Beyond Assimilation: Christian Art as a Critic of Culture

[Here are a few excerpts from a paper I wrote freshman year titled "Beyond Assimilation: Christian Art as a Critic of Culture." Jacques Ellul has been very formative in my thoughts about faith, art and culture.]

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Jacques Ellul in his book The Subversion of Christianity presents a different approach to culture—that Christianity and human culture are irreconcilable. Christianity, then, becomes a critic of society, challenging its obsessions and rejecting its power. At the same time, Christians need to present creative, unique ways of approaching culture—not simply creating Christian CEOs or Christian rock stars, but creating something completely different from the systems and power structures of the world.
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Both Old and New Testaments are filled with culture; God’s revelation comes to us through culture. Not only Jewish culture, but the texts are influenced by Greek, Babylonian, Egyptian and Persian cultures. But what Ellul finds in these influences is a twisting of culture, of “taking a text and giving its objective sense a new turn so as to make it say something else.” He uses the example of the Hebrews changing the name of Baal, a revered pagan god, into Beelzebub (“god of the flies”). The Hebrews twisted cultures around: “they do not shut themselves off from them, they know and use them, but they make them say other things.” Paul uses Greek culture, but instead of integrating it into Christianity, he twists it around, submits it to the truth of the cross and the resurrection, to say something completely different. The Christian approach to culture is to satirize it; to poke fun at its pompousness and to take its words and phrases and twist them around to say truth.
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So what might Christian arts and entertainment look like? Christian arts cannot be a part of the major media empires for a faith based on service and self-sacrifice cannot align itself with the rich and powerful. Christian arts must, by nature, be independent and grassroots. It should never be institutionalized. Attempts to create Christian entertainment systems, obviously, are a perversion of Christianity.
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Christian artists should not see people as a market or a demographic, but as individuals. Christians should, then, reject forms of wide mass media that turn people simply into consumers and spectators.
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So Christian concerts should not be designed to elevate entertainers and separate them from audiences, through lights, sound and stages, but a Christian concert should connect the two parties together and put the entertainer on an equal (or lower, if possible) level with his audience. Standing six feet above a crowd covered in lights is not an act of love for others; it is an elevation of self. Standing six feet below a man is not graciously accepting a gift; it is veneration of a human being above one’s self. This is completely alien to Jesus.

There are many more issues that Christians need to think about, such as merchandizing, that should not be swallowed whole, but should be carefully thought about and either be twisted for good or eliminated altogether. The summation is this: Christianity “must permeate the social body and become an active, life-giving, critical, disturbing, inadequate, or stimulating factor, but never an institution belonging to the social body, never a principle by which to organize it.”