A Humanistic Jew Observes Evangelical and Christian Pop Culture

First Things had a postive review of this very interesting sounding book Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture

The author ,Radosh, is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and a contributing editor at The Week magazine. The First Thinsg Review is here at Are you Ready?

The Review says in part:

In working on this unusual project, Radosh had the earnest desire to look beyond the tacky bumper stickers, tasteless “Testamint” breath fresheners, and humdrum rock and roll in order to discover what is behind many of the strange phenomena that comprise this misunderstood segment of American society. In the end, what he offers is not a scathing review but a brief history and fair-minded analysis of the commercialization of Christianity. And more interestingly, he offers Christians the rare opportunity to be a fly on the wall. .......

Radosh was not writing with Christians as his audience, and so the book’s side-glanced relevance to evangelicalism is intensified with a raw, simple honesty that too often evades books in the Christian market. Rather than reading like another sermon about how Christians should and should not engage culture, the book simply shines a spotlight on the elephants that have been in the room so long that they now have dirty “Pray for America” made-in-China coffee mugs and dusty Left Behind books sitting on them. Christians could benefit from listening to more respectful and engaged observers like Radosh whose observations, not filtered through a churched colander, could jolt them out of insularity and provide the motivation to finally return these elephants to the zoo. ......

Though most of the book is spent rummaging around in the periphery of American Christianity’s pop universe, Radosh concludes his adventure not by reprimanding the extremist, but by raving about the centrists who are as shocked as he is by his discoveries. In fact, rather than advocating for the annihilation of Christian pop culture, Radosh actually calls for a more complete intersection of the mainstream evangelical subculture with the larger American pop culture.
“As an outsider who has come to support the ascendancy of moderates within evangelicalism, I find myself sharing the goal of erasing that barrier,” he says. Radosh is so impressed by some Christian rock, Christian literature, and the Christian desire to participate as equals in American pop culture, that he wants to see this segment of the subculture adopted by the larger one: “As evangelical artists forgo the safety of the Christian bubble for the greater risks and rewards of competing in the mainstream, I hope the mainstream will make a similar effort to explore this ‘crossover’ Christian culture.” Radosh is like an amusement park caricature of John the Baptist: calling for a repentance of the sacrilegious junk at hand, while proclaiming a better pop culture to come.
By the end of the book, however, Christians should pause and realize that the perspective of a humanist can only be so helpful. Though Radosh might now understand this subculture better than some living in it, he is still operating from a completely different worldview and cannot understand that Christianity must, and always will be, a sort of parallel universe. But, perhaps now that Christian artists have been encouraged from the outside to enrich American pop culture, their parallel universe will become less stigmatized. .............