The Influence of Popular Culture

Next year marks the 20th anniversary of Ken Myers book, All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians & Popular Culture. This book contains scads of insights that remain quite relevant today.

From the Introduction:

It might seem like an extreme assertion at first, but I believe that 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. Being thrown to the lions or living in the shadow of gruesome death are fairly straightforward if unattractive threats. Enemies that come loudly and visibly are usually much easier to fight than those that are undetectable. Physical affliction (even to the point of death) for the sake of Christ is a heavy cross, but at least it can be readily recognized at the time as a trial of faith. But the erosion of character, the spoiling of innocent pleasures, and the cheapening of life itself that often accompany modern popular culture can occur so subtly that we believe nothing has happened.

Christian concern about popular culture should be as much about the sensibilities it encourages as about its content. This book focuses on those sensibilities. Many other studies look at the content of rock ‘n’ roll lyrics, of television programs, of movies, and of popular fiction…In this study, I have tried to make the case that popular culture’s greatest influence is in the way it shapes how we think and feel (more than what we think and feel) and how we think and feel about thinking and feeling.