It’s Like Pop Culture, Only Less Interesting

I don’t know if I want to read a whole book about it, but Daniel Radosh’s premise in his recently published book Rapture Ready! is certainly interesting. Basically, instead of avoiding secular culture altogether, Radosh points out that evangelists have created a sort of parallel universe, filled with all the same things, just cleaned up for super-Christian audiences. This guy seriously did his research and found the Christianized equivalent of pretty much every piece of pop culture, including Christian chick lit and mood rings. After laying it all out, Radosh wonders just how Christian monetizing religion into its pop culture version could be.

Slate‘s Hanna Rosin takes it one step further, comparing American evangelicals today to Old Testament Israelites. "They are blending into the surrounding heathen culture, and having ever more trouble figuring out where it ends and they begin," she writes.

Radosh, who describes himself as a secular, liberal Jew, was motivated to write his book when he attended a Christian rock concert with his born-again sister and her friends. In the process of researching he came to respect a number of the bands making actually decent music, and arrived at the conclusion that evangelicals are not stupid. In fact, as he told Playboy, "There is definitely a strain of anti-intellectualism in evangelical circles, but that’s different from stupidity. It’s a rigorously intellectual anti-intellectualism. That doesn’t make it less offensive, but it’s not stupidity."

We’d love to hear his sister’s response to that one.

What do you think?