This semester I've been teaching a composition class with the theme of "Christianity and Pop Culture." We've been reading Ashby's With Amusement for All: A History of American Pop Culture since 1830 and WIlliam Romanowksi's Eyes Wide Open: Looking for God in Pop Culture. I've been trying to get them to look at pop culture from a Christian lens.
But, like all of us, the college students are gnostics, loving the spirit and hating the flesh in word, but loving the flesh and hating the spirit in deed. Glancing up from their Facebook pages, they argue that the real point of the Christian faith is to avoid wrongdoing--to keep ourselves separate. But come on, these kids are anything but separate. Their media defines them. They are digital natives, inhabitants of Facebook, Myspace, Youtube. They are not distant from media, and therefore pop culture--they are immersed in it.
In a postmodern culture that multiplies interpretations, these students ironically search for the one "real" interpretation of things, as though we don't see through a glass darkly. They struggle with knowing what a work of art "means" and throw up their hands in despair, returning to the comfortable, unambiguous world of digital social interaction. In a world that grows increasingly entropic, they search for order amidst the ruins.
But what are they looking for? Truth? Because I'm just looking for interpretation; I know where truth is.
A seminary professor used to say that the Bible was God's "baby talk" to us. It occurred to me tonight in a flash of insight that if scripture, our normative text, is mere baby talk, than our art can be no more than fingerpaintings. How many 4-year-olds do you know who agonize about whether their scribbles accurately reflect reality or not? Or whether they've depicted God correctly? They merely do the best they can with passion and utter sincerity, and their parents consider the source.
Isn't it possible that God does the same?
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