern and the power of the Holy Spirit to convict and guide.

Our goal is to equip you for the task of cultural discernment, not necessarily to do it for you. Sometimes we do this by laying the groundwork. Other times we do it by modeling what cultural discernment ought to look like.

We rarely want to build solid walls around cultural works. Our experience has been that God often works and speaks not only through surprisingly dark or worldly works but also through our interaction and engagement with them.

Cultural consumption is a calling we all have, a task that none of us can escape. Interacting with a work cannot be avoided, not even with resolute boycotts or ignorance. We are affecting the world and our own culture with our response, no matter how we choose to color or disguise it. Even worldly concepts and ideas will conjure ideas within us, and our best response may just be to outwardly acknowledge that impact, then praise or push back accordingly.

The most recent issue of Christ and Pop Culture Magazine is all about that inevitable heavy-lifting that every Christian must embrace. It goes beyond pointing out what is right and wrong and extends to considering purpose, intent, pomp, circumstance, and the manner in which grace and sin interact; messy, God-acknowledging ways that simultaneously proclaim and obfuscate the truth. In this fallen world, even God-honoring, Christ-centered, “Christian” works will be marred by the repercussions of the fall. Conversely, dark, disturbing, offensive, “worldly” works will praise God just as rocks, oceans, and preachers do.

Perhaps the main reason the evangelical church has such a hard time with cultural discernment is the uncomfortable grey areas that so often result from paying attention to and truly engaging a work. Evangelicals have always been a people of clarity, for good reason. But if we abandon the neutral colors present in God’s creation, even while affirming the bold reds and blues, we’ll inevitably find ourselves missing out on the full beauty available to us.

Illustration courtesy of Seth T. Hahne. Check out Seth’s graphic novel and comic review site, Good Ok Bad.

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Richard Clark

Richard Clark is the Founding Editor of Christ and Pop Culture. He is also the managing editor of Gamechurch and a freelance writer for Unwinnable, Paste, and other outlets. He lives with his wife in Louisville, KY and has a MA in Theology and the Arts from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
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18 Comments

    1. Lee, we are currently in the planning stages for some kind of solution for those who don’t have access to an iDevice! So sorry for the wait, but we’ll get there.

  2. AMEN! It is so good to hear someone else with this view!

    Christians have to engage with popular culture if the word of God is to be spread and people persuaded of its worth. That doesn’t mean we have to agree with everything that pop culture offers us – quite the opposite. But the Church so often confuses being critical of something with refusing to engage with it in the first place. If you don’t have knowledge or experience of something, don’t criticise it unless you want to look like an idiot.

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  3. The need to nitpick obsessively over every tiny bit of media to determine if it was acceptable was one of the things that eventually led me out of The Church(tm), as it was.

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    1. Out of curiosity, do you still consider yourself some type of Christian, or did you leave The Church as in Leave The Church?

    3. Okay, just wondering. Here’s a question for you though–if Christianity is indeed true, then why should the odd behavior of some of its followers be a reason not to believe it? I’m sure you came independently to the conclusion that Christianity isn’t true, but unless the Bible commands Christians to be jerks and morons, I confess to not seeing how that’s a legitimate reason to abandon your own faith.

    4. That was just a drop in the bucket, in the grand scheme of things. I started really reading the bible while I was attending a Christian college, and the odd behavior of the people and entities in the Bible are what really turned me off to the faith.

    5. Well I can definitely see why large sections of the Bible would seem weird to a modern reader, particularly the Old Testament. Keep in mind though that we’re looking back across many millenia into a culture quite alien from our own. That’s bound to result in a certain amount of weirdness from our perspective. Furthermore, I don’t believe one has to be an inerrantist to be an orthodox believer, so if something inside you is just balking at, say, the slaughter of the Canaanites, that’s okay. I balk at those passages too, so much so that I’m prepared to question their authenticity. That would get me in trouble with a lot of people I respect in other ways, but I don’t believe it’s a foundational plank of my faith to accept those accounts unquestioningly. Of course, I believe our feelings can’t always be the best guide to truth, but when it comes to fundamental moral principles like “Do no murder,” I believe we’ve been given a certain amount of natural light to make those judgments. And those passages contradict God’s own command not to murder, making me further question whether the command to murder was truly coming from God.

      What was your reaction to the New Testament, particularly the gospels and Acts? How did Jesus strike you? Did the style of those accounts read like eye-witness biography or myth? Have you ever considered investigating them as historical documents?

    6. The slaughter of the Canaanites. The entire book of Job. The global flood. Elisha summoning bears to maul his critics. These are all things that are troubling to me. Not only for the pointless bloodshed, but if he’s an omnipotent entity, he’d know of problems before they happen making their occurrence impossible in the first place.

