All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes - A Review

One of my best recent investments has been in a subscription to the Mars Hill Audio Journal.

I’ve known about Ken Myers for years, but with so many free podcasts and sermons, I’ve never felt justified in paying for the material. I was tremendously wrong.

The first inkling of the error of my delay came when I purchased a single edition, “The Christian Mind of C. S. Lewis,” because one of the contributors to that edition also contributed to a book I was editing with the same title. After I listened to that hour-long recording a few times, I was ready to plunge into a full subscription.

Since I began listening to Ken Myers conducting interviews on a regular basis, I decided to finally pick up a copy of his book, All God’s Children & Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture. The book was originally released in 1989, but has remained in print since. Crossway released a reprint edition with a new introduction in 2012. In the world of publishing, that is a pretty significant record for longevity. It is well deserved.

The constant refrain of Myers and Mars Hill Audio Journal is to pursue permanent things. So much of what passes for culture in our age is intentionally temporary and of little durable value. Modernism, which is a nebulous movement with many tentacles, demands that we believe that what is new and shiny must be better than what is old and well-worn.

Myers’ book is intended for Christians, it is not a generic critique of culture for a broad audience. It offers a consistent reminder that Christianity should have its own unique culture, which should have a distinct shape. And, since that shape is caused by the character of our immutable, impassible God, it stands to reason that an authentically Christian culture should seek after permanent things.

More significant, I think, to Myers is that Christianity should reflect a degree of excellence in its culture, rather than subsisting on the edges of the mainstream of popular culture, picking up the crumbs and copying the worst trends of a few months or years ago.

In this way All God’s Children & Blue Suede Shoes espouses something similar to Andy Crouch’s concept in Culture Making or what T. M. Moore argues for in Culture Matters. In some way, Myers also seems to be pushing for the recovery and restoration of permanent institutions, much as James Davidson Hunter does in To Change the World. All God’s Children & Blue Suede Shoes was a foretaste of what the Mars Hill Audio Journal would become four years later. It is a vision that has withstood the past thirty years quite well.

The book begins by describing the dangers of popular culture, beginning with its tendency toward trendiness. Everything is temporary and disposable. There is an immediate gratification that finds itself fulfilled primarily in a disenchanted materialism. That bleeds into the way that even Christians make decisions, where dollars and cents are the only real consideration for vocational changes and entertainment selection. The soul is not fully considered.

As Christians, Myers argues, we should be seeking after durable things. We should seek to value beauty, goodness, and truth. Those are qualities to our distinctly Christian culture that should go beyond merely gluing a Bible verse onto the cover of a journal or modifying rock and roll lyrics to have a gospel-centered vibe. Instead, we should be looking for transcendent qualities in our literature and our music.

This means that sometimes we will prefer art that has been created by non-Christians much more than that that has been created by believers. Because, if a novel points us deeper into the human experience as it ought to be, then that is a cultural artifact that deserves preservation. At the same, Christians should be more capable of creating those durable works of art because we should have a stronger sense of the transcendent, because the transcendent God lives within us immanently.

This is the tragedy of Christian sub-culture. Too often it is kitsch and cliché. Too often it is derivative. Instead of forming new Austens and Dostoevskys, popular Christian culture knocks off Danielle Steel. Biblical manhood becomes a caricature of tavern culture, except without the good beer. Our worship music starts to sound like the top 40, except without the resonance that even that tissue paper culture has.

Myers calls us to a deeper relationship with culture. To cultivate enjoyment in complex artforms that exalt the human soul, lifting them toward God. This is hard work, as he notes, but it is also an act of worship.

The downside of Myers perspective is that he seems to cut himself off from those occasional snippets of popular culture that use a throwaway medium to make a deeper point. For Myers, good music seems to end with Bach, though he’s willing to accept the value of Jazz. And yet, there are times when the collective weight of a seemingly vacuous television series can make a deeper point. Those cases are, admittedly rare, but following Myers too closely would cut us off from those opportunities. Of course, when we consider the amount of work it takes to sift through the tares to get those few heads of wheat, he may be on to something.

It’s hard to place this book, exactly. It is one that I’d like to read with my teenagers as we think about what good music, movies, books, and art ought to do to us and for us. But it is a book that presumes that the reader has some awareness of good and bad quality and has an ability to make discerning choices. For those that are raised on the cotton candy of cartoons, super hero films, and Christian prairie romance novels, Myers’ thesis may be a hard pill to swallow. And yet, if we are to recover our love for transcendent things and our culture-making Christian character, then the Church needs to listen more carefully to people like Myers.

All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes (With a New Introduction / Redesign): Christians and Popular Culture (Volume 7)

By Myers, Ken

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Breaking Bread with the Dead

The life of the mind is a topic of growing significance as the pace of change, with its assaults on our mental stability, continue to accelerate. Some sources estimate there are more than 2 million books published worldwide each year. And that volume of content is in addition to the newspapers, magazines, blogs, tweets, and emails that also vie for our time.

