To which army in the culture war do you owe allegiance? Are you a populist church growth advocate pushing the envelope of contemporaneousness in a well-marketed church? Or are you a high-brow cultural conservative who ventures from a well-protected elitist world only when an opportunity arises to cast a monkey wrench into the workaday machinery of the mass-produced modern world?
A title like Pop Culture Wars might make readers of this review suspect its author was a cultural conservative. If not the title, then the fact that it was being reviewed in Modern Reformation might clinch it. But William Romanowski does not write as a high-brow cultural conservative. His book calls for an immediate cease fire in the culture wars. The author claims that we have made a fundamental mistake in engaging in battle before we understood about what we were fighting.
This book is readable, clear, and well-documented. Readers may find few strikingly original ideas here, yet the overall impression it leaves is unexpected. Many of the things we have heard elsewhere are connected in such a way that we can see that the landscape we thought we knew so well is unfamiliar.
The most helpful service Romanowski provides is to show how the church was in the same dilemma with the culture at the turn of the century, and that when it engaged the culture as we engage it now, it went unheeded. This is a hard reality, but it is followed by the comforting news that the church woke up, adopted another stance, and won the day. When the church found constructive solutions to offer to pressing social questions, society listened.
The church tends to take one of three stances toward secular entertainment. It either ignores it, attacks it, or mimics it. While in any given case one of these stances may be appropriate, none is a cure-all. Before choosing a position, it is best that we understand what we are confronting.
Few people about to engage the culture ask how our modern pop culture arose. How did the entertainment industry become so big in a nation founded on the Puritan work ethic?
In the beginning, our culture was an agrarian society composed of Anglo-Saxon immigrants who thought alike on the most basic social issues. Any good history of Puritanism will explain how the society of nineteenth century America was a compromising of the original Puritan vision of a biblical commonwealth. Yet even after the compromise between religious vision and capitalist opportunity, the work ethic did hold together a society which would have appeared homogeneous to an outsider. Two factors transformed that landscape: industrialization and immigration.
Romanowski argues that industrialization channeled people into jobs comprised of boring and repetitive tasks. Those performing these tasks had more leisure time and more discretionary income than those of generations before. It is no surprise that leisure became a bigger question under these conditions. Churches saw this as a threat, since time and money spent on entertainment were not given to the Church. The typical pastoral response was to castigate worldly amusements-often in religious revivals conducted in a circus-like atmosphere.
If it were merely a question of an Anglo-Saxon world maintaining the status quo, the churches might have succeeded despite bad tactics. But in addition to the conditions mentioned above, the country was experiencing a major influx of immigrants from countries which knew nothing of the Puritan work ethic. The country wasn't going to hell in a handbasket; hell was arriving from overseas. In rhetoric which reminds one of Dole in his more xenophobic moments (I voted for him, but cringed during every commercial on illegal aliens), pastors saw immigrants as either a threat to Protestant civilization, or so much raw material to Victorianize.
Many of the cultural elite adopted the anti-Christian philosophies of Social Darwinism (only the fittest should survive in the economy) and culture worship. Accepting the theory of the descent of man from the animal kingdom with some shame, the elite saw high culture as a way of marking self-made man from the beasts and immigrants. Some Christians unwittingly adopted the same attitude though they were ignorant of its origin.
Romanowski believes that if we become aware of these ideas' origins, we might join in the postmodern abolition of the distinction between high and low culture. Pointing to shows like Les Miserables and Evita, which use popular music in the traditionally high-brow medium of musical theater, he argues that the culture is abandoning a distinction which was always based on dubious notions. If the culture is engaged in a form of repentance, is it not strange if the Church is barricading itself in on the side of impenitence?
Some Christians have found better ways of engaging the entertainment culture. The Catholic Church has adopted a plan to teach media awareness in its schools so that its students might be educated about this vital aspect of their lives. Instead of passively asking their priests whether a given movie is allowable viewing, the successful student of such a curriculum could make his or her own choice, perhaps choosing to view the movie, but through more informed eyes.
Romanowski's book made me see one journalist through more informed eyes. To any reader who opts to read this book, I suggest reading G. K. Chesterton's essay "Christmas and the Aesthetes" concurrently-which forms one of the chapters in his book Orthodoxy. Chesterton managed to see through the illusions of early twentieth century high culture (He elsewhere said the term usually referred to motoring and playing bridge!) while maintaining a critical stance toward the popular.
In one part of the essay, he disagrees with those who laud the aims of the Salvation Army while questioning its popular methods. Chesterton says that he does not know whether its aims are good, but he knows its methods to be excellent. In one brilliant sentence he says that "anyone can see that banging two cymbals together must be a good idea." He ridicules the elitist worship of high culture, claiming that such reverence is only possible toward a beautiful lie. Real believers are not reverent. All they know is laughter and war. The irony is that those high culture devotees who worship every relic salvaged from the cultures of the past, would in the times of those cultures have found them to be vulgar. The proof is that they think Christmas to be vulgar. It is strange to find a Christian journalist defending the commercialization of a holy day, but Chesterton's luminous clarity regarding high and low culture causes one to ponder the question anew. Together, Chesterton and Romanowski provide a stereoscopic vision of popular culture.
I would recommend Romanowski's book to any reader. It is a perfect introduction for those who are new to thinking about the connection between Christianity and popular culture. Those familiar with the subject will find this book to be up-to-date, having been published in 1996. Readers from the front lines in the culture wars may be disappointed to have some of their activist enthusiasm deflated, but even they should appreciate this book. The time they would have spent picketing and writing cantankerous letters to the media might now be spent exploring the world and asking "How does the Gospel address this?"
