All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes - A Review
One of my best recent investments has been in a subscription to the Mars Hill Audio Journal.
I’ve known about Ken Myers for years, but with so many free podcasts and sermons, I’ve never felt justified in paying for the material. I was tremendously wrong.
The first inkling of the error of my delay came when I purchased a single edition, “The Christian Mind of C. S. Lewis,” because one of the contributors to that edition also contributed to a book I was editing with the same title. After I listened to that hour-long recording a few times, I was ready to plunge into a full subscription.
Since I began listening to Ken Myers conducting interviews on a regular basis, I decided to finally pick up a copy of his book, All God’s Children & Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture. The book was originally released in 1989, but has remained in print since. Crossway released a reprint edition with a new introduction in 2012. In the world of publishing, that is a pretty significant record for longevity. It is well deserved.
The constant refrain of Myers and Mars Hill Audio Journal is to pursue permanent things. So much of what passes for culture in our age is intentionally temporary and of little durable value. Modernism, which is a nebulous movement with many tentacles, demands that we believe that what is new and shiny must be better than what is old and well-worn.
Myers’ book is intended for Christians, it is not a generic critique of culture for a broad audience. It offers a consistent reminder that Christianity should have its own unique culture, which should have a distinct shape. And, since that shape is caused by the character of our immutable, impassible God, it stands to reason that an authentically Christian culture should seek after permanent things.
More significant, I think, to Myers is that Christianity should reflect a degree of excellence in its culture, rather than subsisting on the edges of the mainstream of popular culture, picking up the crumbs and copying the worst trends of a few months or years ago.
In this way All God’s Children & Blue Suede Shoes espouses something similar to Andy Crouch’s concept in Culture Making or what T. M. Moore argues for in Culture Matters. In some way, Myers also seems to be pushing for the recovery and restoration of permanent institutions, much as James Davidson Hunter does in To Change the World. All God’s Children & Blue Suede Shoes was a foretaste of what the Mars Hill Audio Journal would become four years later. It is a vision that has withstood the past thirty years quite well.
The book begins by describing the dangers of popular culture, beginning with its tendency toward trendiness. Everything is temporary and disposable. There is an immediate gratification that finds itself fulfilled primarily in a disenchanted materialism. That bleeds into the way that even Christians make decisions, where dollars and cents are the only real consideration for vocational changes and entertainment selection. The soul is not fully considered.
As Christians, Myers argues, we should be seeking after durable things. We should seek to value beauty, goodness, and truth. Those are qualities to our distinctly Christian culture that should go beyond merely gluing a Bible verse onto the cover of a journal or modifying rock and roll lyrics to have a gospel-centered vibe. Instead, we should be looking for transcendent qualities in our literature and our music.
This means that sometimes we will prefer art that has been created by non-Christians much more than that that has been created by believers. Because, if a novel points us deeper into the human experience as it ought to be, then that is a cultural artifact that deserves preservation. At the same, Christians should be more capable of creating those durable works of art because we should have a stronger sense of the transcendent, because the transcendent God lives within us immanently.
This is the tragedy of Christian sub-culture. Too often it is kitsch and cliché. Too often it is derivative. Instead of forming new Austens and Dostoevskys, popular Christian culture knocks off Danielle Steel. Biblical manhood becomes a caricature of tavern culture, except without the good beer. Our worship music starts to sound like the top 40, except without the resonance that even that tissue paper culture has.
Myers calls us to a deeper relationship with culture. To cultivate enjoyment in complex artforms that exalt the human soul, lifting them toward God. This is hard work, as he notes, but it is also an act of worship.
The downside of Myers perspective is that he seems to cut himself off from those occasional snippets of popular culture that use a throwaway medium to make a deeper point. For Myers, good music seems to end with Bach, though he’s willing to accept the value of Jazz. And yet, there are times when the collective weight of a seemingly vacuous television series can make a deeper point. Those cases are, admittedly rare, but following Myers too closely would cut us off from those opportunities. Of course, when we consider the amount of work it takes to sift through the tares to get those few heads of wheat, he may be on to something.
It’s hard to place this book, exactly. It is one that I’d like to read with my teenagers as we think about what good music, movies, books, and art ought to do to us and for us. But it is a book that presumes that the reader has some awareness of good and bad quality and has an ability to make discerning choices. For those that are raised on the cotton candy of cartoons, super hero films, and Christian prairie romance novels, Myers’ thesis may be a hard pill to swallow. And yet, if we are to recover our love for transcendent things and our culture-making Christian character, then the Church needs to listen more carefully to people like Myers.
There’s no reason to doubt that Jesus was nailed to the cross. Ultimately, I trust what Scripture says about Jesus’s crucifixion because I also trust what it says about his resurrection. And that’s what we should be celebrating this week.