Along with the flash and glamour of new publications, our attention is also directed to “old books,” which are often celebrated as “classics” that are critical to becoming properly formed as humans or derided as elements of a “racist patriarchy” that must be resisted by any means and at any cost.

In three books, written through the last decade, Alan Jacobs has drafted a series of books that wrestle with the life of the mind, the nature of reading, and value of ancient literary history. This is an odd series. Each book comes from a different publisher, has a distinct thesis, and wrestles with a different topic. There is no thematic unity and little hope of a boxed set, which seems to be the hallmark of such sequences in our day. The progression of topics, too, does not seem as unified as one might expect.

And yet, Jacobs admits that these books are in a series, and that they are related, as disparate as they may seem. The careful reader will, indeed, find that there is a connection between them all. Not a connection that requires reading the books in sequence, but that these are markers, perhaps, staking out the boundaries of a mind alive to the unity of the world and its possibilities. The series is by no means complete, so it will not surprise me to find another short book set out to help readers navigate the modern world, published in a few more years.

Jacobs is, by profession, a teacher of literature. He has also done significant work as a cultural critic. In this he is much like C. S. Lewis, a thinker with whom Jacobs has demonstrated significant interest and expertise. It is not difficult, as a result, to find echoes of Lewis throughout Jacobs’ work, especially in this latest book, Breaking Bread with the Dead, which shares a common theme with Lewis’ essay, “On the Reading of Old Books.”

Breaking Bread with the Dead obviously comes out in favor of reading old books. But read in context with The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, it is abundantly clear that Jacobs is not advertising the “checklist” approach of slogging through “Greats,” which is a quest to max out your score on Facebook quizzes and a recipe for gobbling a gourmet feast without savoring the marinated centuries between works—in other words, it represents the sin of gluttony. Rather, he is arguing that reading old books is necessary to understand our times and to live in them.

Jacobs clearly states this goal toward the end of his introduction,

To open yourself to the past is to make yourself less vulnerable to the cruelties of descending in tweeted wrath on a young woman whose clothing you disapprove of, or firing an employee because of a tween you didn’t take time to understand, or responding to climate change either by ignoring it or by indulging in impotent rage. You realize that you need to obey the impulses of this moment—which, it is fair to say, never tend to produce a tranquil mind.

This book is an essay that wanders toward a single goal, rather than an argument with chapters neatly divided into segments of support and refutation. It is a literary essay that seeks to deal with the questions of the day. One of the most pertinent questions for our tiny historical moment is whether one dare to read authors whose social and moral views differ—whether greatly or radically—from our own.

Jacobs begins by examining the problem of presentism, which is the tendency to see our particular cultural moment as the moral apex of humanity and to denigrate all who have ever had a differing opinion. Thus, the reading of Robinson Crusoe must be abandoned because it is racist, sexist, colonial, and a bunch of other bad things that are native and irrevocably attached to old, dead, white men. Jacobs argues that in order to properly understand our own moment, we must interact with minds that came before our moment, even when they do, in fact, have racist, sexist, and colonial ideas.

The concept for engaging with those we disagree with is represented as “table fellowship,” which is obviously conveyed by the title of the book. Jacobs understands this has the center of the book: “sitting at the table with our ancestors and learning to know them in their difference from, as well as their likeness to, us.” He argues that reading even those with whom we disagree—by inviting them to our table—we open ourselves up to a greater understanding of their time and ours. But at the same time, since we invite these sometimes-scraggly guests through the practice of reading, we control the interaction, so that when they get to rowdy we can, with little effort, simply disinvite them from the meal by closing the book and moving to another guest.

Breaking bread with the dead offers us challenges to our own worldview—exactly the reason many activist “academics” want them “cancelled”—and force us to examine our unexamined assumptions. They also force us to wrestle with the reality that our morality du jour has some of the same barbarities of a previous age (albeit with a different shade of lipstick) and that it sometimes is a positive logical outcome of a trajectory we might find in older literature, if we but take the time to consider it. Reading old books helps us to understand ourselves and our time better.

As morality has become increasingly unpinned from any sense of permanence or overt morality, the pace of change from one absolute standard to another has become exhausting. A group of racist trolls on a social media site turn the “OK” symbol into a symbol for “white power” and suddenly everyone who uses the symbol, with its long-standing cultural significance, is now complicit in white supremacy. Unless, of course, someone who is of the right color or political affiliation uses it, in which case it means what it has consistently meant. The tyranny of the present undermines every sense of peace. As Jacobs argues, reading old books is the best way to remind ourselves of our own finitude, the temporary nature of our culture’s moral conclusions, and deepens our souls to better understand those who differ from us. In other words, breaking bread with the dead helps make us more human and reminds us of the humanity of others.

Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

By Jacobs, Alan

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NOTE: I received a gratis copy of this volume with no expectation of a positive review.

The Human Swarm - A Review

As Western Civilization seems to be fraying rapidly, the nature and origins of human societies seems significant. Why do societies arise? Why do they hold together? What makes them fall apart? These are big questions whose answers help explain human history and the world around us.

Mark Moffett explores these giant-sized questions in his recent book, The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall.

According to his biography, Moffett is something of a misfit. He dropped out of high school but managed to get a PhD from Harvard. His degree was in biology, but he has done more journalism than anything else. He was a student of E. O. Wilson, who is an intriguing figure himself, and likely has a million stories to share.

The book is long and expansive in scope. As such, it has more of a theme than a thesis. Moffett doesn’t grind away at a particular point as he does show the general direction that his research has pointed. This may sound like a criticism, but it is a strength in this case, because to force analogies of insects and animals onto humanity tends to result in critical failures. And yet, Moffett makes the case that we can learn something from the way societies form among non-human creatures. He does not rely on zoological observations alone, though, but also draws on research from anthropology of various human societies at various levels of organization and structure.

There are nine sections in this large volume. Section I begins by discussing how individual creatures are recognized as part of a group (e.g., enemy vs. friend). Section II explores anonymous societies, noting some significant similarities between ants and humans in our ability to socialize with those whom we don’t know as individuals. The third section dives into anthropology, looking at hunter-gatherer societies in human history. Section IV continues in anthropology (with zoological analogies) by considering how cultural markers can tie anonymous individuals together.

In the fifth section, Moffett digs into the human psyche, specifically evaluating how types, family relations, and other associations can aid creatures in existing in societies. Section VI evaluates whether conflict is a given, ultimately concluding that it is likely inevitable at some level. The seventh section traces the rise and fall of various societies, making an implicit argument that decline is inevitable and not entirely bad. More significantly, this section shows how societies morph over time. In Section VIII Moffett outlines how tribes turn into nations and, eventually, fracture. Then, finally, in Section IX, Moffett asks hard questions about ethnic and racial differences, whether societies are even necessary, noting that societies will always be a collection of people with differences.

The conclusion Moffett offers is that societies are generally good things, but they are also notably temporary things. Understanding their nature and proclivity toward fracture can be helpful as we wrestle the fracturing of our own society.

The Human Swarm is an engaging book. Well-written and copiously research. I am an expert in none of the disciplines that Moffett is drawing from, so I cannot critique whether he gets the nuances of various theories from a diverse range of fields correct. However, based on a review of the extensive end-notes in this volume, Moffett appears to have done his research faithfully and well. Not only does this work reflect copious research, but he thoughtfully engages with contrary theories, admitting disagreement where appropriate, in his notes. This is a book that bears the marks of being well-thought through, despite being an expansive volume that is wrestling with an interdisciplinary question.

A strength of this volume is that it avoids the naturalistic fallacy. There are times, especially when reading the distilled versions of scientific research, that firm conclusions are drawn in error. A scientist publishes research on aggression in Chimpanzees and either a popular interpreter or, sometimes, the scientist herself will draw straight-line conclusions to human behavior. Moffett recognizes the danger of this fallacy and avoids it. There are analogies between human societies and those of animals, they can provide some clues as to how societies form and creatures behave, but we cannot derive firm ethical conclusions from them.

Another significant strength of The Human Swarm is that Moffett does not romanticize any stage of human existence. The hunter-gatherer is recognized as a human with joy and suffering, interacting with the world as it was and in a particular context. There is neither the myth of a noble savage nor of the hapless primitive. We can learn about human behaviors by considering similarities and differences in typical behaviors in varied contexts.

One of the more helpful aspects of this volume is that it helps put contemporary politics in perspective. There are those who view America’s rise or fall (as categorized by the other party getting control) as dependent upon the next election. Though Moffett doesn’t talk about American politics at all, the framing of the constitution and disintegration of human societies within millennia helps put our current battles in perspective. The United States has been an imperfect union, better on balance than many other nations, but its rise or fall will not determine the final course of human events. In the meanwhile, Moffett provides some ideas about what makes societies cohere, which can help thinkers understand how cooperation and neighborliness can be cultivated.

This is one of those books that warrants being read, simply because of how well it is put together. There will be no reader who does not find points of agreement and disagreement with Moffett, but the final product is thoughtful and thought-provoking. For example, Moffett recognizes the goodness of a plurality of human cultures, but he also identifies the problem when immigrants within a larger society refuse to meaningfully integrate. On the other hand, he also notes that attempts to integrate excessively also have negative societal impacts. There is a tension that is necessary whenever societies mingle that cannot be resolved by the extreme proposals of either political pole.

There are careful considerations of how humans form their identities woven through this book. Contemporary scholars writing about human interactions would do well to read The Human Swarm alongside other, more theological, reflections.

