At CCHS, or any Christian school for that matter, if you ask a student what kind of music they listen to, “Christian music” will likely be somewhere in their response. At Barnes & Noble or the library, you may see a section labeled “Christian fiction.” Movies that are specifically “Christian” come out every year. In an odd manifestation of Christian detachment from culture, Christian media has become its own genre.
Christian media, whether it is intended to reach a secular audience or not, often remains untouched by non-Christians. And who can blame them? With all the half-baked, sugarcoated, “inspirational” movies, thriller novels with Biblical messages tacked on in odd places, or enormously bizarre manga versions of the Gospels, it’s no small wonder that Christian media is largely ignored by the rest of culture. But, the second-rate quality of much of Christian media, though it is certainly detrimental, is not necessarily its biggest issue. In fact, the most significant problem with Christian media is that it exists at all. When “Christian” exists as a genre, it creates a barrier that is difficult for someone who is not a Christian to cross over,
To illustrate why the separation between Christian and secular media is a problem, let me give an example from the days before “contemporary Christian” was a music genre. Rock bands expounding Christian messages, though they generally did not enjoy the success that mainstream bands did, played at secular venues and were published by secular labels. A band like Glass Harp could open for The Kinks with rock versions of hymns, and though the venue owner might cringe in embarrassment when they sang, “I took Jesus as my saviour, you take him too,” he couldn’t deny the quality of their guitar solos. And the band couldn’t go to a Christian venue or a Christian label, because there weren’t any. That kind of evangelism is much more uncommon now.
Admittedly, many of the first Christian media companies were made because of secular companies’ unwillingness to accommodate entertainment with an obvious Christian bent. But to the people who think that the answer is to keep on writing books for Christian publishers, making music for Christian labels, and creating movies for Christian companies, I would say that they are preaching to the choir. Similarly, when Christian media producers use increasingly peculiar methods to attempt to get non-Christians to even glance at their work, I would say that they are only further widening the gap.
So what is the answer? I would say it is to create art and entertainment within the secular media. Here, we can go back to the issue of quality. We, as Christians, must make works of truth that are good in and of themselves; not “Christian” books but good books, not “Christian” movies but good movies, not “Christian” music but good music. These are the vessels that can display Christian truth, whether it be obvious or not-so-obvious to the larger world, not via an outside-in method (how can we get non-Christians to like Christian media?), but rather a method focused on changing things from the inside.
By: Nicole Krueger, Writer
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