Perhaps I am not the ideal reviewer for this book. I do not own a television, and I have not seen a movie in a dozen years. (I do have an AM-FM radio in my truck, which I use to monitor blizzards, sandstorms, flashfloods, and tornadoes.) I do not read People, Us, Self, TV Guide (naturally), or the New York Times Book Review. I have never read a novel by James Michener, Alice Walker, and whoever it was who wrote Gorky Park. I am vaguely aware of something called Billy Joel, which I assume is a brand of chewing tobacco manufactured in the backwoods of Arkansas or Mississippi. In other words, I don’t know nothin’ about popular “art”—but I knows what I hates. Many a critic for the New Yorker, Harper’s, or the Atlantic has got through a job of book reviewing with no more than that going for him. That relieves me, because All God’s Children is an excellent small book, despite the fact that it seems at times to be addressed to a slightly dimwitted YMCA member. (“Let’s begin by establishing your Pop Culture Quotient. . . . First, how many entertainment appliances are in your house?”) Mr. Myers, who is the editor of the two newsletters. Public Eye and Genesis, and a former editor of This World: A Journal of Religion and Public Life and Eternity, is by training and background above this sort of thing and ought not to drag us down to it. Nor has he any excuse for the following example of squeamish usage, of which he is regularly guilty: “A very sick person can be a very holy person, but generally it would be better if they weren’t sick.” You can’t be any sicker than dead, which in my opinion is how most people who deliberately torment the language in such ways should be. Fortunately, most of the book is written at a vastly higher level than this.

All God’s Children operates on two levels of argument: on the one, it is a consideration of the proper relationship between Christianity—institutionally and in its individual components—and the phenomenon of popular culture; on the other, an inquiry into the nature of popular culture itself. “It might seem an extreme suggestion at first,” Myers begins,

but I believe that the challenge of living with popular culture may well be as serious for modern Christians as persecution and plague were for the saints of earlier centuries. . . . Christian concern about popular culture should be as much about the sensibilities it encourages as about its content. . . . In this study, I have tried to make the case that popular culture’s greatest influence is in the way it shapes how we think and feel (more than what we think and feel) and how we think and feel about thinking and feeling. . . . Popular culture, like the meat offered to idols in 1 Corinthians 10, is a part of the created order, part of the earth’s that is the Lord’s, and thus something capable of bringing innocent pleasure to believers. But not everything that is permissible is constructive. That is the main theme of this book.

Unlike so many voluble Christians today, Myers does not regard it as a Christian duty to create a holy community on earth. “Not even the people of God in our epoch of redemptive history are called to create a holy culture, because Christians are called to go out into every culture with the Gospel. We are a people, to be sure, but our peoplehood is spiritual. Culturally, we are Jew and Gentile, Greek and Roman, European and African.” Yet, “while our culture may not be holy, it should not be inhuman. This is the perspective we must bring to bear on all aspects of culture, especially on popular culture, which not only presents some unique challenges to personal piety, but which increasingly poses threats to our humanity.”

Popular culture is never to be confused with folk art. It is not, as Myers observes, simply a new diversion, but rather a culture of diversion. “Popular culture was not simply influenced by, but was created by the same forces that resulted in modernity.” While “Modernity has not excluded God from the universe . . . [it] has simply made it more difficult to maintain a consciousness of God’s presence in a culture that increasingly ignores Him.”

Popular culture celebrates novelty and the present, provides instant gratification and the warm silk-lined blanket of the familiar, abhors (and is largely ignorant of) transcendence, is associative rather than evocative in technique, and is the creation of formula, not of inspiration. This last characteristic guarantees that it is an impersonal culture, for which impersonality is substituted the personality of the “artist.” Still, “When I say I ‘like’ Bach, and you say you ‘like’ Bon Jovi, are we really using the same verb?” For what interested Bach—and appreciative hearers of his music—was art; while what is of central concern to Bon Jovi and their anthropophagous fans is “the energy that drives the self” and that is associated in contemporary society with fast cars, cocaine parties, cities, and the reinvention of the self as the center of the universe. Television and rock ‘n’ roll are not just the dominant forces pushing contemporary popular culture. They are also “the essence of the spirit of our age.”

C.S. Lewis wrote that, “The ideally bad book is the one of which a good reading is impossible.” Popular “literature”—a/k/a “reading material”—is comprised of books that approach, to a greater or lesser degree, that negative perfection, just as popular “art” is comprised of paintings and statuary of which a good viewing is impossible, popular “music” of which a good hearing is impossible, and Broadway “drama” of which a good performance is impossible and an intelligent observance intolerable. In the 60’s occurred the eclipse of high culture by popular culture, as—in Hilton Kramer’s description—”the boundary separating art and fashion was breached . . . [and with it] the dividing line between high art and popular culture. ” Among the effects of this calamity have been, in Kenneth Myers’ opinion, a loss of cultural memory and a growing disinterest in both the past and the future. As a direct result of it too, the claims of Christian dogma have come to appear more absurd than ever before—a condition with which the churches have attempted to cope by co-opting the medium of popular culture in the propagation of the Christian message. With foreseeable effect, of course: “Our God is too small because our culture is too small.”

And by the way: if the Word appears to be so much a discouraging one today, that may be in part because of the low estate to which the printed word has fallen. Although television often seems destined universally to replace the word with the image as the basic unit of communication, words nevertheless have properties essential to higher human thought that mere images cannot provide. An image is what the social scientists call “value-neutral”; while no image is capable of conveying so seemingly simple an idea as the idea of being—of the great I AM, for example.

“I don’t think,” Mr. Myers concludes, “total abstinence from TV”—or, one gathers, from popular culture generally—”is necessary or wise.” (Oh dear.) Unlike many or most members of the late Moral Majority, he cannot believe that “much would be improved if, all other things being equal. Christians could somehow take over all of the instruments of popular culture, even if they were very talented and orthodox Christians.” Self-exposure to what Dwight McDonald called “mass-cult” is thus permissible to Christians, so long as they recognize it for what it is and do not prostrate themselves before its idols.

Permissible, then: but is it constructive? Not really, except to the extent that it preserves them from a monkish and elitist existence. Man is a spirit and a Promethean being whose highest needs and abilities are scarcely honored and served by popular culture, for whose creators he exists finally as no more than a creature of which a good reading is impossible.

[All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture, by Kenneth A. Myers (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books) 213 pp., $8.95 paper]