Page 2817 – Christianity Today (2024)

Mike Myers has made a career of pushing the limits of the PG-13 rating. For example, the American ratings system currently allows PG-13 films to use the f-word only once, maybe twice, and never in a sexual context; anything beyond that gets the R rating. But in one of the Austin Powers movies, the title character meets a couple of Asian women who seem to be asking him to do something to them and, if he is hearing them correctly, it would seem that they are using the f-word over and over again, and in a definitely sexual way. But then it turns out that they are actually telling him their names, which are spelled just a wee bit differently, so it’s all, um, innocent, or something. And so the film remained PG-13 and—since the PG-13 rating is purely advisory and not enforceable—children of all ages could still go to the movie and share a snicker or two over this naughty bit of innuendo.

Myers dishes up more of the same in The Love Guru, his first live-action film since he starred in the seriously ill-advised The Cat in the Hat five years ago. This time, he plays Guru Pitka, an American raised in India who has moved back to the States—to Hollywood, specifically—and become a popular author, speaker and friend to the stars, delivering lectures that substitute trite acronyms and word games like “BIBLE = Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth” and “Intimacy = Into-Me-I-See” for anything of any real spiritual depth. But, as we learn in a flashback, Guru Pitka has been wearing a chastity belt since he was 12 years old, and he cannot take it off and enjoy the love of others until he has first learned how to love himself. So while the guru has built a reputation on boosting the self-esteem of others and on fixing other people’s relationships, his brain is essentially stuck in preadolescence—look no further than his obsession with penis jokes throughout the film.

But since Guru Pitka is supposedly an expert on relationships, the central plot of this film—to the extent that it has one—revolves around his efforts to save the marriage of one Darren Roanoke (Baby Mama‘s Romany Malco), a black hockey player known as “the Tiger Woods of hockey,” who has been off his game ever since his wife Prudence (Stomp the Yard‘s Meagan Good) left him for a goalie on another team, a French-Canadian named Jacques Grande (Justin Timberlake). Jacques, incidentally, has a nickname that is synonymous with rooster—and indeed, his hockey mask bears an image of a rooster and his house is even guarded by a rooster—but of course, that isn’t what his nickname refers to. Similarly, the coach who oversees Roanoke’s team happens to bear the name Cherkov (Verne “Mini-Me” Troyer). And so it goes.

At any rate, Guru Pitka’s motives in wanting to save the Roanokes’ marriage are not entirely pure. First, he has been invited to do so by the owner of Darren’s team, a woman named Jane Bullard (Jessica Alba), who is convinced that the team cannot win the Stanley Cup without Darren and that Darren cannot win on the ice unless his personal life is straightened out. Second, Guru Pitka has taken the case because he thinks it will boost his chances of winning a guest spot on Oprah’s talk show, thus making him a bigger self-help celebrity than Deepak Chopra. So, for a while at least, the health of the Roanokes’ marriage is important chiefly because others find it useful—but of course, somewhere along the way, the guru’s priorities change.

It is interesting to compare The Love Guru to a film like, say, You Don’t Mess with the Zohan. Both films feature Saturday Night Live alumni and a lot of raunchy humor, much of it based on the male sex organ, that could easily have tipped over into R-rated territory. Both films also allow their stars to dwell on issues that matter to them; for Sandler, it is Jewish culture and American politics, while for Myers, it is Canadian culture and Hollywood celebrity. Darren’s team, which hasn’t won a Stanley Cup in over 40 years, happens to be the Toronto Maple Leafs—or, as my dad used to call them, the Toronto Make-Believes—while Jacques frequently uses a French swear-word that is supposed to be the worst thing you can possibly say in Quebec, or so every child raised in English Canada is told. (That hasn’t stopped the film from getting a G rating in Quebec, though.)

But the subject matter of Sandler’s film is inherently more interesting than anything Myers might have to say about the shallowness of pop spirituality, and the moral of Sandler’s film, such as it is, has lingered in my mind for the past few weeks, while I am writing this review mere hours after seeing The Love Guru and already I can feel it slipping out of my memory. There simply isn’t a whole lot worth retaining here.

If, like me, you grow tired of films that rely on a non-stop stream of genitalia gags—with a few pee and poop jokes thrown in for good measure—then the relentlessly juvenile tone of The Love Guru certainly won’t be for you. But the film is not entirely unfunny. There are chuckles to be had from the opening scene, in which a famous actor mocks himself without ever appearing onscreen, to the closing credits, where an outtake shows Troyer tossing off an unscripted quip that is funnier than just about anything that is said within the film itself. I also got a kick out of the Hockey Night in Canada segments that begin with the animated logos for the Toronto Maple Leafs and Los Angeles Kings violently bumping each other off; and Stephen Colbert throws in some weird, absurdist moments as a seriously out-of-control sports announcer.

But for the most part, this film is a waste of time. In one of his many bon mots, Guru Pitka promises to take his followers from “Nowhere” to “Now here.” But too often, the gags leave you shrugging and thinking, “I guess you had to be there.”

