VOX POPULI Beware the counsel of the pious
Keen, Suzanne
Suzanne Keen The relation of two amorphous entities- Catholicism and popular culture-cannot be reasonably understood in units larger than the individual person. For if we can sometimes agree about...
...Similarly, we must wonder why certain productions of pop culture "ought to be" offensive to us as Catholics, or as defenders of American family values...
...My own view is that if the Catholic church really wanted us to be counter-cultural, the priests would tell us to throw away our TVs...
...In the end, one of the most striking contrasts between popular culture and Catholicism is the latter's defensiveness...
...For if we can sometimes agree about what Catholicism means to American Catholics, we certainly will not agree about the lineaments and boundaries of popular culture...
...Though frequently urged by the church to live our lives counterculturally, we watch TV, listen to the radio, read magazines and catalogues, go to movies, rent videos, repeat urban myths, and spend our money on the material goods we ought to be able to live without...
...We are too much immersed in it, and Catholicism is too much a part of it...
...I'm not sure that there's a whole lot Catholicism can do about pop culture, although individual Catholics can use their time, attention, money, and intelligence like any other Americans...
...Of course pop culture is influenced by Catholicism: the derivative blasphemies of heavy metal music, grunge, and Madonna require the iconography of religious culture...
...we ought to ask...
...How do they know...
...In the style of Hildegard of Bingen or Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act, Catholicism can adopt aspects of popular culture in order to get the folk to sing along, but I confess a distaste for this derivative strategy...
...And what are they getting out of it...
...Suzanne Keen, a regular Commonweal contributor, teaches English at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia...
...my husband could not get beyond the adultery at the heart of The Bridges of Madison County...
...Too often attacks on the "messages" of pop culture get the message wrong, or take a naive view of the consequences of representation...
...But as long as we're keeping them, we'll have to rely on our own judgment to recognize the pernicious fictions and to resist the enticements to consumerism...
...While my pop culture may have more subtitles in it, and my husband's more sports statistics, its significant relation to our Catholicism depends only on how much time and money it absorbs...
...Who says...
...As consumers and Christians, we must make our own judgments about popular culture's multifarious offerings and its methods of making us want more...
...To be convincing, condemnation requires understanding, which sometimes means looking at the interdicted object...
...When we deplore movies on moral grounds, our Catholicism refracts differently...
...In extreme cases, alternative recommendations cast doubt on the cultural watchdog's competence (poor Bob Dole-do you think he actually saw True Lies...
...If the two can be seen as antagonists at all, their rivalry takes the ludicrous form of a contest in which one of the parties (popular culture) fails to realize it's being attacked...
...So do the films of Wim Wenders, a contemporary allegorist...
...I fumed for days about the repellent message of The Lion King (that those nasty inner-city hyenas would despoil paradise for lack of a patriarch...
...I do believe that protesters can make big companies such as Disney or Time-Warner jumpy, but popular culture is a diverse and mercurial phenomenon, broader and less predictable than the big companies most often targeted by those who would circumvent the First Amendment by employing strategies of public shaming, rather than out-and-out censorship...
Vol. 122 • September 1995 • No. 16
