Hanna Rosin rips Christian pop culture a new one
http://www.slate.com/id/2190482/
A Christian friend who’d grown up totally sheltered once wrote to me that the first time he heard a Top 40 station he was horrified, and not because of the racy lyrics: “Suddenly, my lifelong suspicions became crystal clear,” he wrote. “Christian subculture was nothing but a commercialized rip-off of the mainstream, done with wretched quality and an apocryphal insistence on the sanitization of reality.”
well…isn’t she right? that said, she also lumps all christians into one big basket. a more nuanced look would have been more useful. at the very least, it would have helped explain things like christians watching john stewart.
my reaction reading this was: it has taken non-Christians this long to discover Christian subculture?
Wait. So are you telling me that Christians didn’t invent this …
http://www.dancepraise.com/ecard/v2.php
I’ve been saying that praise music in the Rock Band store would do amazingly well. Every church has a youth praise band & a youth group full of kids who want to play like they were in the praise band. Guitar? Drums? Bass? Vocals? It’s perfect.
Late to the game, due to vacay…
The criticism that Christian subculture is a lame rip-off of mainstream culture is true in some cases, as made painfully/hilariously clear by Dance Praise. (Thanks for that link, btw!) But it’s not always the case, and I would argue that the roots of Christian music in particular are more nuanced. After all, what new music isn’t influenced by the music that preceded it?
If four Christian guys love music and start a band, their music may sound like a lot of other mainstream music. That’s true of pretty much every new band, Christian or not. By Rosin’s definition, what music is NOT a commercialized rip-off in some way?
In other cases, sometimes Christian culture mimics mainstream culture because it’s trying to offer a more edifying alternative. Because as good as mainstream music may sound, maybe it isn’t a great idea for kids to only listen to music about sex and misogyny. (e.g. http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0808/p01s04-ussc.html)
Finally, is a few rare instances, Christian culture may just be taking back what mainstream culture borrowed first!
http://speed8.org/message/to-church/