Talk About It

Discussion starters

1. The gurus in this film say you need to learn to love yourself before you can love others. Is that true?
2. Do you think Guru Pitka is in a position to give advice to other people when he has not entirely succeeded in learning the lesson that his own guru gave him? How grown-up does someone have to be before he or she can help someone else to be a mature adult?
3. As shallow as Guru Pitka’s lessons are, is there anything we can learn from them? What about sayings like, “There is no such thing as failure, only early attempts at success”? Do you agree or disagree? Why?

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

The Love Guru is rated PG-13 for crude and sexual content throughout (including frequent references to the male crotch, penis-shaped food items, and so on, as well as people playing with urine-soaked mops and animals leaving droppings outside buildings and copulating in public), language (some English four-letter words, a French curse word), some comic violence (a bar fight involves a lot of chairs being smashed over people’s heads, and someone pulls a piece of glass out of his forehead) and drug references.

Photos © Copyright Paramount Pictures

Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

What other Christian critics are saying:

• Plugged In
• Crosswalk
• Catholic News Service
• Past the Popcorn

UrL: Some people are taking issue with the idea that a pastor’s sheep can be stolen because the sheep really belong to Christ. Where do you think the church member’s loyalty should reside – with Christ, the church, the pastor, or all three?

Ed Young Jr.: I agree that church members and attendees don’t belong to the pastor. They are God’s people, called by him to serve him above all. Pastors are called to shepherd them, not own them.

The issue of pirating, though, isn’t about the members’ loyalty or about attendees finding another church. We tell people all the time that if Fellowship Church isn’t for them, they should leave. And we lovingly direct them to any one of the phenomenal churches in our area.

The issue with pirating is all about what happens in the church leadership – specifically the staff. I’ve discovered there are several types of people around you: those who are with you, those who are for you, and those who use you. Pirates are the ones you thought were with you, but who end up using you for their own agenda. They are the people you, as a leader, pour your heart into. They’re the people you laugh with, cry with, and share your life with, the ones you mold and shape.

Pirating rears its ugly head when those leaders that you cultivate work behind your back (and the church’s back) maliciously and intently to gather their own “kingdom” and head out the door. The real issue is betrayal.

I have no problem with leaders being cultivated in the church and then being sent out to start new churches. But the key is that they are sent. When someone on your staff usurps the authority of the church, starts a rogue movement, and does their own thing, then you are dealing with a pirate.

UrL: Employees leaving a corporation to begin their own business often sign a non-competition clause requiring them to operate a predetermined distance away. What do you think is an appropriate geographic distance for a church planter to operate who was nurtured and given their start at Fellowship Church?

EY: This is an interesting question, because it brings up a core issue that many people seem to be missing in this whole thing: ethics.

In the corporate world, it is illegal to work for someone and, at the same time, work to steal their clients. You are getting paid by that person and pulling the rug from underneath them at the same time. You will go to jail for that. And that’s why there are non-competition clauses.

I’m not saying that the church should be run like a business. I’m not saying that we should model everything we do after the corporate world. I don’t think we need to sign non-competition clauses. I’m simply pointing out that the ethics of this situation are all out of whack.

In the church, our ethics should be so far above the corporate world that competition isn’t even an issue (“above reproach” sound familiar?). To use the old adage, there are plenty of fish in the sea. It’s not about placing some building in a certain position on a map. It’s about ethics and how you go about fulfilling your call.

UrL: Is competition always bad? Lyle Schaller wrote a book titled From Cooperation from Competition in which he calls for more churches to compete in the same area for the same people. This, he says, will cause all the churches to improve their ministries. (It’s free-market capitalism meets seeker-driven church.) Should we be upset by the presence of a competitive church down the street, or should we celebrate and welcome it?

EY: Simply put, no, competition isn’t bad. I believe it helps us become better at what we do. It’s the thing that drives us. Everything we do at Fellowship is about competition. We’re in competition against the evil forces in the world to reach lives. That’s the same battle we all face. But pirating has nothing to do with competition.

We celebrate every church that is preaching and teaching God’s Word and going after those far from God. We’re all called to depopulate hell by making it hard for people to go there.

But so many of these comments are about sheep swapping; they are so concerned about the competition down the street that they miss the point of reaching the lost. I’m not worried about competition. Again, there are plenty of people for every church.

We are here to reach the lost. And I think every church leader would agree with that. But when someone in your staff becomes a pirate, the mission is jeopardized. The focus shifts from reaching out to the world for Christ. Instead, we have to deal with issues that Christ never wanted us to face when he prayed in John 17, “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.”

It ultimately comes down to one question: who are you reaching? Because pirates are all about reaching into the church first for their own agenda rather than reaching out to the world to save lives and fulfill Christ’s agenda.

Those raised in a ministry home and who are now in ministry themselves have a unique perspective on the relationship of church life and family life. Kyle Idleman is a teaching pastor at Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky. He and his wife, DesiRae, have three daughters, Mackenzie, Morgan, and Macy, and a son, Kael. Kyle's father, Ken Idleman, has been a both a college president and a minister. Ken now ministers at Crossroads Christian Church in Newburgh, Indiana. We thought you'd benefit from Kyle's perspective …

I've often thought I should be in some sort of support group for those who grew up in a ministry home. I'm Kyle and I'm a PK. Of course, there wouldn't be any real need for introductions because everyone would not only know who I am, they would also know from the sermon illustration that I used to wear Yoda "underoos."

