The Problem is Human, Not Cultural/ Vince Brackett

Have you come across church critiques like this one I was pointed toward a little while back?

"To say that the service was religiously ‘dumbed down’ is not quite right. In fact, I wish that were the case, since the goal of comprehension sometimes demands that complex ideas be simplified. No, it seemed rather that the presentation aimed at finding a theological and cultural lowest common denominator in order to attract and engage the greatest number of people. As a result, there was no need to be a Christian to understand most everything that was said or sung."

This was from a recent article for a Christian magazine after a long, not-at-all-subtly subjective description of a contemporary worship service.  The description was full of allegations of consumeristic and shallow faith.  This is a critique I hear all the time--that churches are “giving in to wider culture” or “secularizing” to be more appealing to more people and compromising true Christianity--and it’s one that confuses me.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got no problem coming down hard on faith that is too consumeristic or shallow if there is good reason (though I’m not always entirely sure what is meant by the oft-thrown around “consumeristic” tag).  The problem I have is the assumption that degrading forces like consumerism and shallowness are always the negative influence of wider culture or secular people.  It is a false dualism, I think, to paint wider culture as by definition destitute and Christian culture as originally pure but eternally under attack from the wider culture.  This blog is a testament to the fact there is plenty in secular literature, pop culture, sociology, and philosophy that can powerfully point many people toward Jesus.  There is also plenty that doesn’t point people toward Jesus, but the wholesale writing-off of wider secular culture is a straw man argument.

What if the real invading force (the “worldly” force in the Bible) is not cultural, but human?  Yes, wider culture in America is consumeristic and shallow and prefers the easy way out and blah, blah, blah, but, you know, the Stage 1 pagan peoples of Ancient Israel’s time who tried to manipulate their gods with rituals could in some ways be described as those things too… so what else is new?  The great task is not to fight a culture, but to fight the fundamentally unhelpful tendencies inside all of us.  We all can tend toward consumerism or shallowness, whether secular, Christian, or otherwise.

Ironically, I have a hunch that there wouldn't be much of an attraction to these contemporary services for most of my secular friends, though the critic above suggests that is the motivating factor in such services.  I'm of the opinion that the gospel of contemporary music/culture in churches has already been spread to the world, so that's not really a unique appeal--as it was in the 70s, 80s, and 90s--even though it's still often talked about as if it is.  My friends would likely see the service described above not as more like their culture, but as MORE Christian subculture-ey.  They've all been exposed to Christian pop music, and such a service would seem like just another vehicle for that.  The whole premise of the argument here, I think, is built on a misunderstanding of who secular people are and what they’re looking for.  What the critic is really set-off by is the young Evangelical's version of nominal Christianity: commercially-driven Christianity.  But because he thinks the problem is cultural (instead of human), there seems a confusion of terms and wider secular culture is unfairly demonized.

taken from "stuff Christian Cultue likes"

What is your reaction when you come across critiques like these?  Am I missing the point behind them?  Or do you, like me, feel there are some misperceptions?