CHMN 608: Youth in Contemporary Culture

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CHMN 608: Youth in Contemporary CultureCHMN 608: Youth in Contemporary Culture

Understanding the Dynamics Of Faith and Culture

Studying Religion & Popular CultureStudying Religion & Popular Culture

A. Four Approaches (Lynch)

1. Religion in Relationship to Popular Culture

a) How popular culture shapes or is appropriated by religious groups.

b) How religion is represented in popular culture.

c) How religious groups interact with popular culture.

2. How popular culture serves religious functions in culture.

a. Social function – religion binds people into communities of shared beliefs and values

a. Existential/Hermeneutical Function – religion provides identity, meaning, and purpose

c. Transcendent Function – religion provides a medium by which we experience the “other” or “beyond”

3. A Missiological Response to Popular Culture

a. Pop culture as potentially harmful and in need of critique

b. Pop culture can sometimes mediate fundamental religious truths.

c. Pop culture as a potential source of new understandings of the faith

“Sensus infidelum” (the wisdom of the unfaithful): “People (or formsof popular culture) who profess to know little or

nothing about the religious may indeed form, inform, or transform religious meaning for people of faith.”

4. Using texts and practices of popular culture as material for theological reflectiona. Pop culture in relation to biblical

textsb. Pop culture in relation to

theological questions or themes

www.hollywoodjesus.com

POP CULTUREPOP CULTURE

1. Quantitative View: Popular culture is culture that is well liked by many people.

• Any definition of popular culture must include a quantitative measure.

• But how far must we count before something is considered popular?

• What if a piece of high culture becomes popular? Does that make it popular culture?

Classical or Popular?

2. Qualitative View: Popular culture is what’s left after we’ve defined high culture.

• Makes value judgments.

• Defines popular culture as the substandard culture of the masses. Creates an elitist class marked by high culture.

• Believes popular culture leads to social and cultural decline.

• Sees education as the means to civilizing the common class.

3. Mass Culture View:Popular culture is what

is mass-produced for mass-consumption.

• Views popular culture as formulaic and manipulative – an impoverished culture imposed on a group of non-discriminating, passive consumers.

• Sometimes speaks of popular culture as a form of public fantasy, drug or escape.

• Uses the term “culture industry” to describe the means (radio, television, magazines, etc.) by which the products of popular culture are mass-produced and distributed.

• Adherents to this view are divided on whether mass culture leads to anarchy (political/social disorder), or to conformity and the maintenance of a contented (if not be-numbed) populace.

4. Folk Culture View: Popular culture is culture by ‘the people’ for ‘the people.’

• Problem: Who is to be included in the category of “the people?”

• Fact: The raw materials of popular culture in a capitalist society are provided by big business not ‘the people.’

5. Political View: Popular culture is culture in a state of conflict and compromise.

• Popular culture is a tug-of-war between the ‘resistance’ of subordinate groups and the ‘incorporating’ forces of the dominant group.

• The dominant class controls culture by continually striking a compromise with the subordinate classes (a process known as hegemony).

• Popular culture, then, is neither entirely from ‘above’ (commercially imposed) or ‘below’ (authentic culture) but a negotiated mix of intentions and counter-intentions from both the subordinate and dominant groups.

• Youth cultures move from originality and opposition to commercial incorporation as the culture industries mainstream and market their resistance for consumption and profit.

6. Postmodern View: Popular culture is a self-constructed culture.

• High/Popular Culture.

• It celebrates all types of cultural expression and the blending of genres.

It blurs the distinctions between:

• Production/Consumption

• Youth produce their own culture and meanings by actively consuming and splicing together cultural products (‘bricolage’).

• Culture/Commerce

• Artistic values merge with economic ones. The question of “Is it true and lasting?” must now answer to “Is it marketable?”

• Real/Imaginary

• Actual events and media coverage, movies and reality, live performance and recorded sound dissolve into each other (known as ‘hyperrealism’).

• New/Old.

• The present is collapsed into the past by imitating and recycling the old (a culture of quotations and ‘intertextuality’).

Postmodernism blurs the distinctions between:

ForrestGumpForrestGump

Three Approaches to Popular Culture in the Classroom:

Defensive strategy – introduces popular culture in order to condemn it as second-rate (or evil/dangerous/sinful) culture.

Opportunist strategy – embraces the popular tastes of students in the hope of leading them to better things.

Discrimination Strategy – teaches students to discriminate within and not simply against popular culture – to sift ‘good’ popular culture from ‘bad.’ Teaches students to evaluate popular culture on its own terms, within a Christian context.

Culture as MapCulture as Map

• Directs• Prescribes• Shapes

Culture as MirrorCulture as Mirror

• Reflects• Describes• Imitates

Culture as ConversationCulture as Conversation

• Symbolic• Dialogue• Conflict and Compromise

• Provides• Select• Construct

Culture as ToolboxCulture as Toolbox

Commercial CultureCommercial Culture

1.We are consumers by choice.

2.We crave not only objects, but their meanings.

“In a world of surplus and plenty, we tend to seek meaning in the objects at hand. When times are tough and objects scarce, we turn to the world beyond for meaning.”

3. Objects are infused with meaning through

magical thinking.

of commercial culture

4. We organize our things and their meanings into

lifestyles.

“Lifestyles are secular religions, coherent patterns of valued things.”

5. The value of things is affected by the process of commercialization.

Commodifying

Marketing

Stripping an object of all other values except its value for sale

Inserting the object into a network of exchanges (monetary or otherwise)

6. Youth culture is the primary focus of commercialism.

7. Television is the primary force in the

material world.

“I’m not interested in culture. I’m not

interested in pro-social values. I have only one interest. That’s whether

people watch the program. That’s my

definition of good, that’s my definition of bad.”

Arnold Becker, CBS VP for Research

8. Consumption has replaced conversion as a way of making sense

of the world.

“In becoming the central register of selfhood, commercial culture is now laying out what was the historic role of organized religion.” (Things tell us who we are not God).

CHMN 608: Youth in Contemporary Culture

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