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CURRENTLY IN CULTURE
Christianity and popular culture

Martin E. Marty

Ironies abound as Christian expression, of a sort, makes its way into popular culture through film, television, music, novels and even computer games. The main irony? Much of that expression taps into America’s appetite for violence and apocalyptic struggle while coming from the same branch of American religion that has most vigorously protested against violence and the occult in the mainstream media.

For example, the Frank Peretti novels were the first “Christian” books to make the secular best-seller lists. They deal with apocalyptic imagery, cosmic wars between good and evil acted out among frightened and frightening humans. More recently, the wildly popular series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins traffics in similar themes while telling the fictional story of those Left Behind after the rapture.

A new expensive experiment by Christian entrepreneurs crashed the Christmas computer game market. Computer games tend not to be about doing justice, loving mercy and walking humbly with God, but rather about devils, angels, cities destroyed and earths quaking, with humans fighting each other.

Most of these expressions pass over the prophecies of peace one finds in Isaiah and Micah. From them you won’t learn central Christian stories like the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son or Mary and Martha.

In a World article entitled “Hollywood Goes Spiritual”, culture critic Gene Edward Veith asked the question, “Why should the devil get all the good movies?” But now we find that, as Christian spirituality goes Hollywood, the devil at least gets into all the good movies. A momentary movie breakthrough, The Omega Code, was designed to appeal to the born-again conservative crowd. It had its 15 minutes of fame in secular Hollywood, but critics were not enthralled. The Chicago Tribune quoted notices that called the movie “ham-handed, flat-footed”, “a stinker” and “a disservice to people of faith, the solemnity and portent of Revelation and to moviemaking”.

Such movies, novels and computer games cannot be dismissed lightly. Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation – this audience’s favourite biblical books – are indeed full of cosmic struggle. Great writers like Dante and Milton seized upon those images, and artists from Dürer to Dore did the same. Violence has already shaped children who play computer games and three generations of television viewers. These new Christian products seem not to minimize violence or the occult but to simply bring in a different cast of characters.

Maybe there are other (biblical) plots out there waiting to be brought forward. It’s time to see some.

This is a “Sightings” column, distributed by the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

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Last modified May 3, 2000.

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