July 31, 2022, column from the Amarillo Globe-News

Popular culture was once blessed with godly influence; why not now?

By Mike Haynes

            The column below appeared in this newspaper on June 26, 1997 – 25 years plus a month ago. It was the first Faith column I wrote, and it focused on a speech by Philip Yancey. A quarter of a century later, Yancey has written many outstanding Christian books, and other creative people have taken his message to heart. I had hoped to hear him speak in person again this week at a C.S. Lewis conference in Oxford, England, but I’m settling for seeing him live online at home. Since 1997, I’ve written another 474 of these columns. Here’s the first one:

Somewhere in a backyard storage shed in the Texas Panhandle are the notes I took on a June 1979 morning in St. Paul, Minn.

Philip Yancey

The young speaker that day so impressed me that I don’t have to find my notes to recall the exhortation he gave to a group of fledgling Christian writers.

“Christians usually settle for less than the best,” was the gist of Philip Yancey’s remarks.

Yancey, who already had written a couple of best-selling books, must have struggled to avoid offending some of the sincere people in his audience while not white-washing his criticism.

He left the whitewash in the bucket.

Writers, musicians, painters – anyone attempting to do something creative to advance the gospel of Jesus Christ – too often churn out mediocre work and, consciously or not, pass it off as excellence.

Christian artists, Yancey claimed, don’t attract the attention of people in the general culture because the quality of their work doesn’t compare to the efforts put forth by talented people whose motivation is far less divine.

What if the innovation and “coolness” of the Beatles had come not from an admittedly fab four who nevertheless were wandering in their personal lives, but from a band of lads whose purpose was to glorify their Creator?

 What if a novelist with a Christian world view put words together as compellingly as Hemingway?

Actually, popular culture has been blessed with godly influence in past centuries more than it has in our own.

From my college art history class, I know that the subject matter of many master painters through the ages has been biblical. Art experts praise the Sistine Chapel for Michelangelo’s vigorous brushstrokes at the same time Christians admire it for its depiction of the Last Judgment.

Much great music also was inspired by Christian muses. How else do you get a piece called “The Hallelujah Chorus”?

So what happened? Yancey said modern Christians typically are satisfied with good intentions. So what if a short story is predictable and has stereotypical characters? If those characters quote scripture, isn’t that all that matters?

So what if a praise chorus sounds almost like “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and repeats “I love Jesus” 14 times? Isn’t it the thought that counts?

Well, yes, and people worshipping in simplicity can be a pure, admirable act. It’s the creators of the lyrics and the tunes and the artwork and the paragraphs for whom Yancey had a swift kick. 

Since 1979, Christian creativity has made much progress in quantity and maybe some in quality. Customers can mine a Christian bookstore for a profusion of musical styles and book topics. Sometimes they even find gold.

Even assuming that artists are achieving more, however, how much of it is preaching to the choir? One of Yancey’s coups 18 years ago was getting a story published in Reader’s Digest. That’s a small example of a Christian influencing U.S. culture rather than vice versa.

Bob Briner used his 1993 book, “Roaring Lambs,” to tell Christians they can’t spend all their time lounging in their own bookstores when there is a whole culture out there drifting, drifting away from the foundation in which they believe.

Briner urged church members to focus less on choir practice or usher training and more on stirring the salt of the Christian message into the cultural stew.

“Certainly, there’s much in this world that is alarming,” Briner wrote, “but I believe there’s a better way to do something about it than simply preach against it. The best way to stop the spread of evil is to replace it with something good.”

   And according to Yancey, artists must inject into our culture not only a good message, but a message presented in such a creative way that the public will be enticed to notice.

            People committed to God should be marketing movies that rival the attention of “Jurassic Park.” They should be pitching TV shows that become as acclaimed as “NYPD Blue.” Someone should be picking up where C.S. Lewis left off, Briner wrote, making the best-seller list of the New York Times, not just that of the Christian Booksellers Association.

            Yancey got my attention that morning in Minnesota in part because he didn’t look like the then-typical Christian evangelist. He wasn’t much older than me, and he had bushy hair reminiscent of a hippie.

But he has a place in my storage shed because he didn’t repeat phrases I had heard from preachers a hundred times before. He was intellectual in that he talked about poetry, philosophy and art. He was sensitive in that he talked about beauty.

And he didn’t think Christians, of all people, should be producing drivel.