snap, crackle, pop culture

a fast-forward interview with Ken Myers

Interview & highlighting by J. Eugene Harris
Photos by Nate Hilman

“In a world that seems to splinter into ever-smaller shards of special interest,” writes journalist Kristi Turnquist, “popular culture is the glue that binds us.”  From the presidential candidate who quotes a line from a movie in a speech to the lively discussion at a church get-together about a current television commercial, pop culture truly seems to be the common language we all speak fluently.

Few of us take time to consider the influence it has on our lives.  “Most of us take out pop culture pastimes so much for granted we don’t stop to think about what they might mean,” says Turnquist.  “Thinking is what we do for a living; pop culture is where we turn for fun.”

But Ken Myers believes it’s time Christians take a hard look and do some serious thinking about pop culture.  A Christian journalist who focuses on cultural issues, Ken is the producer of an audio magazine called The Mars Hill Tapes.  He’s also a speaker and the author of All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes, a book which gives a balanced and indepth look at the assumptions and effects of pop culture on Christians.

One secular author writes, “Pop culture is the closest thing America has to a national faith.”  If this assessment is true, understanding the creeds and doctrines of this “faith” is vitally important for the Christians immersed in it daily.

In this exclusive interview with New Attitude, Ken talks about the need for Christian teens to recognize and combat the dangerous sensibilities of pop culture.

New Attitude: Before I read your book, I was unaware of how much I was influenced by pop culture because I really didn't know what it was. How would you define it? And what's so dangerous about it, if it's just for fun and entertainment?

Ken Myers: An important characteristic is that popular culture is designed for mass distribution and usually with a commercial purpose in mind—not to express values but to entice purchasers.

One of the things I think is most destructive about popular culture is the fact that it segregates generations. Popular culture separates children from parents so that their cultural experience is aligned more with people their own age than with people that are from their family or from their community.

Popular culture, as we now know it, is communicated by mass media—television, radio, and recordings. And the artifacts of popular culture are created for a specific age group. Historically, music, dance, art and all sorts of cultural forms existed to serve the community, to express the values of that community. Now popular culture's artifacts are expressed first of all to sell products, and to concoct alleged values that apply to the generation that they're trying to sell the products to.

NA: What other changes has pop culture brought to our lives?

Ken: I read an essay recently by an older man who grew up in the country. He wrote that when he was young (this was before radio and television), his whole family would walk over to their friend's house after dinner and sit on the porch and tell stories and sing songs until it got dark. Now that sounds pretty incredibly boring to most of us, but what we need to realize is, for most human beings, through most of recorded history, that is how they spent their time. They entertained themselves. They entertained one another rather than being passive observers or listeners. I think that's another thing that characterizes popular culture. It's meant for consumers of culture rather than participants. We watch TV or listen to CDs; we listen to the radio rather than singing and writing songs for one another.

NA: How is going back to evenings on the porch going to make us better Christians? Are boring activities more spiritual?

Ken: The question is, is it always better to be more exciting and more frenetic and more active? We regard these activities as boring principally because we live such hyped up lives. See, if in fact that task of a Christian life is to shape ourselves so we have a higher capacity to love God and to love our neighbor, then part of what we ought to be asking is what kind of cultural life will be most suited to encouraging in us the kinds of virtues that help us to love God and love our neighbor. Make your cultural decisions from those premises.

NA: In your book you focus on the sensibility that pop culture encourages. You state that Christians need to focus on more than just what it makes us think, but more importantly how it makes us think. What is pop culture's sensibility? What's dangerous about it?

Ken: The thing that most characterizes the sensibility of popular culture is the promise of immediate gratification. Popular culture is intended to be immediately accessible; that is, it doesn't take time to appreciate it.  The music for television commercials or most music that's on popular music stations doesn't require any kind of study.  It doesn't require acquiring knowledge like, say, classical music or jazz would.  I'll use jazz as a counterpoint. It really takes some time to get to understand jazz and to appreciate it, to have an understanding of how it works and who the classics are. And it's an acquired taste, whereas most popular music isn't an acquired taste. It's an immediate taste and one of the things that concerns me about popular culture is that generally, especially the medium of television, it encourages us toward the kind of implicit assumption, not explicit affirmation, but the implicit assumption that the good things in life are those things which are immediately available and immediately apprehendable. Now there are a lot of other things that do that: ATM machines, Federal Express, microwave ovens. There are a lot of other things in our lives that tell us that the immediately accessible is better.