People have long forgotten the compelling point my dad was making, but they forever retain the image of me in my Yoda pajamas. (I'm still looking for a way to work into one of my messages that my dad sleeps in his whitey tighties and black dress socks.)

In this support group, we also would bemoan the discrimination we faced. Always being held to a higher standard. Called on to pray at every youth meeting. Pressured to wear Christian t-shirts (This blood's for you! Yes, I wore that one). Oh, the expectations. For as long as I can remember, I've been asked, "Are you hoping to be a preacher when you grow up?" Actually, I'm still asked that from time to time.

But the real challenge for ministry kids is feeling that your entire life is being played out on stage for all to see. Sometimes referred to as "life in the fishbowl," there is a sense that people are always watching.

The danger is that you grow up associating your faith with impressing other people. Growing up I often did all the right things not primarily out of love for Jesus but because I knew people were watching, and I cared what they thought. Inevitably this leads in one of two directions: to hypocrisy (you embrace the stage and become a professional actor), or to rebellion (if people want a show, you'll give them a show). For many ministry kids it leads to both, rebellion that no one knows about.

My wife and I are now raising four ministry kids of our own. God is patiently teaching us as parents, and we constantly pray for his grace and mercy to cover our shortcomings. Early on I vowed not to use my children as sermon illustrations, which sounds great until it's Saturday afternoon and they've provided you with the perfect story. I've tried to keep them out of the spotlight, but they've already learned that people are watching them.

The danger for ministry kids is feeling that your entire life is being played out on stage … associating your faith with impressing other people.

As they get older, my hunch is that two of my kids will love the attention, and two of them will despise it. I'm equally concerned by both responses. So as I've reflected on my upbringing, several things stand out to help me in raising my own ministry kids.

Less "spotlight syndrome"

It helped me to see my parents consistently live the faith when I knew no one else was watching. Things were not one way behind the closed doors of our home and another way when we stepped through the doors of the church. This is especially important in the little things. My mom never ordered water and then got Sprite at the drink station. My dad never lied about our age for a cheaper admission into the theme park. If my parents would forbid us from watching a certain movie, I knew they wouldn't see it either. My wife and I don't want to be legalistic about it, but we try to live to the same standards that we are teaching our children.

When I came down the steps for school, mom was sitting there with a coffee cup in one hand and a Bible in her lap. Every night my dad would kneel beside my bed and pray. In his prayers he would often confess some of his sins and ask God to help him be a more loving husband and a patient father.

Sometimes integrity is thought of as not having secret sin, but my dad showed me that it's more than that. It's being honest when you do sin. It's not pretending to be more spiritual in public than you are in private.

It's important to own your failures. Your kids will eventually figure out the truth, so you're better off not pretending to be more impressive than you really are. A few weeks ago I got into an argument with my wife before church. I raised my voice in front of the kids and displayed my impressive gifts of sarcasm.

Less than an hour later I was teaching from Philippians 3 on the peace of God. In my message I confessed, "Just a short while ago, I was stressed out and talked disrespectfully to my wife. I was wrong." I included that in my message so that one person would hear it – my oldest daughter who was sitting with her mother. I want my kids to understand that the spotlight doesn't mean pretending you're perfect.

Life in the spotlight tends to become all about the performance. Ministry kids have high expectations and a lot of pressure put on them by others and there isn't much you can do about that. But the general parenting principle of encourage their character more than their accomplishments is especially important for ministry kids. My wife and I are careful to compliment our children on things like good grades, athletic success, or clean rooms. But we try to make a much bigger deal out of a selfless act, a kind word, or their consistent quiet time with God. We want the focus on who they are, and not just what they do.

The longer I'm in ministry, the more I appreciate how my parents would be consistently positive about the church. I never heard my dad be critical of others or my mom complain about a late night prayer meeting.

When I talk about work with my family, I try to share stories of how the church helped a single mom with this month's bills or the letter I got from the man in prison who listens to our messages online. At dinner we'll pray for the student ministry team that's in the Dominican Republic, or the lady who visited my wife's Bible study. We try to find ways to celebrate what God is doing through the ministry.

Even more than that, I'm trying to include the family in the adventure of ministry. When I was a teenager, my dad would take me with him to serve food to the homeless at the local food kitchen. When he would speak out of town, my sisters and I would take turns going with him.

I try not to make my kids feel that my job as pastor is a package deal, where they're all put to work. But I am always looking for ways to include them in the adventure. When I visit small groups, I often take one of my older daughters with me, and if she wants to, I'll have her pray with us. Together we make cards and then visit a nursing home to hand them out. As a family we make care packages for needy families over the holidays.

A few months ago, I got to speak out of town. My wife packed my oldest daughter's bag, and on my way to the airport I stopped by her school, took her out of class, and told her we were going on a preaching trip. All the way to the airport, she tried to guess where we were going. Eventually she read on the boarding pass that we were going to Las Vegas.

Each time before I spoke, I asked her to pray for me. I wanted her to think of ministry as an incredible adventure of seeing God at work. And you don't have to go to Las Vegas. The farthest my dad ever took me was to Parsons, Kansas. But it was on one of those trips that I told my dad, "I want to become a Christian."

