Customer Reviews

All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture (Turning Point Christian Worldview Series)

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
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Ken Myers explores what popular culture really promotes. This is not a book for those who are seeking reasons to put down secular rock n' roll and replace it with Christian rock n' roll. The discussion focuses mainly upon the medium of information, not just the content. The book is documented thoroughly and he strongly supports each of his points. He examines what values/aesthetics popular culture rallies around, and what values/aesthetics Christian should support. Is there something about TV, rock music, MTV, etc that is against Christian values? Do they support instant gratification and lower disciplie? Ken Myers offers something everyone needs to see.

This is one terrific book. Ken Myers delves deeply into popular culture. He does a great job of grounding his research and findings in a theological framework. He cites everyone from C.S. Lewis to Bob Dylan to G.K. Chesterton to Bo Diddley.

This book is so needed today. So much of pop evangelicalism and even the mainline churches have unwisely and unthinkingly schmaltzed the Church's glorious message into a dumbed-down, styrofoam, homogenized pop culture framework and are submerging the Church's heritage into it. (See Marva Dawn's book "Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down"). I refuse to listen to my local Christian radio station because they've pretty much pancaked their format to just watered-down pop Christian music, pretty much devoid of hymnody or anything with any history to it. What if the World War II generation had demanded that the Church's glorious history and hymnody be replaced by Lawrence Welk-style tunes? That's exactly what's happening today.

Read Myers' book to find out the values of popular culture and how they compare to high and folk cultures. This book will provide you with much great background, and, most importantly, helps you to think Christianly. It's creative, intelligent and a very enjoyable read.

For several years I have enjoyed Ken Meyers Mars Hill Audio Journal periodically as he brings together people from all fields and disciplines to teach people the importance of thinking religiously from an interdisciplinary place of depth and meaning.

This book is a serious and stern critique of popular culture and it's main medium: television. Although some reviewers of this book have considered it a little highbrow, if not extreme, to be useful, I would wholeheartedly disagree. If you feel that way by the end of chapter two simply read it like you would Kierkegaard- "don't be put off by the hyperbole or generalizations, he's making an important point so don't miss it."

Meyers main thrust in the book is that post 60's there is a firmly established thing called popular culture mediated to us in images and that this cultural medium is making us dumber. He argues popular culture, in distinction to folk culture and high culture, does not do what the great artists of the past did, and that this is often true because it is the product of jaded marketers instead of real artists. The artists of high and folk culture tended to draw us into human universals. They stretched us, and experiencing their art was a human exercise of the mind and affections. We had to work at it to understand and we experienced either a clarification, a deepening appreciation, or a revelation of something we somehow didn't know but knew we should have known. The artist helped us become more human by drawing us into a more developed experience with a human universal.

Contrary to this, popular art does not do this with nearly the same frequency or depth. It is immediate, easy (not an exercise of growth), it markets to us what we already know, and deals mostly with trivialities- or treats serious subjects trivially, and communicats a form of knowledge that is immediate rather than reflective, physical rather than mental, and emotional rather than volitional. Meyers argues this is true in the degeneration of high cultural art forms, but even more so in the transition form what Neil Postman called "print-based epistemology" and "television-based epistemology", or what Jacques Ellul has called "the humiliation of the word". Because television holds to the main medium of images, it does not communicate linearly or logically. As Meyers says, "images cannot make an argument", they are at the mercy of the response of the viewer, and whatever the viewer transfers onto the images.

Throughout the volume Meyers brings us to the right discussions. How the medium effects the message, the nature of post-industrialism boredom, the contrast of Montaigne's and Pascal's theories of leisure and diversion and their effects on culture, the concrete differences between high, folk and popular culture, the effects of the 60's on the transition to image based cultural discourse, the liberating and isolating effects of "Liberalism", tension of Romanticism celebration of the primitive and Rationalism's triumphalist machine of secular scientific progress effected the development of rock music, and on and on and on.

Negatively, There are many places I wish Meyers had argued as if we were not agreeing with him as he asserts things. Truly, his authoritative sources are very good ones who say what they say compellingly, but there were a bunch of places I wanted more explanation of why something is the case. I wanted more reasons and more development.

Concerning recommendation, this book is no doubt written with an evangelical Christian readership in mind. Yet, Meyers is no homeowner in the Evangelical intellectual ghetto. This book could be read much more widely with profit, and I would recommend it to a non-Christian reader without hesitation, not because it is evangelistic; but because Meyers is a Christian who can think and clearly has. And I think one of the greatest weaknesses of the libertarian and liberal intellectual projects today is a misunderstanding of the teleology of culture and the inability of the free market or the secular liberal to make a culture good. Meyers offers a meditation that is inclusive and should not be alienating to the non-Christian reader, though it is distinctively Christian. Most can take away something important from this book.

