What does Hollywood have to do with Wheaton? The place of (pop) culture in theological reflection

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Jun 2000 by Grenz, Stanley J

In her intriguing book God-Talk in America, Phyllis A. Tickle, contributing editor in religion to Publishers Weekly, declares, "more theology is conveyed in, and probably retained from, one hour of popular television than from all of the sermons that are also delivered on any given weekend in America's synagogues, churches, and mosques."1 Is this a purely brash remark? Is it sheer overstatement? Is it nothing more than well-crafted rhetoric designed for maximum shock value? Perhaps. But we ought not reject Tickle's words too quickly. Her observation captures a trend Christian scholars and theological educators dare not ignore: Pop culture in generaland the entertainment industry in particular-has emerged as a potent shaper of the fundamental convictions of North American society rivalling, if not surpassing, the church itself.

The thesis of this essay is that the influence of pop culture, especially among younger North Americans, challenges us to think through the way we engage in theological reflection and, in turn, how we approach theological education in an age of entertainment and the media. Although "Hollywood" may choose simply to ignore "Wheaton," we whom God has called to vocations in the "Wheatons" of the land do well to be aware of the machinations of the folks at "Hollywood." I intend to set forth this thesis by moving through three major topics: the phenomenon of culture itself; the place of culture in theology and finally the role of pop culture in theological education.

I. HOLLYWOOD AMONG THE WHEATONITES: THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURE TO SOCIETY

I begin by looking first at the word culture and the importance of culture to contemporary society.

1. The nature of culture. Culture is derived from the Latin cultivare ("to till the soil"). This etymological connection to the practice of "cultivation" led to the original meaning of culture, namely, "the care and tending of crops or animals,"2 especially as this activity is aimed at improving or perfecting its object. The idea of a specifically human culture, indicative of our use of the term, was likely a metaphorical extension of this "tending" process to the human person.

In Enlightenment Europe, culture was connected to the process of educating and refining the individual, as well as denoting the artistic and intellectual products (such as art and literature) deemed to be the means to becoming, or to be expressions of, the "refined" person. The resulting preference for what we might call "high culture" formed a marked contrast to the practices, customs, and even the language of the "uneducated" lower classes. Understood in this manner, culture was often used somewhat interchangeably with civilization, especially by thinkers in France.

While the idea of "high culture" still lives on in certain quarters, in the 1920s it was replaced by a far-reaching shift in the meaning of the term, especially in intellectual circles in the United States. Rather than denoting the ideal-the goal of an education process-culture came to refer to an already given dimension of human social life. Culture now consisted of the customs and rituals of a particular social group. This understanding finds its genesis in the field of anthropology, including the work of structuralist anthropologists such as Claude Levi-Strauss (b. 1908), who explored the connection between social practices and identity formation. As a consequence, the term came to denote the ongoing practices of human beings in the context of groups by means of which group participants construct the character of their own lives, as well as the specific pattern of behaviors that distinguishes any society from all others. This understanding is evident in the description offered in 1948 by Melvin Herskovitz: "culture is essentially a construct that describes the total body of belief, behaviors, knowledge, sanctions, values and goals that mark the way of life of a people. . . . In the final analysis it comprises the things that people have, the things they do, and what they think."3

In recent years, however, anthropologists have understood culture more in connection with systems of meaning. Clifford Geertz, to cite a prominent example, describes the phenomenon using the metaphorical language of the "web." Cultures comprise the "webs of significance" that people spin and in which they are then suspended.4 As he expresses in his well-known, terse definition:

[Culture] denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which [people] communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.5

Under Geertz's influence, culture has become a shorthand way of talking about the shared dimension of meaning-making that typifies people in a given society.

Viewed from this perspective, culture plays a crucial role in personal and social life. According to Raymond Williams, culture functions as a "signifying system through which a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored."6 Thus, culture generates a shared context in which a people engage in the construction of meaning and of meaningful social actions. Through culture, participants in a society are bound together by a common attachment to, or investment in, items that constitute common reference points for making sense out of the world and of social behavior.7