Finally, I'm learning just how hard it is to find the right balance between ministry and family. If I do the wedding on Saturday afternoon for the child of long time church members, I'll miss my daughter's soccer game. If I speak at the fundraising banquet for the crisis pregnancy center, it will mean missing dinner with my family at home. Whatever decision I make, someone isn't going to be happy. It's tough.

My greatest concern as a ministry parent is not that my children will grow up and decide that they don't want to work in the church or marry someone who does.

What I really fear is that they will associate Jesus with an overbearing ministry and end up walking away from both. My prayer is that they will associate Jesus with the adventure of ministry and end up loving him all the more.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Dale and Faye’s daughter Anna had cystic fibrosis. A blood clot that formed because of her severe coughing had lodged in Anna’s windpipe. I had finished breakfast when the call came. Could I meet Dale and Faye at the hospital?

I stepped into the room by 7:45 and sat next to Faye. That’s when they told me she was gone. We wept. A friend came. A doctor came and went. It became quiet. The moment had come, and I must pray. On my knees in that little room, I tried to make my voice work well enough to choke and stumble through the words of Psalm 27:

“The Lord is my light and my salvation—whom shall I fear? … One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord forever, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord, and seek him in his temple. For in the day of trouble he will keep me safe in his dwelling.”

I can’t say, now, that I chose the best psalm, but that was the prayer of the moment, the first of more to be squeezed and poured from me in that next ninety minutes at the hospital.

Spoiler alert: challenge ahead

Why I stopped memorizing Scripture years ago, I don’t know. Laziness. Busyness. Pride. Always this nagging feeling that I should, but never the conviction to really do it.

Then conviction came from an article in my college alumni magazine. Chaplain Dale Cooper is a runner, and his workouts took place in the early morning while it was still dark. He would copy Bible verses onto 3×5 cards, and whenever he came running under a streetlight, he would pull out the card and memorize the words. What a great image!

Coop had been doing this for 20 years. I thought, How much of the Word could I know by heart 20 years from now? So I started carrying paper in my pockets. When I go for my morning prayer-walk, I take a piece of the Bible along. On long drives to visits or meetings, I can have a Bible on my lap, reviewing and learning. There are countless empty moments just waiting to be used, and brain cells and heart cavities just waiting to be filled by Scripture.

I took Coop’s challenge for these reasons:

1. Knowing Bible verses by heart makes the Word alive within me.

There are Bibles on my shelves, on my desk, in the back window-shelf of my car, and one in the trunk too. They accumulate. I carry them to hospital rooms, living rooms, and meetings. I read them, sometimes out of duty, or with the cold, practical necessity of having to generate a sermon or inspirational lesson from them. Using the Bible is my job.

Memorizing portions of it, however, makes God’s Word a living presence within me; I can no longer read it as something that is outside of me.

There are times when, while trying to memorize it, a phrase or just a word captures me, and all day long it becomes an object of wonderment. I am surprised at times how God ministers to me through this thought process.

2. It makes for more interesting conversation in my head.

When you drive, road signs say things like “Next rest area, 37 miles” or “Warning: Deer, next 7 miles.” A cartoon in The New Yorker, though, shows a man in his car on the highway, and a sign at the roadside says, “Your Own Tedious Thoughts, next 200 miles.” The same ol’ thoughts and worries play in there, and Satan tosses his dreary sludge in there, too.

Memorizing Bible verses gives me something productive and worthy to do with my brain. Dreary stretches of road pass quickly. And Satan has a more difficult time getting my attention.

3. Knowing the Bible by heart gives me greater professional confidence.

It’s not that I want to show off, but it sure is nice to know that, in the event (*gasp*) that I am somewhere and there is not Bible at hand, I still have the Word in my grasp.

Don’t get me wrong: there are times when I pray and I am surprised at what God provides for me to say. But when I was in the room with Dale and Faye, I had no words worthy to speak. Psalm 27, at that moment, was God’s Word for us, as clear and undiluted as it gets.

Coop is so far ahead of me, but who knows? Twenty years from now, I could have amazing amounts of Scripture living within me.

So could you.

Keith Mannes pastors Highland Christian Reformed Church in Marion, Michigan.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

N.T. Wright will be on The Colbert Report tonight (11:30 p.m. eastern, 10:30 central). To whet your appetite, head over to CatholicColbert.com for some of the show’s best clips on religion (well, on Catholicism, anyway).

Unfortunately, CatholicColbert.com has slowed down lately – the last post was April 22, and there’s no mention, for example, of the following week’s religion-heavy episode with Anne Lamott, the religion-filled May 27 episode with bits on John Hagee and a brutal interview with guest Tony Perkins, or Rick Warren’s visit earlier this year.

Last night, Colbert continued his commentary on Obama’s church resignation by launching “Barack Obama’s Church Search.” The first installment had Hindu Temple Society of North America President Uma Mysorekar on whether Obama should convert to Hinduism.

If Colbert’s so-many-layers-of-irony-he-might-be-sincere shtick doesn’t appeal to you, set your TiVo to record PBS’s “Jesus in China,” a Frontline/World documentary with Chicago Tribune China correspondent Evan Osnos. It airs on PBS stations Tuesday night.

If both shows appeal, you can watch Osnos on Colbert. PBS and Comedy Central will have their respective programs available online after they air.

