By Adam Groza

Facebook is the new mall. It’s where (mostly) young people go to interact with peers. Emoticons and IM speak have replaced the food court. Goodbye concert tee. Hello mini-feed, requisite “favorites”. Ask me who I am and I will tell you who I listen to. Ask me what I like and I will list my favorite shows.

My disclaimer: I love pop culture. I think Facebook is pretty cool.

My problem: I think we are drowning in the noise.

Pascal makes the observation in Pensees that we are addicted to distractions:

When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men, the pains and perils to which they expose themselves… have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single, fact that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber

This post is not a puritanical argument for cultural abstention nor do I intend to establish guidelines for media consumption. Rather, I hope to encourage the reader, especially the Christian reader, to tune down the noise altogether.

Pop culture isn’t life’s main course. I recently read a blog post from a mother who lost her 3 year old to a tragic disease. She made the point that she loves television but hadn’t watched it for months. The reality of loss and suffering put the value of pop-culture to scale. There is a sense in which much of what we watch and listen is filler. It passes time. To a large extent, we are distracting ourselves. These are costly distractions and often our churches, friends, children, and spouses pay the price. To appease our guilt, we fold our addition to pop culture into our home life and pretend renting a DVD is family time. We strap our children in the vehicle and turn on a video to distract them. Is it good for them or just nice for us? By “hang out” we mean “share visual media”. We squander precious energy over a missed goal or drop in political percentage. There are monetary and spiritual costs to this obsession. How many of us would say we want to sense God’s presence and hear His voice echo from our time in the Word but in truth, when are we quiet enough to listen? When are we still enough to sense? To quote Neil Postman (out of context, but grant me some will-to-power) we are amusing ourselves to death. As Jeremy Post once said, “let the presence of purpose proportion the spin of your wheels.” Consume pop culture like ice-cream; in moderation. If it starts to dominate your thoughts and conversation, you might be a glutton.

Resist the temptation to define yourself and align your friendships by association along pop culture lines. I am not suggesting that our pop-preferences cannot betray meaningful things about us, but it’s the lazy way out! Someone may hate your music and end up being your best friend. Conversely, the easy connection afforded by tastes is often short lived. I am troubled by Christians who “church shop” for a congregation with similar cultural tastes, whether this means looking for suits or iPods. Cultural alignments make it easy to laugh and easy to hate. This cultural bigotry is unchristian because it draws lines in the shifting sand of cool, relevant, and hip. We miss the Titus 2 relationships with those who (gasp) know nothing about our music or movies but can teach us how to love our spouses, raise our children, and pursue our God. So pursue more enduring bonds: Eternal bonds. Pursue the unity of the faith with the old, the un-cool, and the un-hip. You will want others to look beyond your cultural ignorance when you are old and culturally obsolete. Be willing to do the same.

Cultural relevance is only descriptive. To refer to cultural relevance is to say something has impacted culture. It can describe, but it has very limited prescriptive value. John Piper has impacted culture but by most definitions he isn’t “culturally relevant” (i.e. doesn’t use movie illustrations, isn’t listening to Radiohead). Culture moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it. Once you get what has been impactful and reproduce it, the cultural world has already turned. Beware the sin of Babel! These ancient hipsters wanted to make a name for themselves, and this same vice often accounts for our indulgence in pop-culture. In endlessly branding ourselves with Bono or Tweedy, with Apple or Starbucks, we are hoping to project something about ourselves that makes us important or unique. We don’t buy the mini-van; we buy the family in the commercial. The family we want. The image we want. But you are not your music. Your value is rooted in the God who created you and not your iPod playlist. I think we will have better friendships if we stop looking for ourselves in others vis-à-vis shares cultural connections (“Oh good, their cool like me”). I think we will have better churches if we connect with others on the enduring levels of shared faith and hope. I think our families will benefit if we stop watching and start listening. To quote the Story Corps project, “honor each other’s lives through listening”.

By all means, eat your ice cream in moderation. Too much will make you sick. I conclude with a quote from one particularly noteworthy fictitious cultural icon: “Just take it easy, man.”

• Read Pensees by Pascal
• Read Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
• Read Eyes Wide Open: Looking For God in Popular Culture by William Romanowski