      Then there’s the whole manifesting himself as a human so he could sacrifice himself to himself to save humanity. It’s the logical stuff as much as the moral.

      You’re going to balk at me saying this, but Jesus really comes across as bipolar. He’s preaching and feeding the masses at one point, then booting the moneychangers the next and murdering a fig tree, for good measure.

    7. So are you trying to articulate a form of the argument from evil? That God is either impotent, uninformed, or callous? That’s an interesting argument, but there are well thought-out answers to it. Christians disagree on some of the details (for example, some articulate a divine command theory, while I and others incline more to natural law theory), but the bottom line is that logically speaking, a Christian conception of God can co-exist with the existence of evil in the world.

      I guess I fail to see what the _logical_ problem is with Jesus’ manifesting himself as a human to save humanity. Are you familiar with the rationale of the gospel? Essentially, the collective sins of humanity had to be paid for one way or another. The only way that didn’t involve punishing sinners was for God’s Son to be the bridge between God and man. By becoming a man, Jesus represented the entire human race—like the other side of the coin with Adam’s face on it. Because he lived a perfectly sinless life, he was a perfect sacrifice. At the same time, he was God, which gave him the power to forgive sins. But he needed to be both. If he was God only and not man, he couldn’t receive God’s punishment on behalf of the human race. If he was man only and not God, he would have no power to save or forgive.

      When we sin, we’re not only hurting the people affected by that sin. We’re also hurting God. When a man rapes a little girl, or a mass shooter guns down a room of innocent people, that offends God’s holiness. It’s a bloodstain on the planet He created. It’s a crime that has to be paid for in eternal terms. And yet God would rather that both the rapist and the shooter would repent of their sin and be forgiven than for either to be punished forever. That was the purpose of Jesus’ death. God’s wrath was channeled into Jesus instead of the sinner, so that if the sinner will recognize the magnitude of his sin and repent, God will consider the sin paid for by that sacrifice.

      That’s my best shot at condensing the gospel into a couple paragraphs. If an idea like the Trinity seems difficult to wrap your mind around, I would cautiously suggest that perhaps a little humility is in order when we try to conceive of anything on this kind of a scale. We are potentially considering an entity who created the world from scratch, who exists outside of space and time, and who has the power to end the world at any time He pleases. Is it so far-fetched that there might be a few things about this entity that we find a little bit hard to grasp?

      Finally, with regard to Jesus’ personality, I actually found your description kind of funny, because it didn’t make any sense! All of us have strong feelings of love towards some people and strong feelings of anger towards others. Jesus was angry with the money-changers for a very specific reason—they were committing sacrilege in the temple. But why should he be angry with the hungry masses? Different people are different. We deal with the people we encounter as it’s appropriate. Jesus was like anyone else in that respect.

  5. Mostly agree, except for this bit: “Cultural consumption is a calling we all have, a task that none of us can escape. Interacting with a work cannot be avoided, not even with resolute boycotts or ignorance.” Of course I can avoid interacting with certain works, as indeed I should. I can choose not to have a television so that I miss cultural watershed moments like Miley Cyrus twerking. I can choose not to acquire a video game console and play Grand Theft Auto on it. I can recognize that Kanye West isn’t worth a penny of my money or a second of my time and pass over his work for the profane junk that it is. Meanwhile, I can interact with actually excellent art, music and films. If that means I’m missing out on the latest pop culture fad, well, there are worse things.

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    1. Esther I think the point is that boycotts are a FORM of interaction; there’s a basic value decision there, and that’s the calling/struggle Rich is articulating. Sometimes I’ll try to tell my daughter a story, and she covers her ears and closes her eyes and says, “Not listening!” She may not here the story I tell, but that’s still a form of interaction, a choice about consumption. Your not listening to Kanye West or whatever else is still a form of interaction with the culture.

    2. Okay, if that was Richard’s point, perhaps I misunderstood him. But another question I had was whether he always views a boycott as closed-minded, narrow, or ignorant. Surely there are things he boycotts himself?

    3. Based on my knowledge of Rich, I would say no, he does not believe boycotts are always closed-minded, narrow, or ignorant. Things like that tend to exist on a continuum, which is why discernment is so important.

  6. Good stuff, Richard. I taught a class last spring at my church on H. Richard Niebuhr’s book “Christ and Culture,” and out of what I’m told is 2500 weekly attendance I could only draw 10 or 12 people to such a class. Prompted by this, I started a Christ & Culture group at the church and the leadership is all for it. To paraphrase the title of a famous book by a famous pastor, we need purpose driven cultural engagement in the church, yet far too few Christians even know what that is. Keep up the good work.

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