NA: Which is the exact opposite of what Christ calls us to in the Christian pilgrimage.

Ken: Exactly the opposite of things which I think are necessary in terms of spiritual growth.  I'm more and more persuaded that the Bible puts before us not the ideal of just getting saved. The Bible puts before us the idea of maturity, of perfection. James talks about being mature and complete, lacking in nothing. Paul was consistently talking about being mature Christians and the idea of cultivating our lives and how it takes time.

It seems to me that the kind of sensibility and assumptions that ought to characterize the Christian character are the assumptions that it takes a lifetime of care and deliberateness and attentiveness to become the sorts of men and women that God wants us to be. But that doesn't happen instantly; it doesn't happen just because we get hyped up.

There's also the danger of assuming that mere enthusiasm and excitement are the principal means of growth rather than that kind of quiet, painful learning.

A lot of people are critical of popular culture because it tends toward lust or tends toward sinfulness in some way. But I believe that it's not so much the kinds of specific preoccupations that it leads us to; it's kind of the whole overarching spirit of our lives.

NA: Do you think Christians demonize certain types of music or "all movies" because it's easier than having to constantly evaluate this "overarching spirit"?

Ken: I think it's easier to be legalistic than to be wise. I think that we're called to be wise. And it's really hard; it takes time to be wise. It's much easier just to say "do this and don't do that".  But more often it's a question of what's best and what's not best. That's why I quote Paul in I Corinthians 10 where he says, "Everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial." That's the way we ought to approach all of our lives, not say "Is this sinful or not?" and "If it's not sinful, I can do it." I'm not going to say it's sinful to go to the arcade and drop in $3 in quarters to play video games, and it may not be sinful, but is it prudent? Is it wise? Is this a beneficial thing in my life? The truth is, a lot of us don't want to be bothered with that question.

NA: So how do you discern what is and what isn't beneficial?

Ken: I think one key is to figure out, how is this affecting the way I treat people? When I first noticed this, I was a disc jockey at one of the early contemporary Christian music stations and was doing a four-hour shift every day; and I realized I got so hyped up while I was on the air that I was insufferable for about two or three hours thereafter. And I thought, "This is bad for me spiritually; this is not a good way to live a life."

I remember reading somewhere somebody said, "In all of your activities, ask 'How far does this take me from prayer?'"

And extending that, how far does this task take me from the activity of loving my neighbor and treating people sensitively?

Another warning sign is if your immersion in popular culture is making you sarcastic or ironic or cynical, and a lot of modern culture is incredibly cynical. There's an essay that talks about the kind of glibness that much of television encourages, the notion that conversations are made up of snappy, sassy one-liners. If you find that your conversation is characterized more by the smart-aleck response— Bart Simpson speech—than by speech that is edifying, then I'd say, is it coming because you're immersed in…

NA: Sitcom dialogue...

Ken: Right. Where nobody is ever thoughtful or at a loss for words. And yet, it is when we are at a loss for words that we grow. It's when we're quiet and thoughtful and not responding with a quick retort, that we actually see inner growth happen. There are rarely any moments of inner growth on American sitcoms.

I listen to a wide variety of music, and I ask myself as I'm listening, now what is this doing to me? Is this making me so frenetic that I'm going to be insensitive? And people are going to differ in that. There's music I like to listen to that I know isn't good for me. I think that's another thing that's hard for most people, especially young people to say, "I like this, but I know I shouldn't like it."

NA: That’s exactly how I feel!

Ken: Most people say, "Well, if I like it, then it's good." I know that's not true with foods. There are a lot of foods I like that I know I shouldn't like, or I know I shouldn't have as much of. And so it is with music, films, games or whatever it is. We have to ask, "Should I like this as much as I do?" Or should I be striving to do other things to shape my character so that I don't like it too much?

NA: You talk about how our cultural experience should help us transcend our earthly preoccupations. What does that mean for a teenager, the guy in high school, what does it look like for him to transcend his "earthly preoccupation"?

Ken: One of the great liabilities of living in the late 20th century for young people is that they have no sense of history. They have no sense of where they came from; they have no sense of where their desires have come from other than their own hormones. They have no sense of where their view of reality, where their concerns, where their assumptions about reality have come from. They just kind of showed up. That's always hard for younger people, but I think that it's especially hard now because we live so much in the present, we don't have much understanding of the past.

