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How does one identify beliefs and provocative issues out of any cultural artifact?

Think critically. Do I agree with that? Do I not agree with that? Is this something that is explicit Christian truth? At times I hear stuff in The Sopranos and I think, "I could preach that without changing a word of it."

You say in your book's introduction, "I remember one night watching Tony Soprano … cursing up a blue streak, as a throng of naked women with near-perfect bodies crowded around him. I flipped over to CNN a few times, but always turned back." How do we know what our relationship with culture is supposed to be?

I'm not sure we ever do. I hope that that tension never leaves me. I hope that when I see evil it ought to bother me a bit, and yet in the midst of it, it wasn't death that I turned back for. The Sopranos has a story of sin and redemption I continue to turn back for. Or at least the longing for redemption. Tony Soprano is full of sin and anger and murderous rage and greed — and was looking for some way to make it right. Yet in therapy there were no real answers.

How do you relate to comments that watching these kinds of behaviors indulge our worst appetites?

If your temptation is to become a mob boss killer, and that's a major temptation for you, maybe you should avoid the show. But I do not believe that this show, in particular, glorifies violence or deviant sexuality. I think you see how bankrupt and how sad a life that most of these people lead.

My dad and I had this argument, and he has some of the same fears. He never has watched the show, and I don't know that he will. We joke about it because the reality is, some of the shows that he would take me to watch when I was a boy, like James Bond movies, very much glorified violence and sexuality.

There are people who argue that "amusement" means to watch without your mind. So people are clicking over to Sopranos and watching without their mind. How do you respond to that?

If you watch any of this, if you listen to music, whether it's on your Christian radio station or any other, or you go see any film, you're foolish if you turn off your mind. We can't afford to do that. Just because Mariah Carey sings about love songs does not mean she's an expert on love. We have to be critical thinkers.

Shows like The Sopranos become the cultural metaphor. It becomes the speaking points, the place that we refer to. It becomes the common story. And so we need access to that story to begin a launching point for a dialogue. The reality is everybody else is watching this show. These are people that are outside the faith and I want to speak the gospel into their lives, and it's the perfect opportunity.

Why does The Sopranos strike a chord with people?

We see Tony Soprano as he really is. He's a sick man, and yet he's a beautiful man. There are all of these things present with him. And I think most characters that we get in popular film and television are not very real to life. Most of the ones that we have emerging from Scripture are very real when you read them in Scripture, but we have distorted them. We've tried to make them into morality heroes, which they are not. These were really broken men and women. They were very messed up, very sinful. The beauty of the story is that God continues to meet them there.

I don't think that Christ ever fixes it all. He definitely didn't for the people of Scripture. These were not people that were somehow fixed by God. I don't think we are either. The hope is that we don't have to take our sin to the point that Tony does. Redemption takes place in us much quicker.

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September (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46