Update: The Wright video is below. But it turns out that Colbert’s other guest beat the bishop to the punch in quoting Scripture. Cookie Monster paraphrased Deuteronomy 8:3: “One cannot live on cookies alone.”

“Author Unknown” once asked Jesus why there was only one set of footprints in the sand during life’s most perilous moments.

Now a federal court on Long Island is trying to decide just whose footprints were next to Jesus’ during the better times.

Basil Zangare of Shirley, New York, claims they belonged to his late mother, Mary Stevenson, and that she’s the “author unknown” whose “Footprints in the Sand” poem is depicted on countless posters, coffee mugs, and pocket cards.

Zangare filed suit on May 12 in federal court, claiming his mother penned the famous words in the 1930s and registered them with the U.S. Copyright Office in 1984.

“My client wants to preserve for all time the knowledge in the public that his mother wrote this poem,” said Zangare’s lawyer, Richard Bartel, who is based in Remsenburg, New York.

Not so fast, says the lawyer for Canadian traveling evangelist Margaret Fishback Powers, one of the women named in Zangare’s suit.

“In a nutshell, it’s baseless,” said Powers’s San Francisco attorney, John A. Hughes.

Hughes said Zangare waited too long to sue and, besides, the registration of a copyright doesn’t prove absolute authorship. Powers, who lives in Coquitlam, British Columbia, is the only one with a registered trademark for “Footprints” and “Footprints in the Sand,” he said.

“She wrote it at Thanksgiving in Canada at a religious retreat in 1964,” said Hughes of Powers, who has numerous “Footprints” products on the market.

He hopes the case will be dismissed before “witnesses of an event that happened in rural Canada in 1964” have to be tracked down.

Meanwhile, Carolyn Joyce Carty, the other woman named in Zangare’s suit, said she has not yet been served with the suit.

“I am devastated at any remarks that have been made about my authorship,” she said in a response to e-mailed questions.

On her website, Carty claims to have written the poem in 1963 when she was six years old and inspired by poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The proof of who wrote the poem could actually be lost in the mail. In a probate settlement after Stevenson’s death in 1999, Hughes said, an alleged “original document” of her writing was lost in an overnight delivery several years ago.

Bartel said he’s trying to track that document down. “Everything is someplace,” he reasons.

The poem continues to sell, so much that Zangare suggests the two women he’s suing have earned more than $1 million each from sales. Powers’s attorney said her “significant but not staggering” revenues on the poem are confidential.

Zangare’s lawyer says he mostly grants permission for use of the poem at funerals and in yearbooks, and calls the son’s profits on occasional product licensing “minimal.”

Carty, for her part, said Zangare is making assumptions about her income: “I have not been paid any royalties by anyone who has promoted my poetry.”

But distributors of the myriad of products with the poem, or portions of it, often stay out of the controversy altogether, declaring the author as “unknown” or “anonymous” or simply not listing one at all.

“It probably doesn’t have the popularity that it had 20 years ago, but it has become something of a standard,” said Jim Potts, president of Dicksons, a Seymour, Indiana-based Christian gift company that includes six pages of “Footprints” products in its online catalog. Dicksons uses “Author Unknown” on some “Footprints” merchandise.

Potts said it’s sad “Footprints” has become the source of litigation rather than inspiration.

“At times we think we’re strong enough that we did walk through the proverbial storm alone,” he said, “and then we realize … not really.”

Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

NPR reported on the popularity of the poem and the confusion over its ownership.

Zangare and Carty’s dueling websites have more about their versions of the poem’s origin.

The three versions of “Footprints” are side-by-side at WowZone.com.

A humanistic Jew spent a year immersed in the Christian entertainment world. When he came back up for breath, Daniel Radosh wrote about the $7 billion industry.

In Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture, Radosh describes his experiences with the Cornerstone Music Festival, Christian comedians, creationist Ken Ham, Bibleman, Ultimate Christian Wrestling, Jay Bakker, and others.

Actually, he concludes, merging pop culture and Jesus isn’t as bad as he expected:

“The best aspects of Christian culture — the unabashed celebration of the transcendent, the challenge to crass materialism, the commitment to personal responsibility — helped me see more clearly what is too often lacking in secular entertainment and media,” Radosh writes. “Jesus’ radical message of brotherhood, selflessness, and dignity may be just the antidote to our contemporary ethos of shamelessness and overindulgence.”

Radosh is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and a contributing editor at The Week magazine. He also blogs at Radosh.net.

What prompted you to work on this book?

The initial idea for it came because the world is totally unfamiliar to me as a secular Jewish New Yorker. But I have a teenage sister-in-law who is a born-again Christian, and I met her for the first time visiting my wife’s family in Wichita and tagged along with her and her Christian friends to a rock festival. At that point I really wanted to try to understand what was going on in this society, and how I could have missed it all these years.

Did you have something you wanted to accomplish, or was your intent pure observation?

Honestly, I did it because a lot of it is quite funny. I think even many Christians will recognize how humorous a lot of Christian pop culture can be, especially from the outside. But I also thought they were interesting ideas to explore. We think about pop culture as something ephemeral and superficial, and I wanted to try to understand how that could be combined with something like faith, which is eternal and deep. Even Christians consume this culture and participate in this culture but don’t give as much thought as they might to what it means for their faith life.