Perhaps the factor that will most likely reduce the use of this volume is the sheer length. This is a comprehensive book, reaching back into basic animal behavior to finally arrive at signs and contributors to human society. It takes some patience to get to the end. This is an engaging book, overall, but there are points that a careful reader can easily lose sight of the final destination.

The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall

By Mark W. Moffett

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NOTE: I received a gratis copy of this volume from the publisher with no expectation of a positive review.

The Benedict Option - A Review

Rod Dreher’s 2017 book, The Benedict Option: A Strategy of Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, caused quite a stir when it was published. It was reviewed both favorably and unfavorably. Dreher defended his position at The American Conservative, the magazine website he is the editor of, vocally and often. There were points in the public discussion that it wasn’t clear that everyone who was criticizing the book had read the same thing.

The Benedict Option is an idea borrowed from the monastic order that descended from St. Benedict. Dreher drew the idea that a resurgence of a Benedictine ethos would be beneficial from Alistair McIntyre’s seminal work, After Virtue.

Dreher, formerly a Roman Catholic, who has migrated to the Eastern Orthodox faith, sees a separatist community as the path forward in resisting the corrosive effects of our post-Christian culture.

Strengths

It is clear that Dreher has a good understanding of the problems with Western culture. It isn’t that one thing or another is the big problem. For example, sexual immorality in its various forms as celebrated by our culture, is not the main problem with our world. Or, perhaps more clearly, it is not unique to our culture.

The unique aspect of our culture is how relentlessly intrusive the anti-Christian influences are. Before the digital age keeping your kids from pornography was largely a function of not buying dirty magazines and reasonably screening their time at a friend’s house away from the family. Now pornography is streaming down the same digital pipeline as the cute, if inane, videos about making pretty bracelets or surviving in the wilderness.

Dreher recognizes that even if parents put a filter on their home internet and monitor usage carefully, the vast majority of the parents in the community have given their child their own digital device with unfettered access to whatever the internet might offer. The only way to keep you kids safe (that is, to preserve them in some condition of relative innocence) is to form a contrast community that has agreed upon norms to help protect the group.

Another strength of Dreher’s vision is that, if implemented, it would give Christians the opportunity to practice authentic community in ways that are exceedingly difficult in our dis-integrated modern world. The Benedict Option would require intentional re-integration of life, neighborliness, and humanity. There is something strongly attractive about the move toward a more conscientious observation of the creational order.

Weaknesses

Although the vision Dreher presents are attractive and do seem to answer many of the contemporary, the Benedict Option is not without its difficulties. Many of these were made apparent during the period after the release of the book, when the roiling rage of reviews threatened to swamp the Christian blogosphere. Many of Dreher’s critics seemed to misread his book, exaggerating his claims. However, there are some legitimate points of criticism.

Most significantly, this book makes much less sense read independently than it does when read as a sequel to Dreher’s 2006 book, The Crunchy Con Manifesto. That book gives a better sense of what Dreher’s desired cloister might look like. In fact, looking back at many of the reviews of The Benedict Option, much of the criticism of the book seems to be based on assumptions about the nature of Dreher’s vision for community, which is spelled out much more clearly in his earlier book. Putting the two books together also makes it clearer that Dreher’s book is not merely a reaction to the infamous Obergefell decision, but a rejection of the broader tendencies of modernity.

As a second significant weakness, Dreher’s Benedict Option seems to give little place for evangelistic missions. It seems to point toward bolstering the bastions rather than sending out emissaries for Christ. Dreher clearly does not deny the importance of evangelism, but the theme is largely absent from his work. Taken in combination with his Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, the failure to discuss this important duty of Christians warrants concern by missions-oriented Protestants.

Conclusion

If you’ve not read The Benedict Option and have formed your opinions about the book from the internet chatter about it, then you’ve likely drawn the wrong conclusions. Dreher posits an idea, which I think deserves a hearing, even if it needs significant modification to be applied. The best thing about Dreher’s Benedict Option is that it offers a positive conception of life as it should be to discuss and strive for. In a world where Christian culture tends to mimic and act as slow-moving revolutionaries, Dreher offers something different.

It may be work quoting a couple of paragraphs of The Benedict Option to give a sense of the work in Dreher’s own words:

The Benedict Option is not a technique for reversing the losses, political and otherwise, that Christians have suffered. It is not a strategy for turning back the clock to an imagined golden age. Still less is it a plan for constructing communities of the pure, cut off from the real world.

To the contrary, the Benedict Option is a call to undertaking the long and patient work of reclaiming the real world from the artifice, alienation, and atomization of modern life. It is a way of seeing the world and of living in the world that undermines modernity’s big lie: that humans are nothing more than ghosts in a machine, and we are free to adjust its settings in any way we like.

There is some wisdom in what Dreher outlines. It is worth considering his plan of action to determine if we can formulate a better one.

