NUMBER ONE, WITH A CROSS:

Jesus Sells: What the Christian culture industry tells us about secular society. (Jeremy Lott, February 2003, Reason)

Critics are right about the apparent insularity of evangelical culture, but not as right as they think they are. The hand wringing that the Left Behind series has engendered, for instance, is irrational. Though Bruce Bawer's Tompaine.com piece is an extreme example of overreaction, a few nonreligious friends have privately explained to me that the existence and popularity of such books -- "wish fulfillment fantasies about non-fundamentalists suffering apocalyptic torment," as Bawer put it -- worry them. The reviewer for the determinedly anti-religious Free Inquiry likened the series to The Turner Diaries, the anti-Semitic survivalist underground classic that helped inspire Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh.

Yet, other popular novelists, Stephen King among them, are often just as apocalyptic as LaHaye and Jenkins, without inspiring dire warnings that America is about to embrace a fascist theocracy. True, King and company don?t take their apocalypses seriously. On the other hand, the end of the world has been a popular subgenre for many years. Exactly what has drawn readers to so many secular total destruction fantasies is a question that?s hard to answer, but that answer is unlikely to be compassion for humanity.

In any event, one might hazard that the incomprehension of secular outsiders has contributed significantly to the birth of the commercial Christian pop culture scene. That is, while the books, music, and videos in CBA stores may not have been of the highest quality or featured the best production values, they at least took seriously the beliefs held by evangelicals, who may constitute anywhere from a quarter to a third of American society. The move by secular presses, movie studios, radio stations, and record labels to cater to this market could be viewed as a victory for commercial self-interest over religious intolerance.

This whole piece is interesting, but on just this one point, one wonders if it's really that far off to compare things like Left Behind to the "literature" that militia groups favor. It seems likely the reviewer in question was trying to be inflammatory and to smear Christians, but most cultural conservatives--who obviously tend to be white and Christian--do have a feeling of being an embattled minority and a sense that most of the trends of modernity lead toward ruin for Western Civilization and thereby for mankind. Nor is this anything new, as evidenced by Ortega y Gasset's fear of the masses and Albert Jay Nock's portrayal of the Remnant. Art, even if extreme, that portrays the few as the Chosen and that suggests that the decline around us presages a great moment coming, rather than an ignominious end, must obviously be attractive. Add to this the the abysmal state of popular entertainment--books, movies, music and tv--not just in terms of the low quality and the gratuitous sex, violence, and profanity, but also the frequent hostility to religious belief, and it seems no surprise that a rather insular community would develop around art that consciously avoids these things.

Meanwhile, one of the most interesting recent developments in pop culture is the resurgence of "decent" great films with serious moral themes. Consider some of the best, and often most successful, movies of last year--Harry Potter, Spiderman, The Lord of the Rings, Signs, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Lady and the Duke, etc.--there's been not only a return of movies that portray existence as a battle of good vs. evil but that portray good as prey to temptation and despair and that place selfless moral obligations upon the good. It's hard to think of a moment in the popular arts--with the possible exception of the punk rock explosion in the mid-70s--that was quite this reactionary and retrograde. Whether the popularity of Christian products had an influence on this or not, it seems certain that if the secular movie industry continues to roll out big-budget flicks like this it will have to impact the distinctly evangelical culture. And the conscious creation of popular art that invites evangelicals and other conservatives in, rather than putting them off, would have to be considered something of a victory for Christian culture, regardless of whether it represents merely an economic decision on the part of artists or a genuine acceptance of the ideas for which they're now becoming proselytizers.

MORE:
Hollywood Rallies Round the Homeland: In a culture newly stirred by the danger of the national security state, the bad guys are clear-cut
and the good guys go nail 'em to the wall. (Todd S. Purdum, 2/02/03, NY Times)

The 70's revelations about C.I.A. coup attempts and other skulduggery gave way to the Carter administration's seeming powerlessness in the Iranian hostage crisis and the Reagan-era rebound in defense spending and the end of the cold war. By the 1990's, with the cold war over and prosperity reigning at home, the C.I.A. came to be seen as almost an afterthought.

Now the attacks of 2001 and the swift success of the United States's military campaign in Afghanistan have made for some creative amnesia about the American role in war through most of the last decade, when the Clinton administration stood on the sidelines in the face of the bloodbath in Rwanda and bombed Kosovo only from a relatively safe distance without a single American soldier on the ground. Next month, Bruce Willis stars in "Tears of the Sun," the tale of a Navy SEAL who defies orders by staging an unsanctioned rescue of a group of refugees in Nigeria.

"In how people are thinking, there's definitely an approach that says, `The government is not the bad guy,' " said Sean Daniel, an executive producer of "The Hunted," a thriller from Paramount set for release on March 14. Directed by William Friedkin, it stars Tommy Lee Jones as an F.B.I. agent on the trail of a serial murderer played by Benicio del Toro.

"There's an understanding from television and the `C.S.I.'s' and "Law and Orders' and the `24's' that there's a desire to see the bad guy gotten," he added. "It weighs in the story conferences and in the staff meetings. It just does. And while clearly the traditional grand escapism is what the movies are there for in times like this, there are also movies to be made where the government gets the bad guys."

Chase Brandon, a veteran covert operations officer who for the last six years has been the Central Intelligence Agency's official liaison to the world of movies, television and documentary films, said he had seen a steady increase in Hollywood's efforts at verisimilitude as well as a predisposition to offer sympathetic portrayals of the agency's work.

"People have seen documentary programs, most notably the series on the Discovery Channel, and they know what our lobby looks like and what our buildings look like, and more about the actual work that we do," he said. "So the old, tired and hackneyed representation of us as a bunch of rogue operatives, with everything dark and gloomy and sensational, that doesn't wash any more."

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 31, 2003 6:15 PM