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Pop Culture Wars: Religion and the Role of Entertainment in American Life
By William D. Romanowski
Intervarsity
379 pp.; $19.99, paper
What on Earth Are We Doing? Finding Our Place As Christians in the World
By John Fischer
Servant/Vine
220 pp.; $12.99, paper
When I applied for admission to a Christian college in 1971, I was required to sign a pledge that I would not, among other things, attend the legitimate theater or motion picture houses, or participate in social dancing of any sort from time of acceptance until graduation. Having grown up in a home where these amusements were commonplace, I signed the pledge reluctantly, thinking the education and experience at this particular school would be worth the sacrifice.
Little did I realize that such a pledge was not simply a neutral instrument of collegiate discipline and conformity such as one might find at a military academy. No, the code of conduct was a potent symbol of what Kim Riddlebarger, in a spin from a Frank Peretti novel, calls "this present paranoia": a fearfulness that has haunted American evangelicalism since the turn of the century. And though the Christian college I attended is one of many to have since dropped their stringent codes of behavior, that anxiety has hardly abated.
While evangelicals continue to presume that the modern world is by nature hostile to the Christian faith, a Michigan college professor and a California folk singer raise the possibility that, far from being oppressed by a secular society, evangelicals themselves may actually project the very hostility to the world they claim is directed at them. In Pop Culture Wars, William Romanowski of Calvin College places today's entertainment wars in historical context, thoroughly documenting the rather bumpy ride that has characterized the relationship between the popular arts and religion in the United States. In What on Earth Are We Doing? recording artist and popular campus speaker John Fischer reveals his misgivings about the consumer-driven, "decaffeinated" culture held together by evangelical broadcasting, music, and publishing industries, a parallel culture from which Fischer himself has profited. The two authors arrive at the same conclusion: responsible Christian discipleship demands less reaction to and rhetoric against modern culture, and more understanding and appreciation of it. In this respect, Romanowski and Fischer rewrite George Duffield's classic Civil War hymn by telling evangelicals it is time to sit down and listen for Jesus for a change.
There is nothing new about the battle being waged today between Hollywood and cultural and religious conservatives, Romanowski reminds us. The same religious, political, legal, and commercial pressures that vie to shape modern entertainment, he says, were very much at work behind Shakespeare's Globe Theater in Elizabethan England. Romanowski confines most of his discussion, however, to the United States in the twentieth century and to what he believes is the most democratic and thoroughly American of art forms, the motion picture.
The debut of picture shows in urban America--during a period of enormous cultural change--exposed the deeper anxieties of the age. Romanowski cites as an illustration the 1907 crisis in New York when several nickelodeon managers were arrested for violating Sabbath-observance laws and showing indecent pictures. The subsequent confrontation between clergy and entertainment representatives drew one of the largest public hearings ever held in city hall.
While the media scholar does not explicitly say so, his story makes it clear that American Protestants--whether of fundamentalist or modernist ilk--did not have the intuition or cultural savvy to lead and develop an infant industry that would soon be projecting not just images on a silver screen but a common public culture to a nation in transition. Committed as they were to Victorian sensibilities, American Protestants turned their noses up at the shabby industry while dismissing movies as popular, commercially driven amusements, not serious art. Thus, as Romanowski writes, "instead of the middle classes controlling the motion pictures and spreading high culture among the lower classes, the opposite occurred. To the chagrin of the cultural elite, the immigrant entertainments seemed to be moving out of the urban ghettos and were attracting a middle class audience."
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