The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

By Rod Dreher

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How to Think - A Review

It is an understatement to argue that our nation and, indeed, the world is significantly divided. This is not a new phenomenon, really, though the nature of the division is somewhat different. Anyone who lived through the social polarizations of the Vietnam era in the US is likely to recognize some similar patterns of division, especially in the apparently significant division of thought between younger and older generations.

However, as Neil Postman shows in his classic volume, Entertaining Ourselves to Death, our culture has cultivated an alternative epistemology by producing and consuming media that shape us in ways that tend to undermine our ability to sustain cogent thought for extended periods of time. My review of that book left more questions than answers about how to overcome this seismic shift in the way we know.

In his book, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, Alan Jacobs actively tackles that challenge, offering an approach to thinking that promises to begin to unravel the tangled know to social dissonance.

Summary

After outlining the problem and its significance in the introduction to his book, Jacobs proceeds to offer some helpful considerations of the nature of thinking and how to do it better. For example, he begins by arguing that thinking must be done in community. Despite the intellectual isolation that often gets attributed to Descartes––I think, therefore I am––Jacobs shows that solitary thinking, divorced from the community, results in antisocial rationalities that often lead to internal conflicts within someone’s vision of the world. Thinking together helps form people for community and sharpen thinking to prevent rational inconsistencies.

Part of thinking together, as Jacobs notes, is ensuring we come to an understanding of the position of others before we respond. Much of our division is the result of people actively misrepresenting their intellectual opponent’s position. This is enabled by our contemporary social climate because there is a prevalence of repulsion to outgroups, whose status of being gross justifies people’s ignorance of their position. For example, many academics (by their own writing) actively despise orthodox Christians and the feeling is reciprocated in many cases, not least because of a regular pattern of condescension and abuse. Those who think will have to overcome our tribalism and seek to understand the position of humans with whom we disagree.

Add to the social dynamic the confusion of communication forums and you have a recipe for incomprehensibility. For example, there are few forms of communication that have a defined audience. The internet makes it possible for someone’s offhand comment or argument shaped for a particular hearer to be dissected, masticated, and hurled back at the writer with incredible bile. For example, a few years ago, TGC contributor, Gaye Clarke write an article about her transformation regarding her views on race and humanity. The article was, fairly plainly, intended to help white evangelicals remove their racial blinders. The language she used, therefore, did not match the latest terminology and Clarke was trolled, abused, and harassed by activists who find her terms repugnant. The article was removed, the woman defamed, and the prejudices of Clarke’s intended audience against “Social Justice Warriors” was confirmed. The conversation has no defined borders. Similarly, the “Sea Lion” phenomena, is when someone overhears (literally or on the internet) a comment not intended for them and persistently harasses the participants in the conversation demanding a response. The technique does much to further division and little to aid communication.

Division is augmented and fertilized by attempts to change and control vocabulary. The standard terminology from five years ago is this year’s hate speech. Or, certain terminology is considered to be permitted only to people within a special demographic. The point is rarely to further human knowledge, but more often to create a power dynamic that disadvantages someone from an out group. For example, the term social justice arose from Roman Catholic literature, but has since been coopted to imply a whole host of anti-human policies. Likewise, the political left is getting increasingly belligerent in their insistence that the only “pro-life” position is full socialism. Jacobs show that words matter, how we use them is important, and that thinking people have to sometimes get beyond delimiting terminology to actually examine differing the support for other positions.

Another critical aspect of Jacobs’ treatise is his undermining the idea that an “open mind” is the ideal state for thinking individuals. While he spends multiple chapters encouraging people to carefully consider other positions and to active reevaluate their own, he is also clear in arguing the point in seeing is not to go on seeing through things, but to actually see some things clearly. Channeling Chesterton, Jacobs argues that the only purpose of an open mind is to close on something solid, like a mouth. So, being a person that thinks does not mean being an ideological drifter.

Finally, How to Think is encouraging, even after all the work Jacobs recommends, because it shows that being a thinking person is well worth the effort. Becoming better thinkers is the only way we are going to get out of the mess we are in.

Conclusion

How to Think is a worthwhile book. It is relatively short, concise, but very important. Although I came into the book agreeing with Jacobs—especially about the importance of thinking—there were multiple times where his examples stepped on my toes and made me reconsider the way I argue and respond to arguments.

For those who want to reach others—to really engage and persuade—this is the sort of volume that can help someone break through barriers and, perhaps, lead even hostile voices on the opposite side of the issue change their minds. Or, at worst, even if it doesn’t help us persuade, it can help us understand and therefore reduce the frustration with our ongoing ideological deadlock.

