Secular Steeples: Popular Culture and the Religious Imagination

Christian Century, Nov 29, 2003 by Daniel Born

There is little room for secular dissent under Oswalt's big umbrella. This makes his ongoing patter about the commingling of secular and sacred influences (a warm bath of harmony rather than the chill shock of combat) ultimately difficult to fathom. Or perhaps that gentle commingling is simply of a piece with the Rogerian therapeutic definition of religion.

Ostwalt's chapters on sacred space and megachurches, based on close observation of Willow Creek Church in suburban Chicago, are his most entertaining and enlightening. Here he historicizes the way secular threes and aesthetic styles have worked their way into Christianity from the very beginning, starting with the Roman Empire.

Willow Creek's borrowing of shopping mall features and decor may seem new, but actually is part of a long church tradition of adopting the larger culture's architecture and rituals. When Ostwalt focuses specifically on space and ritual, two clearly empirical phenomena, his distinctions between sacred and secular categories make sense.

In his description of the megachurch phenomenon Ostwalt treats the critical question of whether aesthetics themselves produce the religious experience, but he could go further in teasing out the class, gender and regional influences that make up the particular aesthetic of those churches. Ostwalt begins to do this when he points out that "MTV style music" and a "Rappelling Rambo" Father's Day film clip provide two windows into the megachurch soul.

What kind of worshiper is drawn to this style, and what kind is put off? I know an Episcopalian who calls the megachurches' worship services of the "praise" variety "Branson worship," in which congregational singing can he characterized as the "7-11" variety ("seven words, sung 11 times") or "throw-up" music (as in "Let's throw that up on the overhead projector"). I know Catholics who have been practically driven back to their pre-Vatican II faith out of reaction to the guitar folk mass.

Perhaps asking Ostwalt to explain these complicated interactions between sacred vision and the profane arts is tantamount to asking for an explanation of how Margot Kidder and Gary Busey got starring roles in the LaHaye-Jenkins pre-Trib thriller Left Behind. I have a feeling that Bart Simpson knows the answer, and has already talked it over with Homer and his Bible-quoting neighbor Ned Flanders.

Reviewed by Daniel Born, author of The Birth of Liberal Guilt in the English Novel: Charles Dickens to II. G. Wells and editor of the Common Review, the magazine of the Great Books Foundation.