All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture

For several years I have enjoyed Ken Meyers Mars Hill Audio Journal periodically as he brings together people from all fields and disciplines to teach people the importance of thinking religiously from an interdisciplinary place of depth and meaning. This book is a serious and stern critique of popular culture and it's main medium: television. Although some reviewers of this book have considered it a little highbrow, if not extreme, to be useful, I would wholeheartedly disagree. If you feel that way by the end of chapter two simply read it like you would Kierkegaard- "don't be put off by the hyperbole or generalizations, he's making an important point so don't miss it." Meyers main thrust in the book is that post 60's there is a firmly established thing called popular culture mediated to us in images and that this cultural medium is making us dumber. He argues popular culture, in distinction to folk culture and high culture, does not do what the great artists of the past did, and that this is often true because it is the product of jaded marketers instead of real artists. The artists of high and folk culture tended to draw us into human universals. They stretched us, and experiencing their art was a human exercise of the mind and affections. We had to work at it to understand and we experienced either a clarification, a deepening appreciation, or a revelation of something we somehow didn't know but knew we should have known. The artist helped us become more human by drawing us into a more developed experience with a human universal. Contrary to this, popular art does not do this with nearly the same frequency or depth. It is immediate, easy (not an exercise of growth), it markets to us what we already know, and deals mostly with trivialities- or treats serious subjects trivially, and communicats a form of knowledge that is immediate rather than reflective, physical rather than mental, and emotional rather than volitional. Meyers argues this is true in the degeneration of high cultural art forms, but even more so in the transition form what Neil Postman called "print-based epistemology" and "television-based epistemology", or what Jacques Ellul has called "the humiliation of the word". Because television holds to the main medium of images, it does not communicate linearly or logically. As Meyers says, "images cannot make an argument", they are at the mercy of the response of the viewer, and whatever the viewer transfers onto the images. Throughout the volume Meyers brings us to the right discussions. How the medium effects the message, the nature of post-industrialism boredom, the contrast of Montaigne's and Pascal's theories of leisure and diversion and their effects on culture, the concrete differences between high, folk and popular culture, the effects of the 60's on the transition to image based cultural discourse, the liberating and isolating effects of "Liberalism", tension of Romanticism celebration of the primitive and Ratio

This is one terrific book. Ken Myers delves deeply into popular culture. He does a great job of grounding his research and findings in a theological framework. He cites everyone from C.S. Lewis to Bob Dylan to G.K. Chesterton to Bo Diddley.This book is so needed today. So much of pop evangelicalism and even the mainline churches have unwisely and unthinkingly schmaltzed the Church's glorious message into a dumbed-down, styrofoam, homogenized pop culture framework and are submerging the Church's heritage into it. (See Marva Dawn's book "Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down"). I refuse to listen to my local Christian radio station because they've pretty much pancaked their format to just watered-down pop Christian music, pretty much devoid of hymnody or anything with any history to it. What if the World War II generation had demanded that the Church's glorious history and hymnody be replaced by Lawrence Welk-style tunes? That's exactly what's happening today. Read Myers' book to find out the values of popular culture and how they compare to high and folk cultures. This book will provide you with much great background, and, most importantly, helps you to think Christianly. It's creative, intelligent and a very enjoyable read.

From telling us what culture is and the various levels of it to what it means to be "in the world but not of it," Myers delivers the best to date analysis of culture and Christianity. Of the numerous insights he gives, one of the favorites is: schools do not just give knowledge, they do cultural assimilation. And we wonder why our schools are letting us down! This is a must read for Christians and those into popular culture!

I read this book when it first was published and it has helped me to frame my thinking ever since. I have yet to find the author wrong in his conclusions. Rather, as time goes by, he proves to be more and more on target. It is too bad more people are not aware of this work.

Ken Myers explores what popular culture really promotes. This is not a book for those who are seeking reasons to put down secular rock n' roll and replace it with Christian rock n' roll. The discussion focuses mainly upon the medium of information, not just the content. The book is documented thoroughly and he strongly supports each of his points. He examines what values/aesthetics popular culture rallies around, and what values/aesthetics Christian should support. Is there something about TV, rock music, MTV, etc that is against Christian values? Do they support instant gratification and lower disciplie? Ken Myers offers something everyone needs to see.