How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

By Alan Jacobs

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Faith Among the Faithless - A Review

Esther is a book that many Christians seem to think has been exhausted. It’s been made into a major motion picture, a cartoon, and studied and preached for generations. We know all about the heroic Esther who had the courage to go before King Xerxes at the risk of her life with the memorable line, “If I perish, I perish.” That quote, along with Mordecai’s equally famous statement that Esther was raised up “for such a time as this” have a dramatic quality to that makes for good theater. To top it off, the bad guy dies on the gallows of his own construction, and the good guys get to kill their oppressors. This is a classic tale, but somewhat predictable by contemporary standards.

For those who delve into the background of this Old Testament book, the provenance is equally familiar. It was a questioned book because it proposed a new festival (Purim) and does not use the name of God. According to some accounts, it almost didn’t make it into the canon. These debates, too, have become old hat for experienced students. This leads to people taking too little care to enjoy the richness of the story of Esther and its application for us today.

In his recent book, Faith Among the Faithless: Learning from Esther How to Live in a World Gone Mad, Mike Cosper manages to cut through the familiarity to present a traditionally orthodox, but refreshingly contemporary reading of Esther. He does this by combining a retelling of the story with sound background study and parsing out the ways that the context of the story is similar to and different from our own.

A retelling of a biblical narrative is enough to make many Christians raise an eyebrow because it often results in embellishments that either distract from or modify the message of the text. Readers can wonder why the text was not sufficient. Cosper’s retelling is less a novel formulation and more an engaging way to present the historical background behind the story. There are places where Cosper has obviously chosen one interpretation over a competing one from scholarship about the context, but none of these choices are novel inventions. Instead, the intention seems to be to enhance the modern reader’s appreciation for the beauty of Scripture and to point them back to God’s revelation itself.

Aside from his narrative choices in the various scenes of the story, Cosper presents a fair amount of background information throughout the text. Before the reader shudders at the thought of academic information being smuggled into a book for the masses, they should know that Cosper does this fairly selectively and seamlessly. He explains the historical background of the Peloponnesian War so the reader can understand why Xerxes might be struggling with a bruised ego and not want to be humiliated by his wife. He also lets the reader know that Vashti likely resisted Xerxes call because of the probability of her own abuse or humiliation at his hands. These are all elements that are helpful in understanding the contours of the story. Cosper does well to present the helpful bits and avoid excessive excurses about cultural details that might enthrall a scholar studying the Ancient Near East, but do little to illuminate the text for a modern factory worker.

Because of this extensive background work and careful retelling, Cosper is able to present sound application for contemporary readers. We understand some of the obvious differences between the world of Esther and our own, so the challenge is to see how this ancient story becomes more than a dramatic tale. Cosper shows that the heroes of the story—Esther and Mordecai—are compromised people who muddle out their lives of faith in a hostile culture. That alone should be enough to raise the interest of Christians in our era. By retelling the story and unpacking the historical background, Cosper demonstrates that their story is much like our story, which gives us hope for being used dramatically by God even when we don’t anticipate it and certainly don’t deserve it. This is not simply a hero tale, it is a reminder that people like us—sinful, fearful, and hopeless—can play a part in the great workings of God’s history.

Faith Among the Faithless is a good book. Cosper writes well, thinks pastorally, and is faithful to the tradition of orthodox Christianity. His writing offers ways to remain faithful when many believers are abandoning Christian theology for pagan practices to appease the culture. Cosper understands the needs of our day and offers a book that is helpful in meeting those needs.

This is the sort of book that will be useful for group Bible studies or individual reflection. It should not replace actually reading the book of Esther, but it could helpfully complement that reading.

Faith Among the Faithless: Learning from Esther How to Live in a World Gone Mad

By Mike Cosper

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NOTE: I received an advance reader copy from the publisher with no expectation of a positive review.

Low Culture with a Purpose

Evangelicalism takes a lot of flack for being hokey. I know this because I’ve dished out a lot of the criticism.

Tim LeHaye’s Left Behind series is the perpetual butt of jokes among conservative and revisionist scholars. It has inspired numerous book titles that play off the franchise’s moniker; those books are almost always critical not only of the theological interpretation of LeHaye, but also the cultural cheesiness.

At one level, the criticism is justified. There are too many conservative Christians the see kitsch culture with a Christian overtone as the high watermark of art. Prairie fiction is a blight on the Christian imagination. Much of the Contemporary Christian Music scene is a sectarian revision of pop hits from a couple of decades ago. Evangelical culture makers need to improve their cultural tastes and stop mimicking popular trends a few years after they were vogue.

However, those who are critical of Evangelical subculture need to ensure we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. This, I fear, is an even more significant danger for us. We can become so critical of the style of some cultural creations that we ignore the value of the content.

The Embarrassment of Christian Cheesiness

When I was in college, one of my fellow English majors revealed how cheesy her homeschool life was. She shared with the class at our secular institution that her mother used to read her C.S. Lewis and point out how Aslan is like Jesus.

