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You talk about the degree to which within the Christian subculture there's been this imitative nature that is missing the transformative power of imagination. What do you see going on there?

Christians have been tempted to say, well, pop culture is a huge phenomenon and it's incredibly cool in its way. Why don't, instead of we rejecting pop culture, let's get on the pop culture bandwagon, let's just place the message inside the vehicle of the pop culture medium, whether it's the romance novel that is being used or the techno-thriller or rap music.

Here's the danger. The great Marshall McLuhan once said, "The medium is the message." And the danger with pop culture is that it is naïve that you can somehow insert some idea about faith or the faith itself into this vessel and simply transmit it and it be opened up and received in some pure way. The very nature of pop culture is to dumb things down, to make things more special-effects oriented, more in terms of spectacle than demanding exercises of heart and mind that high art and traditionally mainstream art has called us to employ. The danger is that what the young Christian listening to as he rocks his head to the Christian grunge rock is grunge rock and not the faith at all.

When you talk about aesthetic and art usually the stuff of Image journal is considered elitist within that definition of popular culture. You describe it in such a way that one would conclude that you think that if we took our faith more seriously that serious art would be popular. Is that true?

Absolutely.

So you think popular culture is, in fact, the child of superficial, shallow theology?

It's a vicious circle. In great folk culture, great popular culture there has always been a spectrum and a whole series of linkages along that spectrum: Shakespeare being able to play both to the plebs below and the people in their booths above. In the modern era we've tended to force those parts of the spectrum further and further apart from each other to the detriment of both. I think part of what we're trying to do is to work in a particular vineyard. We're not saying it's the only vineyard.

And in the end I think even Christian humanism, which seems to be about being highly sophisticated and highly erudite, I would argue it doesn't have to be seen just that way. There's an intimate relationship between the balance of Christian humanism at this intellectual level and what I would call common sense.

I've known a lot of people who are not scholars and not artists, they're just people who live a full life and try to find their way through the culture in their faith and the church. They've said to me "I resonate with what you mean because I've always felt that these extremes of political edges are wrong and the truth is somewhere in between."

I've seen a younger generation of Christians who are taking their faith seriously but who are being led to believe that post-modernism has to be embraced in order to communicate within it. But this ends with a focus on personal story and the loss of master Story, doesn't it?

Image is about nothing else if it isn't about the idea that the faith needs to be made incarnate in the forms of the present day. And those forms are post-modern for the moment in which we live. But here's the thing. So many Christians tend to say, "let's get on the bandwagon and imitate what's already going on" rather than what I would call transformative. And that would be to take what is the form of the day and bring about through a real effort of mind and heart a transformation of the form into something new, into something that isn't just tagging along but something dynamic, something that others would want to look to and imitate themselves.

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March (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48