In short I recommend this book highly because Ken Meyers has actually though more than ten minutes about orthodox Christianity and how scriptural religion affects our understanding of culture. So many American Christians are in his words "of the world but not in the world" (the tongue in cheek opposite of the biblical injunction to be "in the world but not of the world"). Meyers simultaneously calls Christians out of the evangelical ghetto where we copy everything we liked in the "secular world" and make it, to use Derek Webb's category, "explicit" (meaning we dumped explicitly Christian lyrics into rock riffs we like, etc) and yet he also does not call us to drink deeply from whatever popular culture offers us (For example one might see that a Christian might want to avoid most of the summer block busters that feature mostly flesh and fighting, but yet see universal human art in films like Fight Club or Unbreakable or The Village).

In short, it may be true that we (contemporary Americans) are being controlled by those who seek to inflict pleasure on us, and that it is what we love that will ruin us. (in case that sounds like fundamentalist ramblings, that is almost a direct quote from Aldous Huxley as quoted by Neil Postman)

This is a refreshing book, with a great bibliography and a refreshing reach outside the common Evangelical sources.

From telling us what culture is and the various levels of it to what it means to be "in the world but not of it," Myers delivers the best to date analysis of culture and Christianity. Of the numerous insights he gives, one of the favorites is: schools do not just give knowledge, they do cultural assimilation. And we wonder why our schools are letting us down! This is a must read for Christians and those into popular culture!

Still a classic after all these years, Blue Suede Shoes provides lots of food for thought for Christians but also for those outside the faith who have concerns regarding the shallow thinking that many popular cultural trends encourage. "The aesthetic of immediate and constant entertainment does not prepare the human consciousness well for recognition of a holy, transcendent, omnipotent and eternal God, or to responding to His demands of repentance and obedience." (page 132)

As valuable as this text is, however, the huge cultural changes that have continued since the book was written in 1989, especially the impact of the Internet, iPods, etc., call out for a much-needed update. In addition, the book's arguments are sometimes weakened by Myers' tendency to equate "culture" (versus "pop culture" which he generally pans) with only "classical," European and American music, painting and sculpture. Nonetheless, this remains essential reading for anyone interested in popular culture and its influence on thought and behavior in today's society.

With the need for updating and the less than expected acceptance of culture from other backgrounds, this very good text only earns 3 stars.

I read this book when it first was published and it has helped me to frame my thinking ever since. I have yet to find the author wrong in his conclusions. Rather, as time goes by, he proves to be more and more on target. It is too bad more people are not aware of this work.

Ken Myers is required reading for a person in ministry in the 21st Century. His work cites many important and relevant cultural shifts that have taken place in the landscape of the church and culture with reference to our art, music, film, literature, and popular attitude.

My favorite part of the book is chapter 4 "Popular Culture and the Restless Ones" wherein he expounds on the way in which we live in a "culture of diversion" which leaves us chasing one fresh new enterprise after the next. Sensuous and bored, we have found ways as a society to entertain and amuse ourselves in an society that has removed the need for a God.

In all, the work is scholarly yet easily adapted to the broader readership in the way in which it lays out what has failed in a secular-modernist worldview and what must be understood and practiced by the church if she is going to remain a light to truth in such a dark and unsettled culture.