The class groaned as she described her mother’s attempts to disciple her using children’s literature. It was so simplistic and moralistic. It was so cheesy.

I now believe that it was perfectly practical and appropriate.

Photo used by CC License. Photo credit: http://ow.ly/MPTj3090a87

I’m glad to see conservative Christians work toward becoming culture makers again. We need people like Andrew Peterson, Phil Keaggy, and others to keep making excellent books, movies, and music.

At the same time, we need to keep making popular level material that puts the cookies on the bottom shelf, as the saying goes.

This hit me as we were listening to a Seeds Family Worship playlist in the van on the way to church. The music is pretty basic. The lyrics recast Scripture to fit the tunes and are often repetitive and simplistic. I went through an inner turmoil one day while the songs rolled on because I wondered if I was somehow cheating my children by exposing them to this kitschy music.

A Better Calculus is Warranted

Then I realized that I was missing the point and my analysis needed to be revised.

I certainly do not want my children to live in a cultural desert. I want them to be exposed to art and music that reflects the unique ability of humans to create, whether the artists are Christian or not. I want them to be familiar with high quality cultural artifacts and conversant with the good, the true, and the beautiful.

More importantly, though, I want my children to grow up being surrounded by some of the great truths of the Christian faith. Sometimes this will come through watching performances of Handel or listening to Tallis. Sometimes this will come by singing doctrinal truths along with a catchy tune that will never win an award for musical excellence.

Christian movies are another example. If you’ve seen the films produced by Sherwood Pictures, you have seen some feel good, moralistic, happy ending on your screen. The gospel is always a key element as someone goes through a crisis of faith.

I’ve dismissed these movies before and heard others mock them mercilessly. Now that I’m a few years later on in life with kids that are a little older, I’m reconsidering.

In no way do I think that Fireproof or Courageous are worthy of an Oscar. The overall production is not polished enough to put it into the same league as most major films. But I’ve reached the point that I’m glad the movies have been made. They are telling simple stories and pointing to an over-optimistically good world, which is more like the world that we want to live in than most of the dystopian films produced by Hollywood.

But aren’t cheesy Christian films and pop music Scripture songs just cheesy knockoffs of culture?

Knockoffs vs. Creative Packaging

As I’ve considered the difference between “Christian” Prairie Fiction and Fireproof, I think a basic principle that separates worthwhile Christian pop culture from the junk.

Many of the Contemporary Christian Music songs (though not all) and most of the Amish Romance/Prairie Fiction genre are simply knockoffs of popular culture with the offensive ideas taken out. These are the “God is my girlfriend” songs, which only gain any Christian content when played in a context that assumes the deep emotional love being expressed is for God and not romantic idol. Your average Amish Romance is just a Harlequin novel with the sex pushed off screen.

In contrast, C. S. Lewis is trying to present a particularly Christian perspective on the world in compelling terms through a well-written story that is symbolically accessible to children. My family’s peppy Scripture songs are trying to disciple by getting simple lyrics stuck in their head. Sherwood Pictures is trying to entertain an audience and get the gospel out there through a story with a happy ending.

There is a difference between making a cheap knockoff and creating healthy, purposeful entertainment. Sometimes simplicity and morality presented through story is the best way to get the medicine down.

Those of us who are critical should step back and remember that using popular culture to disseminate the gospel is not a recent invention. As Karen Swallow Prior notes, Hannah More wrote plays for sophisticated audiences and entertaining tracts with stories that landed on pleas for gospel conversion, which were distributed to the masses. We ought not criticize methods that were effective in reaching the lost. For example, Hudson Taylor was converted to Christianity through a novel that led to a moralistic gospel presentation. The author of that kitschy book will doubtless receive treasure in heaven for his or her efforts.

There is a place for using popular cultural forms in Christian subcultures, but it should be simplicity for the sake of the gospel, not mimicry for the sake of the dollar. That is the real criterion by which we should be judging our art.

Stay Salty, Christians

When I was in the Navy, being salty referred to being experienced. It was an oft joked about phrase because the first few years I was on the USS Jimmy Carter, it was on blocks inside a building. We were concerned about knowing enough and being good enough so that it didn’t look like amateur night when we first went to see in a very expensive new vessel.

In some circles, salty is a term that refers to crassness. One may speak in salty language, which probably comes from sailors, too, who have been known to swear fluently. I can attest that I’ve known a few experienced sailors that could do so quite well, though that skill is far from exclusive to mariners.

Salt Shaker, by Rachel. Used by CC license. http://ow.ly/wFjH306d08S

Both of these uses of the term salt refer to a distinctiveness of the salty person of the salty language.

When the authors of Scripture use the term salt, they are also getting at distinctiveness. In Christian contexts, though, the distinctiveness of saltiness is viewed as a positive contrast to the sin of the world. According to Robert Stein, in the New Testament, "salt" refers to the characteristics of Christians as disciples. He affirms that in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:13-14, that is clearly the meaning of the term.

