Pop Christianity.

AuthorWeigel, David
PositionSoundbite - Daniel Radosh - Interview

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In 2005 Daniel Radosh visited his wife's family in Wichita, Kansas, and tagged along to a Christian rock festival. It was a bizarre experience for a journalist who thought he knew every cranny of pop culture: He was surrounded by fans screaming for bands he'd never heard of. "The key moment for me," Radosh remembers, "was when one of my sister-in-law's friends ran back after a set and said 'That was awesome! They prayed like three times in a 20-minute set!' I had to know what it meant to judge a band by how hard it prayed rather than how hard it rocked."

Three years later Radosh has produced Rapture Ready! (Scribner), a humorous travelogue-cum-study of this "alternate universe." He doesn't attend a single church service. He goes instead to the Christian professional wrestling rings, stadium-sized passion plays, and rollicking rock festivals that make up the $7 billion Christian pop culture industry.

Q: Since the 2004 election we've seen umpteen books about evangelical Christians and their political influence, most of them written to spook secular Americans. What do you learn from exploring this culture that you don't learn from exploring religious politics?

A: If somebody memorized the Constitution and watched C-SPAN every night and knew all the voting records of every senator but had never heard of Elvis Presley or Oprah Winfrey or Jerry Seinfeld, I think you could make a case that that person didn't know much about America. We hear about evangelicalism as a religious movement, as a political movement; if you don't know who [evangelical superhero] Bibleman is, or who [thriller writer] Frank Peretti is, or if you've never heard Christian comedy, you really don't understand what's going on in these peoples' lives.

Q: You visited the oldest remnants of Christian pop culture, like the Great Passion Play in Arkansas, and it seems like the newer culture is leaving behind a much more conservative, much less tolerant way of life. What parts of that are being ditched in the new Christian pop culture?

A: It's not a function of new and old as much as corporate vs. non-corporate. Companies like Thomas Nelson or Zonderman are wary...

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