Space Enough, and Time

Since the conception of “youth culture,” the tendency towards an entertainment-first focus has always been a danger.  Bells and whistles, light shows and rock music, spiritual highs and week-later letdowns have always been landmines in the field of souls.  The folks at First Things have posted a couple of articles about the new “ontological reality” that is entertainment as baseline not just for young people, but now for everyone.  As the fish in David Foster Wallace’s parable might say: Entertainment?  Entertainment is water.  From Carl Trueman’s recent First Things post:

To use philosophical jargon, entertainment is now ontology. We live in Xanadu, within the confines of a stately pleasure-dome of our own making. We have an economy that is significantly dependent upon the production and consumption of entertainment, a society where men who play children’s playground games are lionized and paid more than the President, and a world where technology is not simply a tool but one of the structuring principles of our very existence and our ways of life, right down to the most mundane details.

What, then, is the church to do?

How can the church assert the truth of the gospel—an exclusive truth which makes demands in the present because of promises which will be fulfilled only in the future—in a world predicated on consumer options, entertainment, and instant gratification? Just a brief glance at the advertising for the most numerically successful and conservative evangelical conferences indicates the importance of the aesthetics of this present age in marketing, even for a serious, exclusive faith. Can we use such methods and still claim that something crucial has not already been conceded at the outset? To answer, “Well, if we don’t do this, if we don’t have the slick, attractive marketing, the cool branding, and the celebrities of the evangelical subculture, then nobody will come”—something I have heard many times—makes perfect sense. But the fact that it makes perfect sense—that, yes, we know that such an approach is culturally wise and necessary—is what is so significant, for it indicates that we are all now trapped inside the stately pleasure dome.

It goes back to the maxim about people and tools: we create them only for us to turn around to see how much they are recreating, reshaping us.  In my own personal experience, church youth culture (more than any part of the church’s culture) was a counter-culture that used some outside trends simply and well, without any real buy-in to the practices that weren’t rooted in Scripture).  Trueman continues:

There is a linguistic problem, too. It might be oversimplifying the picture (though not by much) to say that Europe secularized itself by abandoning the Christian idiom, America by co-opting the same. That makes the task here incalculably difficult because the very words we should use to communicate a serious message and to confront the world around us—holiness, sin, grace, repentance, faith, forgiveness—have been transformed, so that they now mean trivial things that have no real connection to orthodox Christianity. They, too, have become part of the linguistic currency of the pleasure-dome.

We clearly need a reformation as dramatic, if not more dramatic, than that of the sixteenth century. How that reformation can be accomplished and what forms it must take are far from obvious at this moment in time. But it has to start with a wholesale critique of the anti-culture of immediacy in which we live. And that must include acknowledgement that we are ourselves—individually and corporately—deeply embedded in the very essence of this present age.

The linguistic problem Trueman points out is real.  The words he mentioned have almost been hollowed of meaning . . . and not only for young people.  Rarely do I hear adults use them in an orthodox sense, too.

I appreciate Trueman’s call for a dramatic reformation.  What’s unfortunate is that many of those who could have been bastions for a better life have themselves been coopted by the culture of entertainment and immediacy.

You can read all of Trueman’s article here.

(image from bianoti.com)