The Good and The Bad

In the book The Culturally Savvy Christian, the author comments on the present state of our entertainment culture,

“So here’s the deal. The largest companies in the world are hiring smart people and spending billions of dollars to drive a diversionary, mindless, celebrity-fueled popular culture down the highway of new technologies and into our lives in order to sell us stuff we don’t want or need. They don’t care about us, what we believe, or how we want to live. Their ads and products regularly reduce women to sex objects and men to voyeurs and predators. They are unconcerned with what is in our best interest spiritually or intellectually, and in fact, it is in their best interest to keep us spiritually desensitized and dumb. They play to our unhappiness, magnifying our feeling that we are missing something essential and that if we had this something that they offer we would be fulfilled. They then encourage us to shop, convincing us that shopping will do today what it failed miserably to do yesterday–fill what French religious philosopher Pascal calls our God-shaped vacuum.
Today’s superficial popular culture is symptomatic of our human malaise, and technology, marketing, and the lust for profits simply spread our addiction and disease faster and further. For the first time in history it is possible for entertainment culture to distribute our spiritual sickness worldwide, producing a spiritual pandemic.”

The Culturally Savvy Christian pp. 26-27

Reflecting on what Staub (the author)  has to say I think that he is too negative toward pop culture. He doesn’t seem to carry a heart for common grace nor for the positive side of what companies and businesses are doing. There is an assumption that none of these businesses are of good intent or led by well meaning Christ followers or well meaning non-Christians.  He also misses the wonder of the book of Ecclesiastes that points out that God causes us to enjoy things out of his grace–including things, I believe, in pop culture (see Ecc. 2.24-26) I think that the Contemporary Testimony of the Christian Reformed church might have some play here,
51.
In our work, even in dull routine,[1]
we hear the call to serve our Lord.
We must work for more than wages,[2]
and manage for more than profit,[3]
so that mutual respect
and the just use of goods and skills[4]
may shape the work place,
and so that, while we earn or profit,
useful products and services may result.

But given these reflections, I alsobelieve that Staub gives much for thought and reflection both in this quote and in his book.