Theology and popular culture

That a volume such as this necessitates a chapter written about theology and popular culture indicates just how explosive the growth in this interdisciplinary nexus has been over the course of the last two decades. Though theology (or religion) and culture have been paired together as topics for exploration and scrutiny since well before Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869),1 H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture (1950)2 or Paul Tillich’s Theology of Culture (1959),3 approaches to theology and culture from the nineteenth century to the latter half of the twentieth have gravitated towards two biases which are not particularly helpful for our present discussion. In general terms, such approaches have either centered on the relationship between theology and high culture (arguing that certain sorts of culture are particularly effective at achieving certain sorts of theological ends) or have implicitly adopted what Kathryn Tanner describes as both a modernist and an anthropological approach to studying culture.4 In regards to this latter point, this has meant a tendency to study culture from the ‘outside’ and (especially in the case of theological studies) a neglect of the cultural embedding of the scholar. For those interested in a serious engagement with popular culture, either of these tendencies will prove problematic. As an alternative to the assumptions which underpinned previous approaches to

the study of culture, the emergence of Cultural Studies as a legitimate academic discipline in the 1960s changed both the way in which culture was theoretically understood and deepened the methodological resources for studying culture. Beginning with the work of Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and later Stuart Hall (all of whom were associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham), Cultural Studies offered a renewed theoretical framework for understanding cultures. Cultural Studies differed from more established approaches to studying culture that were gleaned from either cultural anthropology or Marxist readings of culture (such as those associated with the Frankfurt School). These scholars, and those who would come after them, gave special consideration to how the various practices, beliefs, institutions, and political and economic structures of a culture, as influenced by issues of class, ideology,

gender, ethnicity, nationality and sexuality, shaped the construction and distribution of meaning within a culture. Parallel to the growth of Cultural Studies in the English-speaking world, the study

of everyday culture has also occupied an important position in twentieth-century Continental thought. In particular, one could note Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1957)5 which applied semiotic theories to cultural texts as varied as advertisements for washing powder and popular fashion magazines; Michel de Certeau’s The Practices of Everyday Life (1984)6 which discusses the strategies or tactics which one employs in the process of meaning making in a highly consumerist culture; or the various academic and popular works of Slavoj Žižek, who uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to read the deep meanings present within the texts and practices at the margins of popular culture. These parallel trends in the academic study of everyday life have provided dialogue partners, theoretical frameworks, and an impetus for much of the ongoing work in the theological and religious studies approaches to engaging with popular culture.7