The Blogosphere on Rapture Ready!

Daniel Radosh's new book Rapture Ready! seems to be making quite a stir (make sure you don't confuse it with the real Rapture Ready website, which is a sincere—and scary—end-times site). I guess it's been out for a month or so, but I claim exam-time exemption from the outside world for the last few weeks. I'm certainly going to flip through it if I have the chance, but a few of the reactions to it seem just as interesting.

It's always interesting to me to hear people talking about the weirdness of the little kitschy Christian things that I grew up with, especially Testamints. What's nice is that Radosh seems to go beyond the weirdness to really try to understand what's going on in the cultural basement where American Evangelicals seem to live. Jeff Sharlet interviewed him on the Bloggerheads website, and they cover a lot in thirty minutes. He likes Pedro the Lion, mewithoutYou, and Over the Rhine; he doesn't like Bibleman, golf ball outreach, abstinence thongs, or Christian raves (“DJ-led worship sessions”). It's even more interesting that he sees quality Christian pop culture is the biggest (and best) threat to fundamentalism, since fundamentalism sees attacks from secular liberals as a badge of honor. As he puts it in an interview with, um, Playboy (follow link at your own risk):

I’m cautiously optimistic about Christian pop culture bridging some gaps. The creative Christians tend to venture outside the bubble of the church. The teenagers who grow up exposed to these more broad-minded artists recognize the world is not as black-and-white as their youth pastor might have told them. Evangelicals tend to be very respectful of their leaders, and the leaders tend to be extremely conservative and judgmental and intolerant. They drive the culture from the top down. Pop culture, however, drives the culture from the bottom up. If people like a Christian rock band’s music, it is placed in a position of grassroots authority. Good Christian rock musicians may play churches but they also play secular clubs, so they have exposure to the outside world. They know gay people, atheists and Muslims, and while they may disagree with these “lifestyles” they also know these people aren’t so bad and that they don’t all hate Christians. There is a persecution complex in evangelical culture that is extremely destructive.

Hanna Rosin reviewed the book over at Slate. She's not a Christian, but she did her time by hanging out at Patrick Henry College gathering material for her book God's Harvard. She asks the question:

What does commercializing do to the substance of belief, and what does an infusion of belief do to the product? When you make loving Christ sound just like loving your boyfriend, you can do damage to both your faith and your ballad. That's true when you create a sanitized version of bands like Nirvana or artists like Jay-Z, too: You shoehorn a message that's essentially about obeying authority into a genre that's rebellious and nihilistic, and the result can be ugly, fake, or just limp.

This is, of course, what so often happens in practice, although my friends at Mockingbird strongly disagree with Rosin's characterization of the Christian message as “essentially about obeying authority.” I'm not sure that Rosin means that the real message of Jesus is about authority, but rather that a number of Christian bands are trying to express it that way.

At any rate, what is more interesting is Radosh's hope that Christian pop culture will make Christianity safe for the liberal order. Ben Myers of Faith and Theology writes:

Radosh’s hopeful outlook arises from his confidence in consumerism itself. Concluding the book, he suggests that the problems in evangelical pop culture – its tendency towards intolerance, for example – will be resolved as Christian pop culture is more fully assimilated into the mainstream market. The weirdness and bigotry that characterises some aspects of evangelical culture will thus eventually be smoothed out – not so much through dialogue, discussion and reflection, but merely through the levelling operation of market forces. The result will be a more liberal and more tolerant Christian culture – in short, a more precise mirror of the values of mainstream culture.

By and large, this analysis is probably correct: in the setting of late capitalism, the creation of a vibrant and distinctive niche market goes hand in hand with the emergence of mass homogeneity. But I’m not so sure this is a comforting prospect. Instead, it ought to raise some disturbing questions about the nature of evangelical culture. It seems to me that the basic flaw underlying Radosh’s analysis is his assumption that evangelical consumerism can be neatly distinguished from evangelical identity – as though the modification of evangelicalism’s consumer culture would not also be a modification of its religious identity.

I, for one, would be happy to lose the bigotry and keep the weirdness, and to begin the long journey from Christian pop culture (back? forward?) to Christian art.