“Modern American popular culture presents many opportunities for innocent pleasures, but its principal attributes are, I believe, obstacles to enjoying the best of human experience. Popular culture is in many ways a very trivial matter. Some readers may balk at taking it so seriously. But its triviality, while making it seem innocuous, also enables it to be extremely pervasive, and that is its most toxic quality. It unobtrusively provides the backdrop, scenery, costumes, minor characters, script, and background noise of much of our lives. When we arrive, the stage is already set, the lyrics and music written, our lines and our movements already determined. Popular culture has the power to set the pace, the agenda, and the priorities for much of our social and our spiritual existence, without our explicit consent. It requires a great effort not to be mastered by it.”
~ Kenneth A. Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians & Popular Culture (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 1989), x111-xiv.
