In the first dozen pages of Through a Screen Darkly, Martha Bayles explores the foreboding feelings many have about the United States's soured image abroad as pop-culture exporters. Bayles should be thanked for her cultural analysis and wake-up call to America's citizens and policymakers. But her elucidation of this complex problem, and the reader's subsequent ability to articulate it, isn't going to make you feel one whit better. Our country's present scandalmongering trajectory seems unalterable given our increasingly secularized society's starting point: an optimistic anthropology. Such naiveté, pleads the author, must be checked with a dose of religious realism’indeed, a sober Augustinian anthropology that understands total depravity’if we expect America to ideologically reengage a deeply religious and largely morally conservative world with ideals consonant with principled democracy, dignified human rights, and responsible freedoms.
American pop culture must be defined and understood as more than a benign marketing medium, argues Bayles. It also includes our collective "way of life (customs, values, and ideals); elite artistic expression (literature, fine arts, performing arts); and popular culture (the products of commercial entertainment industry)" (5). Consider the history: since 1951, the U.S. Government consciously helped all three by supporting efforts aimed at promoting the American story of ideals and lifestyle. "These activities were part of public diplomacy," explains Bayles, "a term that also covers government-sponsored efforts to explain and defend US policies and, more important, project American ideals" (5).
Things changed after the Cold War. In 1999, for example, when the instruments responsible for placarding the brightest and best of America before the world’the United States Information Agency (USIA and internationally located USIS offices)’were closed down. Partly by design, partly an accident of circumstances, the mantle for the promotion of American ideas and lifestyle fell upon the entertainment industry: Hollywood, TV, music, social media, and video games. This transition prompted Bayles to wonder "whether a bigger mistake had been [made] letting the entertainment industry take over the job of communicating America's policies, ideals, as well as its virtues’¦in effect, to make it America's de facto ambassador" (6). This is pop culture for good or for ill (and mostly for ill).
Bayles admits that her theses cannot be established through the analytical method alone (though the chapters are replete with statistical data). Consequently, the mostly nonscientific, largely anecdotal evidence that follows makes a defensible argument that, yes, it has been a mistake: pop entertainment is not winning hearts and minds for democracy and freedom, but rather evoking disdain and distrust. Pop culture cannot adequately reflect the American ethos (248). Here enters the strength of Bayles's analysis. Whereas once there was a time when the entertainment sector exercised self-regulation with governmental oversight and cooperation that assisted in the demise of Communism, now three crucial things have changed in the wake of deregulation and the Supreme Court perspective that recategorized the industry from accountable business to inscrutable art: "Transformations in the tone and content of pop culture, in the technology that conveys it to the world, and in the audiences that receive and interact with it" (7). The real culprit, avers the author, is a human nature that slouches toward Gomorrah, which was once honestly addressed with measures religious, social, and structural. But now the measures are gone, having been replaced with "reckless optimism" and secularism's "religion of progress." The result is an unfiltered pop deluge into foreign domains. Forgotten in the minds of others is that America ever possessed high culture, or even classic pop culture (18).
This work is far more than mere exposé. Bayles's observations and critiques come with neither Theodore Dalrymple's cultural pessimism nor his signature governmental cynicism. Instead, Bayles concludes with pages of non-draconian, plausible suggestions to promote public diplomacy through listening, cultural and educational exchange, reporting the news, and advocacy (233). Religion, particularly the contributions of the Judeo-Christian tradition, plays a significant and in fact necessary role for public diplomacy in every dimension, because the wider world engages, interprets, and interacts with America in religious categories. Though presently hushed in the public square, it is American's religious dimension that stands common ground with values that resonate with rather than alienate people the world over. Her counsel is both seasoned and sage. But is anyone listening?
A glaring omission from the analysis (especially given the impressive and comprehensive scope of this work) is the domain of sports’a veritable religion in its own right and a topic constantly paired with the idea of "diplomacy." The NFL, NBA, MLB, and NCAA are more closely associated with American culture and ideas than rock-n-roll. Bayles must cede pages here. Through a Screen Darkly could have moved more quickly, leaning on tacit knowledge shared by her readers. Still, this is a fantastically winsome and important book that should be read by the widest audience’especially parents, business professionals, and even pastors and church leaders who themselves have imbibed the mediums and, inextricably so, the commingled messages of pop culture in their worship "styles" and ministries, thereby contributing to America's sagging image abroad.
