Wednesday, March 17, 2004
They're OK, We're OK
..."For all their (often quite legitimate) denunciation of sex and violence in the popular media, evangelicals flourish amidst the celebrity-drenched, lowest-common-denominator, highly sentimentalized world of romance novels, daytime soaps, NASCAR races, and Opry-knockoff music that dominates America's entertainment industry." ...
...The special attention Wolfe pays to evangelicals is occasioned not only by his newfound familiarity with them (he is careful to distinguish them from fundamentalists) but also by their vulnerability to his scorn and their centrality to his narrative. It takes little effort to find instances of "insipid," "simplistic," and "narcissistic" praise music and pop theology in seeker-sensitive megachurches and feel-good small groups. Wolfe respects his new evangelical friends too much not to share with them his disdain for the way many of their number flirt with the worst of American pop culture. But he also recognizes the extent to which the deep-seated individualistic and anti-formal currents in American culture, and even the fashionable mantra that lauds "spirituality" over "religion," are themselves the product of evangelicalism. When he writes that "we are all evangelicals now," he knows that evangelicals are agents as well as victims of cultural accommodation....