One of the things I can remember as a high school student, when I first became attracted to classical music, was the fact that it lifted me beyond the horror of being an adolescent. It liberated me from the pettiness of high school life which often was insincere and vain. When I realized that there was something more to life than the trials of adolescence, that was incredibly liberating.

NA: How was that communicated through classical music?

Ken: There's a timelessness about it, first of all. When you're an adolescent, you're focused on the next really big embarrassing moment in your life or the next big challenge: "Can I pass the driver's test?" for example.

I remember in 10th grade learning a motette by Bach and being liberated from the here and now, realizing that this was music that was 350 years old and yet it spoke to me, it had power in my life, and it had power in generations of people's lives. It had power when we performed it, in the lives of people two generations older than I was.

I think that's why, proverbially, when young people discover poetry for the first time, they discover that there's an expression of their deepest convictions and deepest longings that other people have already come across.

NA: In your book you quote Marshall McCluen's famous line, "The medium is the message." How does that apply to what Christians are doing right now? If pop culture is encouraging restlessness and the focus on self, is our version of it, whether it's Christian MTV or Christian celebrity magazines, just as wrong?

Ken:  I think it's unwise; I think it's foolish not to realize the subtext, and the sensibility that it's encouraging. The Jesus content may be there, but the question is, is this encouraging restlessness, or is it encouraging rest in God? Is it a way of making people more thoughtful or reflective, more contemplative?  Or is it just encouraging them to live life on the surface?

NA: So what should we be doing? Is it our goal to invade culture?

Ken: I'd say that we should be concerned about culture, first of all because we want to resist worldliness, to resist the way the culture encourages us to give in to the world. Secondly, I think we want to understand the culture so that we can communicate within that culture, which is important, and I think that's the thing most contemporary people seem to be emphasizing.

But we also need to realize that when we speak into that culture, every culture is under the judgment of the gospel; so every culture has to be understood and judged by the gospel, not merely understood for the sake of doing better marketing.

In terms of transformation—the biggest reason I think we need to try to change and affect the culture is because we're called to love our neighbors. And if our neighbors are hurting in some ways because of the culture being toxic, then it's our duty to try and change the culture in order for our neighbors not to be hurt that way. So if entertainment has become so demeaning and so disrespectful of human dignity, then I would say it is our duty insofar as we are able to do something to change it, not so that Christians can run things, but so that we can love our neighbors.

NA: Do you see that I happening? When it comes to Christians jumping into culture, most people think of Amy Grant and others who are getting a mainstream attraction.

Ken: That's scratching the surface of what ought to be done. I'm not saying that's bad; I'm saying it's a real limited view if we think that's all we ought to be doing.  It's a little bit like saying, "Here's a Christian quarterback who won the Super Bowl." There's a certain amount of pride involved in that. But then you have to ask, what is the ethos of professional sports?  Is it a school of virtue or something else?  There is a certain measure of appropriateness in extolling excellence and being glad that Christians are doing excellent work, but I think we have to ask, are we embracing the world' standards?

To be someone who has a #1 record or box office film, okay, that's a measure of achievement by Billboard magazine or society's standards. But what is the nature of that achievement? Would one Mother Theresa be worth 10 Oscars? And why is it that we're more excited about the Christian who wins an Oscar than about a Christian who lives a sacrificial life for the poor?

NA: What would be some practical steps for a teenager to break out of the pop culture mentality?

Ken: I'd say broaden your horizons. Realize how many opportunities there are for cultural experiences that you're not even aware of. Don't limit yourself to things of social benefit. People listen to the same radio stations that their friends do because it becomes a mechanism of social lubrication. So then you have to ask, is there any other reason to listen to this music other than that my friends all listen to it? Or is there something to it beyond that?  I don't want to be anti-social, but could there be some other experience, and then I might find some new friends in the process that might be richer in my experience. So are there books to read, films to see, are there other ways of being entertained that might do something more than just entertain?

Also, become more conscious of how mass media runs—there are a lot of good books on understanding how TV news works or how a video is edited. I've tried to teach my children from early on how to watch television intelligently so that they're alert to what's happening, what's being shown, what's not being shown. How I am being manipulated by this, what is somebody trying to do to me?  How are they doing it?  The more aware you are, the less likely that you'll just be sucked into it.

Ken's book All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes is published by Crossway and is available at your local Christian bookstore. Mars Hill Tapes, described as "a bimonthly audio magazine of contemporary culture and Christian conviction," is $36 for a one-year subscription. Write Mars Hill Tapes, P.O. Box 1527, Charlottesville, VA 22902.