A lot of people in your book — a lot of them — are really concerned with distinguishing themselves from “those other really crazy Christians,” especially others in the Christian entertainment / pop culture world. Are they successful in making that distinction?

Unfortunately, from the outside, no. Everybody gets lumped together to the extent that the non-Christian world is aware of Christian pop culture. It tends to be the most outlandish, and in many cases, the most obnoxious voices that are the loudest and get heard. People aren’t really aware of the more interesting and more authentic and more meaningful strains of the culture. People do get lumped in, and I think that’s why so many people said to me, “I’m not like these other people that you may have heard of.” Now, that is not entirely their fault. That is in many ways our fault as non-Christians for not making the effort to make such distinctions. If the awareness is not there, it’s partly because these people are often choosing not to identify as Christian in the same way, partly because they don’t want to be tarred by that brush. And I think that’s unfortunate in many ways because I think what they’re doing is very Christian in the best ways, and that by ceding that word to the forces they don’t particularly like, they’re doing a disservice to the faith.

The Christian pop culture world can be pretty big—and as you note, there are many segments of it that don’t want anything to do with other segments of it. How did you choose which groups or individuals to write about?

They do intersect in important ways, and even if those intersections are often antagonistic, I think they’re revealing, and I don’t think you can understand one without the other. for example, the Cornerstone ethos is that the way to honor God is to create the best possible work of art that you can. This only becomes meaningful when you compare it with the point of the person who plays Bibleman, which is, “We do the best we can artistically, but at some point we say we’ve done enough because what is important is not the production but the message.” While contradictory, I don’t think you can really understand what they mean without realizing that the two views illuminate one another. The truth is that there is a lot of interplay.

You seem to see Jay Bakker as a good trend (a moderating strain) and Hell House as a bad trend (or a mean-spirited strain), but trends within the same Christian movement. What makes you think that they’re part of the same movement, rather than parts of different movements?

Those are certainly the extremes. Jay’s ministry is in large part a reaction to the history and tradition of things like Hell House. To understand where he’s coming from, you have to understand where his parents [Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker] came from and where much of the church came from. He has, in many ways, a very reactive strain of Christianity. So his view of the world is informed by this kind of tradition. In that sense they are part of the same world. I’ve heard a lot of people say, “I never set foot in a Christian bookstore. That’s not what Christianity is to me.” In a way making the decision to never set foot in a Christian bookstore says something about the role of Christian bookstores in the culture, and what that person does says something else.

You also wrote, “I learned not to trust my first impressions.” So what were some of your more unexpected experiences in the Christian subculture?

I did have some expectations about what I would find, and my initial experiences heightened those. I thought that the culture would be very conservative politically and socially. I thought that a lot of pop culture would be very agenda-driven, and in many ways, a little more than kind of a delivery mechanism for a conservative agenda — or not necessarily a conservative agenda but a religious agenda — an agenda. And it was very eye opening to find a Christian culture that was not trying to sell anything, that was not designed to be evangelistic or to enforce any kind of moral code, but that was really an expression of the artist’s Christian worldview in honest terms with no sense of utilitarian purpose. I wasn’t expecting that, especially after my first experience at that Christian rock concert.

One of my sister-in-law’s friends came up after one of the band sets and said, “That was an awesome performance. They prayed three times in a 20-minute set.” I thought, well, the whole point of Christian rock is not to perform rock and roll; it’s to lead prayer. Rock is sort of the bait on the hook. But there are a lot of Christians who say that not only is that not what they’re trying to do, but that treating art in that fashion actually cheapens God’s creation. That was a way of looking at the world that I was not familiar with and that I found very compelling.

What do you think should change in the Christian subculture?

I think that Christian culture has a role to play in society at large, and I think that’s the trend that needs to be encouraged, which is to get out of this Christian bubble that has been created over the decades. I think the most interesting artists are the ones who do not want to be limited to a particular sphere. That’s a difficult call to make because it’s easy to make money and to not have as many challenges by branding yourself for this small middle world. But I think that makes for less interesting and ultimately less viable art. I think there’s a way to live your faith in the world. And I think that for those of us who are happy not being Christian, it’s still a valuable perspective to see and it’s a valuable worldview that will ultimately benefit the wider world, too, as their sort of cross-fertilization occurs.

Did you see any examples of how Christian pop culture industry influences how evangelicals actually live on a daily basis?

The truth is that a lot of people spend more time consuming Christian media than they spend in church. And they’re getting theological lessons from the Christian radio they listen to in the car every day, whereas despite what they might tell pollsters and their pastor, they don’t necessarily read the Bible every day. I know that people told me that this music was important to them in helping sustain their faith and explore their faith, and even sometimes explore their doubts. There are some people, certainly, who consume Christian culture just because they want a safe alternative to the mainstream culture, which seems to me getting back to a form of utilitarianism.

How is the Christian pop culture industry fundamentally different from the rest of pop culture?

Christian pop culture is to its detriment often imitative, and it is often utilitarian. They want to achieve some kind of purpose with their art, and often one that I think results in subpar art. But there’s also the idea that pop culture is ephemeral and superficial, whereas a lot of producers of Christian culture see what they do as a ministry and as another way of living their faith. In that sense, there’s in some ways more significance attached to it for the people who produce it and consume it, which is why I think I met so many people who were able to speak articulately about their roles in this culture. That would have been harder to do if I were writing a book about mainstream pop culture, because a lot of fans or artists don’t give much thought to what it means. Some Christians spend a lot of time considering those things.

