Popular Culture, Contemporary Christian Worship, and the Waning of American Conservatism

I can't say it better than Ken Myers whose views on the gradual morphing of Christian worship in America into an expression mimicking popular entertainment culture are well-reported in The Weekly Standard here. Among the many good quotes is this:

“I’ve always thought that beautiful art was a great apologetic resource,” Myers says. Beauty is the chief attribute of God, said Jonathan (not Bob) Edwards. “Beauty points to a Creator.” Yet the church, Myers says, “capitulates more and more to the culture of entertainment.” 

So what, one might ask? Isn't the substance of the Christian message equally true regardless of the banality of the package in which it's presented? Not according to Myers, at least not in the long run: “It’s [the entertaining modality of worship] a way of keeping market share. But they’re digging their own grave. There’s a short-term benefit, but in the long term the kinds of cultural resources they need to be faithful to the Gospel won’t be there.”

That's right; the Christian faith exists within a cultural matrix that, in the first centuries of the Church's existence, was profoundly out of sync with the prevailing culture of late-Classical Rome. Thus, for example, you don't read of Christian gladiatorial combat shows. Eventually the culture of the Church affected that of Rome. And, to the extent it didn't, it failed, leaving the West with, for example, the after-effects of a commingled Church and State.

By any other name the waning of Christian social influence is secularization, as depicted by Charles Taylor, which makes claims to Truth with a capital "T" more and more implausible. See some of my thoughts about Taylor's work here, here, here, here, and yes, even here. The same holds for Beauty. A culture bereft of even the tools by which to identify the beautiful misses one of the primary ways of perceiving God in the world, and churches that substitute popular entertainment for transcendent worship are playing into secularism's hands.

But enough kvetching about the Church. I found this remark by the author of the article about Myers extraordinarily prescient:

Things haven’t been much better in the conservative [political] movement, to the extent that it still exists. The idea that conservatives should have a special interest in high culture​—​the best that has been thought and said, sung and played, carved and drawn​—​has been selectively applied. In speeches and in the Journal Myers has often raised the question of why political conservatives, who defended the literary canon, the Great Books, with such energy in the eighties and nineties, went limp when it came to defending other traditional forms of cultural expression.

I think I've said the same thing but not nearly as well. (Click here for my thoughts in a similar vein.) American conservatism has been reduced to defense of free markets (never mind massive governmentally-generated market distortions--here) and vindication of the right to bear arms (never mind conservatives' previous opposition to the Incorporation Doctrine).

Pursuit of truth has been replaced by Fox News and talk-radio echo chambers (with the volume always turned UP). And beauty? Culture? The pre-Adam Smith Western cultural inheritance? Nary a word. Hyperbolic commitment to the subjective theory of value of neo-classical economics has crowded out all other strands of conservatism. Which is to say, contemporary conservatism is little more than a form of personal secularism distinguished from contemporary social secularism by minimal sexual restraint.

Again, Myers has put it better so I'll let the Weekly Standard have the final word:

The indifference among conservatives toward beauty and order​—​toward artistic aspiration itself​—​shows how deeply they have imbibed the relativism and subjectivism of the culture in which they live and move and have their being. Myers likes to use the term “emotivism,” taken from the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. Emotivism is a handy tag for the secular dogma that all judgments of value are merely expressions of private emotion and taste, telling us nothing about the world as it is and not defensible on objective grounds. Along with everyone else, conservatives and Christians are uncomfortable with a hierarchy of aesthetic judgments. They have come to believe that beauty really is in the eye of the beholder; it’s not a quality inherent in things themselves but a matter of opinion. Bach .  .  . Chrissie Hynde .  .  . who’s to say who’s lovelier?

 Ouch.