Collecting Praise: Global Culture Industries
Michael L. Buddle
121106
Serious followers of Christ are made not born. They are formed by stories, symbols, songs, and exemplars. In our day, it is not the Church that transmits those to the people, it is the global culture industries (Disney, Time Warner, Newscorp, etc. "if the world is now a global village, … it is one in which the sages and teachers, town criers and shamans, all work for the company store." "To the extent that culture industry formation succeeds, Christian formation fails."
Culture Industries as Industries. This is big business in the world, with an impact greater than their economic size.
Ways to Think about Media and Communication.
- Content. The Christian community tends to focus on the content of modern media.
- Control. Control has been concentrated into larger and larger companies. Government funded media has shrunk as it has been defunded. Some Christian communities have attempted to educate their constituents in order to gain control back.
- Context. Context analysis is more interested in the flow of the images, the impact of the system. "Not an idea nor a menu of postures and motions, Christianity is a way of being in the world charged with being a foretaste of the promised Kingdom of God…" In a 75 year life span, the average American will have spent 13 years watching TV, 3 years of which is commercials.
121108
Media and Ecclesial Formation. The early church required a period of Christian development before a new Christian was accepted fully into the fellowships. That practice went away when Christianity become the religion of the culture. Westerners spend very little time in church activities and instead they are consuming the modern cultural industry's products. "Churches whose members know the theme songs to old television shows more deeply and easily that they do the Psalms of Christian hymns are poorly placed to wield tools of such transformation power."
Worship as a Site for Christian Resistance and Formation. Using the worship time as a way to resist the culture is essentially futile. One hour a week will not help compared to the inundation the average person deals with. "For worship and liturgy to contribute to forming disciples rather than children of the culture, at a minimum they must resist the temptation to ape the techniques of the culture industries." That include kitsch, the cheap evoking of emotion.
Conclusion. Church may be the only time we gather as a group of people where there is no commercial motive.