CHMN 608: Youth in Contemporary Culture Understanding the Dynamics Of Faith and Culture Understanding the Dynamics Of Faith and Culture

Studying 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.

Studying Religion & Popular Culture A. Four Approaches (Lynch) 1.Religion in Relationship to Popular Culture b) How religion is represented in popular culture.

Studying Religion & Popular Culture A. Four Approaches (Lynch) 1.Religion in Relationship to Popular Culture c) How religious groups interact with popular culture.

Studying Religion & Popular Culture A. Four Approaches (Lynch) 2.How popular culture serves religious functions in culture.

Studying Religion & Popular Culture A. Four Approaches (Lynch) 2.How popular culture serves religious functions in culture. a.Social function – religion binds people into communities of shared beliefs and values

Studying Religion & Popular Culture A. Four Approaches (Lynch) 2.How popular culture serves religious functions in culture. a.Existential/Hermeneutical Function – religion provides identity, meaning, and purpose

Studying Religion & Popular Culture A. Four Approaches (Lynch) 2.How popular culture serves religious functions in culture. c.Transcendent Function – religion provides a medium by which we experience the “other” or “beyond”

Studying Religion & Popular Culture A. Four Approaches (Lynch) 3. A Missiological Response to Popular Culture a.Pop culture as potentially harmful and in need of critique

Studying Religion & Popular Culture A. Four Approaches (Lynch) 3. A Missiological Response to Popular Culture b. Pop culture can sometimes mediate fundamental religious truths.

Studying Religion & Popular Culture A. Four Approaches (Lynch) 3. A Missiological Response to Popular Culture c. Pop culture as a potential source of new understandings of the faith

Studying Religion & Popular Culture A. Four Approaches (Lynch) 3. A Missiological Response to Popular Culture “Sensus infidelum” (the wisdom of the unfaithful): “People (or forms of popular culture) who profess to know little or nothing about the religious may indeed form, inform, or transform religious meaning for people of faith.”

Studying Religion & Popular Culture A. Four Approaches (Lynch) 4.Using texts and practices of popular culture as material for theological reflection a.Pop culture in relation to biblical texts b.Pop culture in relation to theological questions or themes

POP 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’). It blurs the distinctions between:

Culture/Commerce Artistic values merge with economic ones. The question of “Is it true and lasting?” must now answer to “Is it marketable?” It blurs the distinctions between:

Real/Imaginary Actual events and media coverage, movies and reality, live performance and recorded sound dissolve into each other (known as ‘hyperrealism’). It blurs the distinctions between:

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:

Forrest Gump Forrest Gump

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.

Three Approaches to Popular Culture in the Classroom: Opportunist strategy – embraces the popular tastes of students in the hope of leading them to better things.

Three Approaches to Popular Culture in the Classroom: 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 Map Directs Prescribes Shapes

Culture as Mirror Reflects Describes Imitates

Culture as Conversation Symbolic Dialogue Conflict and Compromise

Provides Select Construct Culture as Toolbox

Commercial 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.

the of commercial culture

4. We organize our things and their meanings into lifestyles.

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

Previous Page Next Page Next Page Next Page

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).