Did the Christians you talked to view entertainment media differently from others in the entertainment industry?

I think producers of much Christian culture and most mainstream culture would say, “All we want to really do is entertain people.” And that’s a perfectly legitimate goal for pop culture. In that case there would be agreement, although people might disagree on what is entertaining or what one ought to do in the name of entertainment. But when you get to the two other ends of the spectrum within Christian pop culture, the one that says we are not just to entertain, we are out to spread the gospel. Or on the other end of the spectrum, the people who say we just want to produce great art for art’s sake, at the same time that is connected to their faith and is drawn from their relationship with God. That makes it different from secular artists who say they just want to produce great art. I don’t think one is more valid than the other, but I think they are useful and interesting ideas.

What do you want people to take away from your book?

I wrote the book from the perspective of an outsider, and if other outsiders can pick this book up and find an accessible way into the diverse evangelical world, that would be great. For Christians I hope that people might gain a great understanding of how their world looks from the outside, and see some of their perceptions of the outside world. You may be somebody who participates in this culture, who shops at Christian bookstores every week, but never really thinks too much about where these products come from or why they’re important to you. Or maybe you’re somebody who wishes that these things didn’t exist and tries to sweep them under the rug. But I think that engaging these issues can help Christians understand something about their own culture.

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Radosh’s blog (subtitled “Pop. Politics. Sex. So on.”) was recently named in TIME’s top 25 blogs. He also has a Rapture Ready blog.

Radosh offered a list of “10 great Christian rock songs” in The New York Times.

Hanna Rosin reviewed the book for Slate. Robin Abrahams reviewed it for the Boston Globe Magazine. Brad Greenberg discussed it on CT’s liveblog. Timothy Beal reviewed it for SoMA Review. Tim Challies reviewed it on his popular blog. Ben Myers reviwed it at his Faith and Theology blog.

Excerpts of Radosh’s book include

In The Beginning (Rapture Ready site)

Holy sex! | Welcome to the Christian sex advice movement, where brave souls tackle the stereotype that evangelicals are prudes (masturbation is still iffy). (Salon.com)

The Good Book Business | Why publishers love the Bible. (The New Yorker)

The Gospel According to Aaron | Christian rocker and mewithoutYou frontman Aaron Weiss preaches anti-consumerism, environmentalism, and progressive ideas (The Utne Reader)

A Wild and Crazy God | Daniel Radosh tours the Christian comedy circuit (Radar)

• Southern Baptist pastor Wiley Drake has been cleared of tax law violations by the IRS. The pastor of First Southern Baptist Church in Buena Park, California, had endorsed Mike Huckabee for President from the pulpit and with an e-mail message in which he identified himself as the church’s pastor. But in a letter to Drake, the IRS concluded that “the endorsem*nt was not authorized or approved by the Buena Park First Southern Baptist Church and no church resources were utilized in preparing or sending the e-mail.”

The IRS also determined that the Cleveland-based United Church of Christ denomination of which Sen. Barack Obama is a member did not violate tax laws by sponsoring one of his 2007 speeches.

• John Lilley has held on to the presidency at Baylor University, despite a May 6 “failure of shared governance” resolution passed by the school’s faculty senate. The senate, upset at Lilley’s denial of tenure to 12 of 30 professors up for consideration, voted 29–0 against Lilley, with two abstentions. Lilley responded by granting tenure to seven of the rejected professors, and university regents later affirmed his presidency after a closed-door meeting. Baylor’s previous president, Robert B. Sloan, resigned amid faculty unrest in January 2005.

• A federal judge ruled in April that the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Safe Space initiative must remove disparaging comments about certain religious groups from its materials. The tolerance-training initiative’s publications “clearly take the position that churches that condemn hom*osexuality do so on theologically flawed grounds,” U.S. District Judge J. Owen Forrester said. Such a theological judgment, coming from a publicly funded institution, violates the First Amendment prohibition against the establishment of religion, Forrester ruled.

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Associated Baptist Press reported on the IRS’s decision regarding Wiley Drake’s endorsem*nt, as well as Drake’s vow to endorse candidates in the future. Earlier this year, Drake asked his followers to pray for the deaths of two leaders of Americans United for Separation of Church and State and said, “The righteous have dominion, but only through imprecatory prayer against the ungodly.”

Associated Press reported on the letter the IRS sent to UCC headquarters.

The Waco Tribune-Herald has more on the recent academic summit that seems to have repaired Lilley’s relationship with faculty at Baylor.

Inside Higher Ed asked about the implications of the Georgia Tech decision for professors and student groups.

How would you describe the situation many Iraqi Christians are facing?

More than a million people who are Iraqi Christians are going through a very difficult time, largely because of their faith. Many have had family members killed or kidnapped.

There are currently an estimated 1.5 million Iraqi refugees in Syria and another 600,000 in Jordan, a significant number of whom are Christians—and these figures are probably growing. These refugees don't have food, housing, or health care. They can't work or get an education for their children.

