Pop Culture - too much or not enough?

Pop Culture is short for Popular Culture. Over the last 60-70 years it has become part of the vocabulary of most Americans. Whether you like pop culture or avoid it, it is part of our American/Western perspective. The term, however, dates back to the late 1800s in England. The industrial revolution had begun to blur the lines between the classes. One of the first indications of that blur was the ubiquity of reading. Many publishers began to see an up-tick in the sales of newspapers and started publishing what they called the “Penny Dreadfuls.” These cheap pulp forms of mass media created a new market that needed its own distinctive name to differentiate it from the higher or upper classes. Thus was born the name “popular culture,” which stood in contrast to the “high culture of Victorian England.”

By the 1950’s in the United States we were starting to call this new fangled music called “Rock-n-Roll” by the kids “pop music,” as a way of distinguishing it from “real music” and trying to avoid the sexual overtones in the monicker “Rock-n-Roll.” Anything connected to the pop music was deemed popular culture and in 1958 it was shortened to “pop culture” in an attempt to associate it with “pop music” and, like in Victorian England, differentiate it from the more highly accepted “high class,” but in the U.S. at the time it was “refined.”

Pop culture in the U.S. is connected with the rise of the baby boomer generation (see the last article). It did not have the negative connotation it had in its origin — though the dominant culture of the time wanted it to be seen as negative. Over time Pop Culture got associated with the largest demographic in American history, which was a marketing hotbed; Madison Avenue saw “pop culture” as a golden goose. That meant pop culture was a key to economic success, youth was who you wanted buying your products. Which meant youth equaled success, popularity, economic growth, and was good — Pop culture = Good. To this day, pop culture is good and we are motivated to harness it’s power at our own demise.

As youth leaders we want to be relevant, we want to embrace pop culture, we want to be seen as “cool,” but at what expense. Do we use pop culture? Do we critique it? Criticize it? Make fun of it? Try to find God in it? What do we do with pop culture? Its part of our world, we can’t avoid it, if we do we threaten being seen as irrelevant, one of Youth Ministry’s achilles heels.

Let’s consider a diagram that might help us in this endeavor. In this diagram we look at two possible ways to approach pop culture: cultural relevance or Kingdom value.

It would be easy to pick cultural relevance. Pop Culture would embrace you and make you feel like one of the cool kids with all the cool stuff, using all the cool language, and believing we are giving Jesus a good reputation. Think about the plight of Hillsong New York, with their ultra cool culturally relevant pastor Carl Lentz. He hung out with Justin Bieber, made a huge splash in the New York social scene, tons of celebrities started to come to the church, and Hillsong New York was considered one of the flagship churches of the movement. As time went on we found out that Carl Lentz, like all of us, struggle with sin. The question is did that sin fester because he was trying to be “cool” or not? What we do know is when you try to balance cultural relevance and Kingdom value, you end up falling, which is what happened to Lentz.

Let’s talk about Youth Ministry, because most of us will never be that high profile. However, our kids want us to relate to them with their culture. Not just because its cool, but also because its comfortable. The issue becomes how accepting of the pop-culture do we become? At what expense? Hopefully never at the expense of the gospel.

Do we never use slang? Stop reading those scary magical books? Never play D&D? Run from social media? Or do we use those things to reach the students? We should also be asking ourselves, does the good news of Jesus need pop culture to be relevant? And almost as important, did Jesus use his version of pop-culture to teach the good news to people?

If we don’t use some popular references to culture we will quickly be seen as boring and irrelevant by the students. As trusted adults however, they tend to know we aren’t as up on their language or cultural likes and dislikes. Making it a tricky balance between being seen as an old person trying to “hip” and a trusted adult who “gets it.” Plus no one wants to be the awkward church kid that never watches Harry Potter and only read Little House Books outside the Bible. Trust me, even those kids don’t want to be those kids. My students called that “being extra Jesus,” which I first heard from a homeschooled student trying to be “cool.” Needless to say this is a tricky balance. So what do we do?

We do it the way Jesus did it. We let the gospel be culturally relevant as it stands up against the injustice and degrading parts of our pop-culture. When we let the good news be good news it will transform the culture it lives within, it may not oppose it as much as it redeems it. For instance Jesus used the popular form of story telling in his culture to his advantage, but each time he did, he would put a twist on it that highlighted God’s love for the world or how God wanted to set all things to right, or both. The time he told the story of the prodigal son was not the first times that sort of story was heard. It may have been a story passed around by the Rabbis for years. When Jesus told it, though, he put the twist on it about the father running to accept the son when he came home. That was his genius, he would use the popular culture he lived within to its fullest extent and give it Kingdom value, without it being cheesy.

Paul knew how to do this as well. Think about some of the words Paul used to talk about the church and Jesus. We are the body of Christ, he stole that from the Roman’s “Body politic.” Paul also stole the idea of Jesus is Lord from the Romans. They would say, “Hail Caesar or Caesar is Lord” as a way of greeting or addressing others. To turn that into “Jesus is Lord,” used a term that was widely used for his own purposes. Paul seemed to get what Jesus was teaching.

We have the opportunity to do that in our era. I’m not talking about a sermon series through the Marvel Universe or How Yoda is a wise teach so we should be wise. That’s probably cheesy, but what I am talking about is helping our students see that God is at work in the world they occupy. For instance, why does a certain YouTube influencer speak so well into their lives? OR Why are they moved every time they see a specific hero on the big screen? OR Why do they want to retreat all the time into their games and such? OR Maybe you share why a story or a game or a cultural moment affected you, so they can see God at work in the world you share with them. That is living in that upper right hand quadrant where Jesus occupied, speaking both in culturally relevant terms and Kingdom value terms. Not 50% of one and 50% of the other, but giving both 100% with their nuances, cultural baggage, and societal wisdom.

The issue is compromise. We are all scared of compromise. We are afraid that we will water down the gospel and make it wishy washy. But what we don’t realize is that doing that is also a cultural construct that we use to push forward a perspective of things in the Untied States after World War II. We don’t compromise the good news at the expense of cultural relevance, which is the fear, we use the good news to redeem and retell the story of culture. Which is what Jesus intended. Listen to Paul in Ephesians 1 “Yes, with all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the secret of his purpose, just as he wanted it to be and set it forward in him as a blueprint for when the time was ripe. His plan was to sum up the whole cosmos in the king – yes, everything in heaven and on earth, in him. “ (NTE - New Testament for Everyone). His intent is to use everything in heaven and earth to sum up his story of redemption. The Kingdom can redeem the pop culture, not use it or contort it for our own good, but live within it and watch it become good as God works through it.

Don’t be afraid of pop culture, don’t rely on it for your sermons either. Seek God’s work within it and point it out, don’t shoehorn it in hoping to be cool, let it come about naturally, God just wants to retell the story in such a way for the world to see the Kingdom.