Rapture Ready – David Radosh

{image via Jeremy Lange}

Religion fascinates me, specifically American Christianity. I live in a country where the dominant religion I make contact with in some form every day fascinates me more than all the distant religions and beliefs thousands of miles away. I wish I could explain why, but my only concluded rationale is that Jesus or God has never really gripped me. I’ve been to churches where people speak tongues, claim that God has touched them, spoken to them and has been a near-physical presence in their lives and I’ve never felt anything…and that fascinates me. Is it me? Is it you? Did I do something? Am I not doing something right? Years have passed and I’ve received a multitude of reasons and explanations for my lack of “awakening” so-to-speak:

1. He doesn’t come if you don’t want him to.

2. Relax, you’ll feel Him.

3. He comes to those who are truly listening to Him.

4. Read the Bible.

5. Pray.

6. Pray harder.

7. Accept him as your Savior.

8. Wait.

Needless to say the healthy Agnostic skepticism has kept me company though the long years of watching other people have this hobby and pastime of all things Church and faith-based with their bff Jesus.

I think there was a time I did believe. I was younger and God was kind of like the Santa Claus that was around all year. I remember pretty vividly one spring evening laying awake determined to catch the Easter Bunny when my mom came in and finally broke the news that she hid the eggs, and ate the cookies and drank the milk and left money under my pillow. I think thats when it all stopped.

Needless to say I was relieved when I met Neil and found he felt the same way. He wasn’t an ardent Atheist, it wasn’t something he didn’t care about, but it was something he couldn’t explain and didn’t have certitude about. Our Agnosticism exists on two different planes. Neil’s is a bit more passive about his religious beliefs, and it’s not something he actively seeks to “remedy.” He’s okay with not knowing, and whether or not it ever moves beyond that point is not something he thinks about day-to-day. I on the other hand am constantly curious about all the stories and religious tenants I don’t know or haven’t heard about yet. Not only theologically, but in the many Christianist communities that make up this country. What do these people believe that get them so riled up for the Lord that I may have overlooked? I subscribe to nearly 50 blogs of various individual Christians and groups, some very tame and mainstream such as Jim Wallis’s “Sojourners” at the very heart of moderate American politics or others a bit more off the beaten path like Doug Phillips’ “Vision Forum,” deep in the buckle of the bible belt further to the right in Reconstructionism than Pat Robertson and James Dobson.

I grew up believing that if you didn’t know something about yourself, that often the best remedy were the people or things furthest from what you believe. I was happy to see I wasn’t the only one that heard this advice after picking up Daniel Radosh’s “Rapture Ready: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture.” Radosh, a self-described “liberal Agnostic Jew” sets forth to examine the burgeoning mostly evangelical Christian pop culture market, a $7 billion dollar industry growing at an astronomical rate so fast that its impossible not to question the methods and expanse of its growth and what happens when it collides with its secular counterpart.

Radosh takes his readers on an eighteen city tour through thirteen states covering not only what most people expect to be Christian epicenters but traditionally secular mainstays such as Hollywood and New York City. He covers all areas of Christian pop culture; from Bibles to Contemporary Christian fiction; live action Crucifiction plays to Bibleman the Caped Christian. He even finds professional Christian Wrestling. At some point, despite the many redeeming counter-Christian culture Christians Radosh meets, you ask yourself, “Didn’t Jesus chase the money changers out of the temple?” Isn’t it wrong and morally repugnant to essentially commercialize faith? Radosh is met with the answer from various leaders and vendors that commercializing and evangelizing aren’t all that different from one another. For some he talked to, the aim seemed genuinely placed, however in others it came across as little more than creating a brand and selling it, creating loyal customers from emotional bandwagon strategy rather than faithful followers. The implications of faith-driven consumerism have an affect the gatekeepers have a harder time answering for. What does consumerism do to the believer? What does faith do to product? The answer to many is damage. Likening Jesus to a best friend or a boyfriend, and creating lyrically narrow versions of secular music at best case scenario a miscommunication that clouds a multitude of messages.

{Image: Cornerstone festival draws more than 18,000 emo kids, skateboarders, crusties, metal fans and frat boys to rural Illinois for five-days of music and celebration. But it’s a rock festival with a difference. Alcohol is banned, drug taking is out of the question and ‘Virginity Rocks’ T-shirts are worn with pride. In this exclusive slideshow photographer Gary Calton documents the American bands and fans that are preaching the word of God. -via The Guardian UK}

Radosh concludes that the Christian pop culture movement is geared heavily toward young people, the result of dismal statistics showing dwindling attendance by young adults in church after age 18. Reaching this younger generation that downloads both secular and Christian music and doesn’t abhor the idea of watching Pulp Fiction on a Saturday night requires a different kind of movement than the one that drew believers toward a counter-culture that refused to integrate. The next generation of Christians will be more critical consumers, opting for less Jesus-per-minute and more meaningful messages and authenticity in their product…message…*eh*…even if it involves cursing.

This book was brilliantly written and even-handed despite that Radosh is in fact what most would consider Jewish by cultural upbringing and Agnostic by choice. There were going to be things that shocked him, and they did, and there were going to be things he found repugnant and he was honest in saying so. What I found most striking was his discovery while visiting AiG/Ken Ham’s Creation Museum that more than disagreeing with secularists, more and more Christians find themselves at odd with one another both politically and theologically, something that results in a lot of the dialogue that does more turning away than witnessing.

Many of the issues in this book are the logs in the dam of my own faith. The strong-arm witnessing, the insta-saving, the dark rapture fortellings and the fear-based evangelism that results. Most of all its the certitude. People who talk and boast of having a Truth that only they or a select few posses that makes the rest of us wrong or ignorant for being different or questioning. While it’s good to know there are others out in the universe asking questions, this book also leaves me a little more comfortable sitting where I’m at.

Side Story: About half-way through the book, we took a trip to St. Louis for Neil’s PDX event. Since he has two sets of wheels this requires we bring both the Z and my car to haul everything we need. While flipping through radio stations I came to a Christian radio show that “specialized” in saving the non-believers and actually listened as people accepted Christ on the phone while they were commuting home from work that day. It was an odd and even more uncomfortably impersonal given the seriousness of what I think that moment would be like emotionally and in the context of one’s life. Is it more important to build strong believers or get them saved? Just an oddly ironic tidbit given I was reading this book.