Culturally Savvy Christian

July 10, 2007 | Filed Under books, culture |

culturally-savvy-christian.jpgI recently began reading Dick Staub’s The Culturally Savvy Christian, subtitled “A Manifesto For Deepening Faith and Enriching Popular Culture in an Age of Christianity-Lite.”  In chapter one Staub emphasises how popular culture is crippling the souls of people. He then contends that the only real answer is a transformed American Christianity. Here is a short excerpt from the conclusion of chapter one.

So here’s the deal. The largest companies in the world are hiring smart people and spending billions of dollars to drive a diversionary, mindless, celebrity-fueled popular culture down the highway of new technologies and into our lives in order to sell us stuff we don’t want or need. They don’t care about us, what we believe, or how we want to live. Their ads and products regularly reduce women to sex objects and men to voyeurs and predators. They are unconcerned with what is in our best interests spiritually or intellectually, and in fact, it is in their best interest to keep us spiritually desensitized and dumb. They play to our unhappiness, magnifying our feeling that we are missing something essential and that if we had this something they offer, we would be fulfilled. They then encourage us to shop, convincing us that shopping will do today what it failed to do yesterday - fill that French religious philosopher Pascal calls our God-shaped vacuum.

If you believe, as I do, that humans possess innate spiritual, intellectual, creative, relational, and moral capacities, it seems clear that what we see today is a diminishment of God’s image on the part of both the creators and consumers of popular culture. Where do we turn to find a better way? In a nation in which Christianity is the majority religion, conventional wisdom would point us toward the church . . . [however] the bad news is that during the rise of popular culture, American Christianity marginalized itself by choosing to flee popular culture, fight it, or simply fall for it. American Christianity, which initially set out to transform culture, is itself in need of transformation.

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