A review by jaclynday
Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture by Daniel Radosh
4.0
This book was one of the suggestions in my 2013 Reading Challenge and I am so glad I included it. There are few books I've read that accurately and thoroughly capture the total weirdness that is Christian pop culture, but this one does it so well. I've mentioned before that I grew up in Christian schools and going to church with my family and I've personally seen or experienced so many similar things that Radosh covers in this book (sometimes to a lesser or even greater degree).
Christian pop culture is weird to outsiders. It seems contradictory, cheesy and strange. But it's a huge business. It's enormously profitable and slowly integrating into the mainstream. This book was written over four years ago and the extent to which some elements of Christian pop culture continue to trickle down into what Radosh calls "mainstream" pop culture is becoming both more prevalent and more alienating. The high points he mentions--the release of The Passion of the Christ, the Left Behind book series--happened years ago, but we're still seeing that same type of crossover. For example, Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander has been on the Amazon best seller list for weeks. Joel Osteen's books consistently become best sellers too. The 5 Love Languages, published in 2009, has over 5 million copies sold.
Ultimately, the reason this book is so good is that Radosh approaches it as an outsider with an understanding that much of what he's seeing is business-driven. They qualify it in different ways ("spreading the Word," for example), but business is business. Keeping the enormous amounts of money at stake in the back of your mind is helpful when reading about the ridiculous (Testamints) and the almost unbelievable (The Holy Land Experience). Whatever I think of it, whatever you think of it and whatever Radosh thinks of it doesn't matter. There is a huge market share up for grabs containing people willing to pay to feed their faith in a way that makes them feel part of something greater than themselves.
It's interesting to look at Christianity through this commercial lens and it's an approach that I haven't often read about. Some of the products and books and Passion plays will seem crazy to you if you've never been exposed to Christian culture before, but you shouldn't be too surprised it exists. You've seen Family Christian Stores in strip malls before, right? People actually shop there.
It would have been impossible for Radosh to cover every corner of Christian pop culture, but what he does discuss feels comprehensive and informative. As someone vaguely familiar with what he's talking about, I didn't feel there were any gaps in the pop culture portrait he was pulling together. The portions where he attends Christian music festivals and discusses Christian music with various artists are some of the most interesting sections of the book and help shed a lot of light on why there are so many "levels" of Christian artists. (For example, some say "God" or "Jesus" in songs but others choose to use the vague "You" for crossover appeal.)
As someone who was once surrounded by Christian pop culture and came out the other side, I found the book intensely interesting, but I think you will too--even if you know nothing about it and really don't care to. Radosh, who is Jewish, has no Christian agenda to push. In fact, he gets confrontational often and isn't afraid to express skepticism or frustration with the people he comes across. (One memorable moment happens when Radosh confronts a man passing out "IVF Violates Humanity Dignity" pamphlets amongst a group of rabid pro-life demonstrators at a music festival. Radosh's children were conceived using IVF.) There are other insightful passages in the book as Radosh has conversations with various members of the Christian pop culture community. In one interview with Jay Howard, author of Apostles of Rock: The Splintered World of Contemporary Christian Music, Howard said this:
Christian pop culture is weird to outsiders. It seems contradictory, cheesy and strange. But it's a huge business. It's enormously profitable and slowly integrating into the mainstream. This book was written over four years ago and the extent to which some elements of Christian pop culture continue to trickle down into what Radosh calls "mainstream" pop culture is becoming both more prevalent and more alienating. The high points he mentions--the release of The Passion of the Christ, the Left Behind book series--happened years ago, but we're still seeing that same type of crossover. For example, Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander has been on the Amazon best seller list for weeks. Joel Osteen's books consistently become best sellers too. The 5 Love Languages, published in 2009, has over 5 million copies sold.
Ultimately, the reason this book is so good is that Radosh approaches it as an outsider with an understanding that much of what he's seeing is business-driven. They qualify it in different ways ("spreading the Word," for example), but business is business. Keeping the enormous amounts of money at stake in the back of your mind is helpful when reading about the ridiculous (Testamints) and the almost unbelievable (The Holy Land Experience). Whatever I think of it, whatever you think of it and whatever Radosh thinks of it doesn't matter. There is a huge market share up for grabs containing people willing to pay to feed their faith in a way that makes them feel part of something greater than themselves.
It's interesting to look at Christianity through this commercial lens and it's an approach that I haven't often read about. Some of the products and books and Passion plays will seem crazy to you if you've never been exposed to Christian culture before, but you shouldn't be too surprised it exists. You've seen Family Christian Stores in strip malls before, right? People actually shop there.
It would have been impossible for Radosh to cover every corner of Christian pop culture, but what he does discuss feels comprehensive and informative. As someone vaguely familiar with what he's talking about, I didn't feel there were any gaps in the pop culture portrait he was pulling together. The portions where he attends Christian music festivals and discusses Christian music with various artists are some of the most interesting sections of the book and help shed a lot of light on why there are so many "levels" of Christian artists. (For example, some say "God" or "Jesus" in songs but others choose to use the vague "You" for crossover appeal.)
As someone who was once surrounded by Christian pop culture and came out the other side, I found the book intensely interesting, but I think you will too--even if you know nothing about it and really don't care to. Radosh, who is Jewish, has no Christian agenda to push. In fact, he gets confrontational often and isn't afraid to express skepticism or frustration with the people he comes across. (One memorable moment happens when Radosh confronts a man passing out "IVF Violates Humanity Dignity" pamphlets amongst a group of rabid pro-life demonstrators at a music festival. Radosh's children were conceived using IVF.) There are other insightful passages in the book as Radosh has conversations with various members of the Christian pop culture community. In one interview with Jay Howard, author of Apostles of Rock: The Splintered World of Contemporary Christian Music, Howard said this:
"Sociologists contend the number-one value in American society is self-actualization or self-fulfillment. Everybody thinks, I have a right to do whatever it takes to make me happy. Christians aren't really a whole lot different from mainstream society in that regard. I mean, we divorce at nearly the same rate as mainstream society. That's because we've bought into this idea that happiness is the ultimate American right. We don't challenge the materialism of our culture. We don't challenge the self-indulgence in our culture. We don't challenge the American superpower we have a right to tell the rest of the world what to do kind of thinking. A counterculture rejects some of the key dominant values of the surrounding society. The only values that we're worried about are abortion and gay rights. That's it. Because those are sins we don't commit; those are sins other people commit. The Bible has more than two thousands verses about poverty and maybe five or ten that you can interpret as being about abortion, but we're all about abortion. Those two thousand verses about Christians' responsibility to widows and orphans and aliens and strangers and the poor? We manage to be blind to all of that, but we can find those five verses about abortion."