Alternative Popular Culture

Alternative Popular Culture

Alternative popular culture is basically the opposite of everything that is popular. Simply put, it is those elements outside the effective dominant culture are described as either alternative or oppositional. The distinction between them is that the former has no desire to impose its values on the general society while the latter does.

One place to begin that is suggested by the deficiencies in popular culture as described above, would be the church. The Church can be a community that displays loving and redemptive authority, thereby offering an alternative to the dubious populism promoted outside. Several cultural critics have argued that one of the major crises of modern society is the crisis of authority. The Church does not love its neighbors (or her Lord) if she mimics populist or egalitarian manners and thereby adds momentum to the debilitating suspicion of authority that afflicts our age.

Secondly, the Church can insist on its identity as an inter-generational community. It can do this structurally, by refusing to segment congregations by age, and temperamentally, by recovering a biblical respect for maturity and rejecting popular culture’s infantilism, thereby offering to children a goal of growing up. Popular culture exalts perpetual adolescence.

By contrast, in the view of biblical personhood, adulthood is a desirable telos.

Instead of adopting the ways of popular culture, the Church should show the world a more excellent way. Instead of retooling Sunday to render it in synch with Monday through Saturday, the Church, in its proclamation and in its making of disciples, should offer a counter-cultural model of living obedience, seeking to transform what believers and unbelievers experience during the week by what happens to them and around them on Sunday.