Lazy Cultural Engagement

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 3:24 pm by Alissa Wilkinson

Lazy Cultural Engagement 2015-03-13T15:24:39-05:00 Alissa Wilkinson

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Last week I wrote a little something for Christianity Today about “lazy cultural engagement”:

In the reflection, Will McDavid wrote that “cultural engagement”—a term I, too, have come to dread—is a poor substitute for the sort of cultural isolation that evangelicals and other Christians embraced in the twentieth century, and have just begun to claw their way out of in the relatively recent past.

But as McDavid points out, our “re-engagement” with culture has sometimes amounted to, well, talking about talking about culture. Things get much trickier when we actually pull out the actual cultural artifacts: it’s one thing to talk about watching movies, and a whole different, more complex thing to try to talk about specific movies (Noah, say, or Before Midnight, or Her, or Free Birds, orWolf of Wall Street).

I think that’s because we tend to treat actual cultural artifacts in the way we sometimes treat the Bible: as “proof texts” from which we can draw principles or truths for application. Though we love the Bible, we evangelicals in particular have often treated verses as if they stand alone, forgetting that the story in which they appear speaks just as much as the verses themselves. Form speaks, as well as content.

Similarly, Christian critics can lean (lazily) into the idea that products of culture mainly exist as object lessons to be turned into “truths” when we talk about them and figure out how they do or don’t line up with our beliefs.

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