Kenneth A. Myers, in All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians & Popular Culture (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, c. 1989), considers related phenomena from a Christian perspective. In his judgment, "the challenge of living with popular culture may well be as serious for modern Christians as persecution and plagues were for the saints of earlier centuries" (p. xii).
Above all else, popular culture seeks to answer one question: "the most edifying way to spend one's time" (p. 53). It insists, as did Michael de Montaigne, that leisurely diversions best suit us. What the skeptic Montaigne celebrated as the best means of self-fulfillment, however, appeared to Blaise Pascal the recipe for self-destruction. In fact, Pascal asserted that "all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber." It's almost as if "They have a secret instinct which impels them to seek amusement and occupation abroad, and which arises from the sense of their constant unhappiness" (p. 55).
Modernity has, quite clearly, fashioned a "culture of diversions." Whatever's new, whatever can be had now, allures us. So we demand amusements, entertainments, athletic contests, concerts--anything to divert us from mundane realities! Strangely enough, "killing time," the very substance of life, seems to be a positive preoccupation of our culture!
Myers analyzes, in perceptive chapters, popular culture's "idiom," rock music, and its "medium," television. While he makes no blanket condemnations of either, he questions their worth. Some rock music, he thinks, draws listeners into an almost gnostic spirituality--offering "a superior form of knowledge," which is "immediate rather than reflective, physical rather than mental, and emotional rather than volitional" (p. 137). Much like those 19th century Romantics who relished sensation, primitivism, emotionalism, and sexual license, rock music easily sucks its addicts into a swirl of artificially-induced ecstasies in a self-created universe.
Television, popular culture's "medium," is "the entertainment appliance" comfortably enthrone at the hearth of the American home. In fact, it's "not simply the dominant medium of popular culture, it is the single most significant shared reality in our entire society" (p. 160). Since TV mainly transmits images rather than words, it propagates a society stripped of rational norms, making "it increasingly difficult to sustain any broad commitment to any truth, since truth is an abstraction requiring language" (164).
Those of us who struggle, teaching and preaching, to keep young people's attention, must realize that today's youths have had little practice attending to anything for more than a few moments. In fact, according to Tony Schwartz, whose Media: The Second God Myers cites, reading requires a "concentration" which is "unimportant in electronic learning." What films and TV require is an "openness" to the diffuse, oft-subliminal "patterns of information conveyed by electronic stimuli."
Having focused on many of popular culture's shortcomings, Myers concludes his study with a call not for resignation but for thoughtful response. In his opinion, "You can enjoy popular culture without compromising Biblical principles as long as you are not dominated by the sensibility of popular culture, as long as you are not captivated by its idols" (p. 180). Like the broader technological society of which it's a part, the electronic media will not disappear. They will continue to dictatorially shape our culture. Christians may not effectively alter its agendas, but we must somehow forge a counter-cultural response to it, creating islands of scriptural sanity where more lasting realities such as health, truth, beauty, and goodness endure.

All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes is one of the most thought provoking books I have read in a long time. If you've ever stepped back from modern evangelical culture and stared at it with a confused expression, a strange feeling gnawing at the pit of your stomach, while scratching your head, this just might be the book for you.

Kenneth Myers has some serious concerns with popular culture and what it is doing to our society. More specifically, he has problems with evangelical pop culture and what it is doing to the hearts, minds and spirits of evangelical Christians. Myers issue is not so much with the content of pop culture, but with the form itself. He insists that even the "Christianized" forms of pop culture emphasize the immediate and shallow over the transcendent and deep. It promotes numb mindlessness over deep reflection.

This book is a call for Christians and the Church to stop imitating pop culture with our own versions of celebrity, television, music and magazines (just visit any Christian bookstore to get a sense of the magnitude of Christian pop culture knock off), but to provide a true alternative, as a living example of alternative methods and content.

Myers distinguishes between Folk culture, High culture and Pop culture. He traces the history of Pop culture, a relatively new phenomenon. Basically it is a result of the lowest common denominator. It is a leveling out and smoothing over of high and folk culture to appeal to a mass audience in a global and industrial society. It is designed and marketed not to encourage reflection, but to maintain the status quo.

High culture is designed to elevate the thoughts and emotions and to encourage reflection on the transcendent. It takes an engaged mind and work to understand and appreciate. It doesn't leave a person the same. Folk culture is a product of a place and a community, the product of a worldview. It is a shared tradition and contains shared values. Folk culture holds one accountable to shared community values while pop culture is all about the individual. I think anyone who has listened to much modern worship music will recognize this effect working it's way into Christian culture.

Myers points to Philippians 4:8, "Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable - if anything is excellent or praiseworthy - think about such things." For Myers these are definitely exhibited easier and better in folk and high culture and rarely if ever in pop culture.

One of the key issues that Meyer is seeking to address is the wholesale embrace of the methodology of pop culture by the church under the banner of contextualization. He points out that the church has long been the bastion of High culture, elevating minds and hearts and focusing people's attention to the transcendent, and folk culture, instilling communal values and cultural heritage. Now, however, the church is often simply imitating the worst of pop culture and mixing in a little Jesus. A major result of this is that the church has adopted the marketing stance of pop culture, luring people with cool music and advertising rather than the Gospel. Myers believes that this is a direct result of evangelical Christianity's wholesale embrace of popular culture's methodology.

I don't always agree with Myers. I'm not sure that rock music, movies, etc. cannot become high or at least folk culture. I'm thinking here of some great and transcendent films or music with excellent lyrics. Basically I'm saying things aren't always as cut and dried as Myers makes them and he obviously never cared much for rock or television or film to begin with.

I do agree with most of what he says because his point is basically this: Christians need to stop selling out to trite and cheap imitations of a trite and cheap world. We need to think about the means as well as the end. We need to think about what our methodology conveys. Instead of asking what people want and giving it to them (pop culture) we need to ask what they need and help them come to understand their need for it and we need to remind them of their great cultural heritage (high and folk culture).

While you may not agree with everything here, I would strongly recommend this book.