Church and Art, Part II: The media is art too

It's a fascinating thing, watching Christianity interact with today's teenagers. Evangelical Christianity, in particular, is often amusingly out-of-touch with the realities of day-to-day life as an American teen. Take for example a prototypical Focus on the Family advice article about protecting your teen from "bad" entertainment. "Make a family constitution", the article advises, "and then weed out whatever music/movies/games don't fit your constitution!" The thing that strikes me about the article is how juvenile the tone seems. Teenagers now are smart about media: most are adept at getting it online for free, and at keeping it on computers or MP3 players, often in hidden folders designed to prevent parental access. Boys have been hiding Playboys from their mothers for years; girls discover fanfiction online, or pass around Cosmo magazines at school during lunch.

The funny thing isn't that FotF is advising a campaign that won't work with today's media-saavy teen, it's that they're approaching the subject from the same point of view as they approach movies like The Golden Compass: they give a nod to the idea of discussing themes in the media from a Christian viewpoint, but ultimately advocate strongly for a strategy of total avoidance as the only "biblical" approach. Every time I see one of these articles (and they are plentiful in the Christian press), I want to shout "Prostitutes!". Jesus hung out with prostitutes! He slept in brothels, and chatted all day long with heathens. He would have been in the corner with the goths and the yearbook freaks in high school. He'd have written letters to the editors of Playboy, making points about female exploitation.

"In and not of" is the soundbyte that gets bandied about a lot in relation to Christianity and the arts and entertainment world. Christians are supposedly to be "in the world but not of it". This is scriptural, a direct quote, in fact, but I don't think it means what a lot of Christians take it to mean. Jesus didn't mean "shun all R-rated entertainment and don't listen to pop bands", he meant "do those things, then think about God while doing them". Being in and not of the world means being completely in the world, doing what the world does, seeing what it sees, and then engaging your brain to think about how the world is commenting on (or how we could comment on) religion in relation to the secular. Jesus is saying be in dialogue with God, listen to what God is saying about the actual things of the world. Not the hypothetical, "I haven't seen it, but I'm sure its evil because it's rated R" things of the world, but the things of the world that we've experienced and understand.

Why is it important not to avoid supposedly "secular" entertainment? (Secular is in scare quotes because I don't think there's a distinction between sacred and secular entertainment, except for perhaps how "secular" entertainment has better production values.) Because it's impossible to minister to a world that knows you don't understand it. Try talking about a movie you've never seen with people who've actually viewed it multiple times. You may be able to make vague generalizations, but they will understand plot details, be able to analyze tone and intention in ways that will completely escape you as a non-viewer. If you keep the conversation up for long, they will realize that you haven't seen the film, and will discount your opinions about it, because you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Similarly, trying to minister to people who live in the real world while trying to remain aloof and in the Christian subculture is like asking people who've seen a film to accept your vehement opinions when it's clear that you don't know what you're talking about. That's why Jesus wasn't hanging out with the temple priests (even though he could debate with them on their own level): because if he'd only hung out with the elite temple subculture, he'd have missed the opportunity to realistically minister to the normal people who needed it. Instead, he'd gone fishing with them, he'd eaten in their brothels, he'd held his debates by their wells. They knew that he understood their lives and their experiences as well as they did. So when he said "look, there's a better way out there", it sounded genuine.

Likewise, when a newly-fanatical parent says to a modern teen "This media/art/video game is unChristian! Let's write a family constitution and get rid of it!", the teen is likely to roll their eyes and just hide the porn a little better. They know that the parent, cocooned in their Christian subculture, has no idea what the world the teen is living in is like. It's a common enough complaint for teens anyway ("You don't understand me!"), and in cases like these it's justified. The parent is making no attempt to have the same experiences as the teen and believe in God anyway, they're avoiding it all in hopes that the big scary world will go away. Teens know it's a recipe for being uncool, but the fact is, it's also a recipe for immature Christianity. The only real way to reach teens, or non-Christians, is to be in the world in every sense. That way, when we as Christians talk to non-Christians, we can genuinely say "We get it. We've been there, we've seen the film, rode the ride, got the T-shirt. And you know what? God still matters."