Unabashedly pro-human, but are Christians even paying attention? Or, we don’t need to exegete the culture, the culture just needs Jesus

...Or, how Hollywood is reminding Christianity of it’s convictions, Or, Ron has too much time on his hands in Romania, Or, Why does Sufjan Stevens do this?

One of my favorite professors at Fuller Theological Seminar (who also happened to be the president), Richard Mouw, had this way of weaving into all of his classes the theme of the need for Christians to “exegete the culture”. He would use the Apostle Paul’s example on Mars Hill in Athens, where Paul wanders around the city noting the religious symbols and statues and uses that to than build a bridge to his audience as he tells them about God, as the prototype for this type of cultural exegesis. He would talk about Madonna in class (so much so that this became a joke as we would wait for the next Madonna reference) and how interested he was in the questions her music brought up and why her music seemed to resonate with so many. He didn’t agree with the answers she gave, but he totally took her and the questions she was asking seriously. His understanding of exegeting the culture totally reframed the manner in which I watched movies and TV, listened to music, and read books. This stance forced me to listen carefully to the questions and issues that pop culture is wrestling with and attempting to answer and has made watching movies and TV, listening to music, and reading books so much more enriching and provoking.

Which brings me to a triumvirate of movies which Christians may write off (because there is lots of cussing, sexuality, and disturbing material), but they do so at their own peril and to their own detriment. The movies are American Beauty, Magnolia, and Little Children and the questions they are asking are central for Christians. These three movies provide a biting and existentially rich critique of American cultural life and the hollowness that it brings, as well as a move towards finding humanness in all. In the midst of awful, but human, subject matter these films display empathically the flaws of the characters so that one can still see them as human. What each movie exposed were my own tendencies to write people off…I didn’t like Kevin Spacey’s objectification of a teen-age cheerleader, Tom Cruise’s misogyny, nor Jack Earle Haley’s sexual interest in children…but what each movie did was portray these awful displays as profoundly human, as something that could be empathized with (which is different from a blind “acceptance”) and, ultimately, as saying something about each of us. In portraying the characters in this light it seems like there is a wrestling with the question of whether we can ever write someone off. Our culture (including unfortunately the Church) seems to lend itself to a type of categorizing that can be deafeningly isolating and dehumanizing and these movies seem to illuminate and name that dynamic. There seems to be something profoundly Christian about this reframing that refuses to let categories and dehumanization reign. It reminds me of a poor Jewish man who saw humanity in Samaritans, prostitutes, the crippled, and the demon possessed and the life and healing that flowed in the breaking down of all these categories. There are bridges to be built…but is anyone listening?