Christians are to be distinct from the world. We need to look no farther than Paul’s oft quoted command to the Roman church in Romans 12:2, “Do not be conformed to this world.” Being distinct is a good thing.

There is a paradox in being Christian in this world. We are to be in the world, but not of it. We are citizens of our nations, but ultimately owe a higher allegiance to God. We will use the accepted professional techniques in our work, but remain distinctly Christian in our motivation. We are to participate in the work of the world without succumbing to its temptations.

We are to utilize our regular lives to illuminate the distinctiveness of the gospel. This is what salt does. When you add salt to your food it doesn’t become a different sort of food, but it sure tastes better. I once ate with a family in which a member had had significant heart trouble. They cooked and ate without salt in their food. I decided that I liked salt a lot in that moment. But unsalted meatloaf is still nourishing. It may even be healthier.

Salt is useful when it is salty, but when it isn’t salty it is worthless. That’s what Jesus is talking about in the Sermon on the Mount.

As Matthew records, “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is not longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.” (Matt 5:13-14)

Christians risk so much of importance when they lose their distinction from the world. That’s part of the reason I reject the idea of America as a Christian nation. There are certainly strong Judeo-Christian influences in the culture in which our nation was founded, but it never has been a Christian nation. To argue that it has been a Christian nation is to accuse Christianity of the massacre of Native Americans and the sustenance of racially based chattel slavery. These are distinctly anti-Christian practices. Obviously, some Christians got sucked into them and even defended them. However, these violate the very principals of Christianity. They are evidences of occasions that people that claim Christ sacrificed their saltiness for political or material gain.

We are over-proud when we make the assumption that we are not swimming in a cultural sea of temptation to lose our saltiness. Those gross violations of Scripture may be in the past, but we face new errors today.

Faithful Christians must fight to retain their saltiness. We must work to avoid conformity to the incorrect practices of this world. A failure to do so may cost us, and the Church, a great deal more than we should be willing to risk. It may cost us the ability to freely proclaim the gospel. It may result in an environment in which the gospel is so buried with baggage that we have to debunk Christian-created myths before we can ever share the wonder of redemption with someone. We need to fight to be salty.

Danny Akin preached a powerful sermon a few weeks ago in the chapel at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. It expands on this topic and proclaims in light of a call to missions.

The Ignorance is Astounding

Recently multiple news outlets have reported on Dr. Ben Carson's theory that the Egyptian Pyramids were used for grain silos. 

There is little reason to give credence to Carson's theory, which is an extreme minority position. All the archaeological evidence seems to point toward the pyramids being built as monuments to rulers. In a presidential election, it's fine to point out the weird ideas of people that have put themselves on display.

What is inexcusable, however, is the fact that multiple news outlets are reporting that Carson's theory is drawn directly from the book of Genesis. 

In their original report (which may be updated any time now) Forbes wrote:

When I found this, I wondered if the ignorance was isolated. However, when I looked at the illustrious reporting of CNN, I found that while their article was correct, the original report required a correction:

“Correction: An earlier version of this story stated the Book of Genesis refers to Joseph building pyramids to store grain. It refers only to Joseph storing large amounts of grain.”

I stopped looking at two sources. Most likely the error was in the original news service story that the other outlets subscribe to.

I'm glad that CNN caught the mistake. However, it is telling that the original authors of the article was so ignorant of Scripture that he or she believed that Genesis talks about using the pyramids for grain storage. This also made it through the editorial process.

It isn't like this is information buried in someone's diary from the 17th century in an obscure monastery library in the Alps. No, this is information that is readily available online in multiple languages and versions. The team of individuals responsible for these reports lacks a basic literacy in Scripture, and yet was too lazy to take a few minutes to proof their information.

Remember this artifact as you read news article reporting on what people are supposed to believe and have said. While one example does not prove that all such reporting is bad, it does give an indication that the authors and editors may be well out of their depth.

Application for Christians

Christians should also recognize the significance of this error. We assume an awful lot of baseline knowledge when we talk to each other and to others. If I asked a group of school age kids at most local churches if Joseph had stored grain in the pyramids they would have given me an incredulous look. Yet, here is a group of adults so unfamiliar with Scripture that they could make such a blatant gaffe in published work.

Think about that when you present the gospel to someone. You can't assume they know the background. And, really, the notion of the substitutionary atonement is pretty crazy apart from the background of Scripture and an understanding of the Ancient Near Eastern culture of the Hebrews. It probably takes more explaining than what has been expected in previous decades.

We are no longer in a culture where we can assume the basics of the gospel. The ignorance is astounding. However, ignorance is not a sin. 

The solution to ignorance is information. This means that we need to get the gospel message out in a way that is comprehensive and intelligible. We can't afford to assume that anyone knows the rest of the story. Likely they have never actually heard it told well at all.