There's a real opportunity for the church in the West to advocate for Christians in Iraq. Large numbers of [Iraq's indigenous Christians] have been driven out of Baghdad, Basra, and other cities. This is the homeland of Abraham. Emptying Iraq of the Christian community will dramatically change the Middle East.

What specific goals will this caucus address?

The purpose of the caucus is to educate Congress and the public, and to [speak out on behalf of] religious minorities—Christians being a large number of them—in the Middle East.

We have a person within the State Department designated to look at the issue of Iraqi Christians. The House also put more money into the supplemental spending bill it passed May 15 for programs to assist vulnerable Iraqi minority groups, including Christians. The U.S. has selected the deputy chiefs of mission in our embassies in Jordan, Syria, and Beirut to address refugee issues in Jordan and Syria. The administration has also asked the Iraqi government to release some oil revenue to meet the needs of refugees.

The caucus also intends to address the challenges faced by other religious minorities in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East, including the Copts, the Baha'is, the Yazidis, and others.

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NPR reported on the caucus.

Other news from Iraq is collected in our full-coverage section.

I‘m a book geek, so one of my hobbies is collecting autographed books. Some I acquire through my work in book publishing; others I find at bookshops. I now have more than 500 signed volumes, comprising authors from Sue Grafton and Walter Wangerin to Anne Lamott and John Stott.

Authors sign their books in myriad ways. Jimmy Carter’s signature is a modest “J Carter.” Max Lucado’s is barely recognizable—what might be an “ML__.” Calvin Miller used calligraphy. Eugene Peterson signed off with “the peace of the Lord.” J. I. Packer rotated through Bible verses, from 2 Timothy 3:14–17 for a book about Scripture to Psalm 46 for Knowing God. Chuck Colson chose Romans 12:2, but more baffling was his inscription, which looked vaguely like “Burm gd.”

I especially treasure signatures from those who are no longer with us. My former Wheaton professor Bob Webber signed several books to me with Dominus Vobiscum (“the Lord be with you”). Spencer Perkins wrote, “In the hope of racial healing.” Rich Mullins autographed CDs with “Be God’s!” Stanley Grenz inscribed a theology text with “May our Lord guide your steps.” And one of my most memorable dedications came from Madeleine L’Engle, who signed my copy of A Wrinkle in Time with “Tesser well.”

But my favorite phrase was inscribed by Michael Card, who borrowed the apostle Paul’s signature expression: “Grace and peace.” This greeting is found in some form at the opening of all of Paul’s epistles, most commonly, “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”

What many don’t realize is that Paul coined a new phrase. “Grace” or “Grace to you” sounded like the standard Greek greeting, but was infused with theological meaning. On the other hand, “Peace” was a Jewish blessing that sounds weightier in the Hebrew: “Shalom.”

Paul knew that many of his congregations were torn by factional strife. But he didn’t say, “Grace to you Gentiles, and shalom to you Jews.” Grace is not just for Greeks, and peace is not just for Jews. God’s desire was for the whole community to receive his grace and experience his shalom—not merely the absence of conflict, but the fullness of well being, harmony, wholeness, and life.

So Paul said, “Grace and peace to you.” Paul addressed Gentile and Jewish believers together, as members of one body. He wrote in continuity with their cultural and ethnic backgrounds, yet pointed to a new, countercultural reality. He combined a Greek greeting and a Hebrew greeting to create a distinctively Christian greeting.

Paul did not neuter the cultural particulars of the church’s constituents. Nor did he emphasize identity politics or pit categories against each other. Instead, he affirmed the communities’ distinct identities, then transcended them to forge a new identity in which the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. He modeled unity amid cultural diversity, as experienced in the church’s birth at Pentecost. If Paul were writing today, he might choose other vocabulary and language to bridge contemporary divides: “Hola and howdy, y’all, in the name of Jesus.” Or, “Salaam and shalom to you.”

As Brenda Salter McNeil points out in A Credible Witness, the gospel is both vertical and horizontal. Jesus reconciles us to God and to each other. Paul’s greeting reminded the church of the new society it was supposed to be—one that had received grace, forgiveness, and salvation from God and also would extend peace, shalom, and goodwill to one another.

The church embodies a radically peculiar social order that incorporates vastly dissimilar people. In Paul’s day, the world was divided between Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female. But he dared to imagine a Christian community that not only included all of these, but also enjoyed interdependent relationships. The power of the church’s witness was due, at least in part, to the compelling alternative this new society offered to the world around it.

Today our culture continues to be divided by race, class, gender, and politics. Within the church, we are split between Calvinists and Arminians, complementarians and egalitarians, evangelicals and mainliners. Yet Paul would argue that our common identity transcends our differences. He would plead with us to treat one another charitably, to extend grace, and to make peace with one another. Indeed, our congregations should be some of the few places in society where conservatives and liberals can break bread together and make common cause.

When signing books, letters, and e-mails, “Grace and peace” has become my customary benediction. It has also become my prayer for the church, that we would truly bestow grace and peace on one another and, in so doing, offer a prophetic witness to our world. May it be so.

Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

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Previous Kingdom Sightings columns include:

A Multifaceted Gospel | Why evangelicals shouldn’t be threatened by new tellings of the Good News. (April 10, 2008)

The Vision Thing | Clarity came just as things got blurry. (February 21, 2008)

He also wrote on the Harry Potter craze.