Beyond the Black and White
Justin Ariel Bailey’s newest book takes a look at Christian cultural engagement and finds it wanting.
Review by Alex Sosler
If you want to place me on the quadrant of Christian cultural understanding, I can tell you that I came of age while the popular imagination was changing over from cultural rejection to cultural appropriation, and I’m still not sure which one was more prominent in my formative years. I was raised in a nominally Catholic family, but my first intelligible encounter with Jesus came in middle school. So I only vaguely remember hearing talk of CD burnings, a phenomenon in which Christian teens in youth groups took “secular” (i.e., non-Christian) CDs and burnt them. (If you don’t know or have forgotten, CDs, or compact discs, were these physical, round objects that contained music, but from only one band and one album at a time.) But returning to the cultural rejection: As best I understand it, the argument went like this—These foreign cultural sources (i.e., music) are pollutants that endanger my very soul. Why wouldn’t I burn these idols? Everybody loves a bonfire.
So this posture toward culture (total rejection) was vaguely in the air of my youthful years, but what I remember most was cultural appropriation being the main mode of cultural understanding for American Christians. That term—appropriation—is pretty loaded, but I’ll use it anyway, because I think it’s apt. What it looked like is this: The “world” (i.e., everyone who wasn’t us) had music, but we had “Christian” music. You may have had Dave Matthews Band, but we had Jars of Clay. You may have had Drake, but we had Trip Lee. “They” had movies, but we had “Christian” movies. They were similar, but ours were worse. (Praise be.) At any rate, we still weren’t consuming secular culture directly, so we felt pretty okay about our souls.
These two postures that I grew up with, which Justin Ariel Bailey in his new book Interpreting Your World: Five Lenses for Engaging Theology and Culture calls “rejection” and “replacement,” still tend to be the dominant options for Christian cultural engagement. But “engaging culture” may be a bit of a misnomer for those who grew up in one of the two modes I just described. It seems to assume there is a culture that exists “out there,” and that we then approach and engage it. The problem is—that culture has already engaged us long before we begin to hold it out at an arm’s length and evaluate it.
Bailey recognizes this, and he wisely guides his readers into a process of discernment, rather than a mere bald evaluation of ideas (i.e., “this is good” vs. “this is bad”) followed by outright rejection. Beckoning Proverbs, Bailey writes, “rightly discerning between the voices (of wisdom and folly) requires us to become a particular kind of person.” In other words, evaluating the cultural landscape is less a matter of its label (i.e., “Christian” or “secular”) and more a matter of whose discernment we are adopting. Like Paul at the Aerogapus in Acts 17, Bailey invites us to see the Gospel not as a rejection of culture (“your poems are bad”) or a replacement of culture (“here are some better poems”) but rather the fulfillment of culture (“your poems, insomuch as they are true and good, point to something true and good fulfilled in Jesus.”) And rather than the stale categories we often inherit in contemporary Christianity, Bailey provides the reader with several alternate lenses with which Christians can more faithfully discern the good, the bad, and the ugly in the culture at large.
Bailey recommends a new stance characterized by non-reductive curiosity, non-dismissive discernment, and non-anxious presence.
I appreciated the range of sources and topics that Bailey draws from to create these lenses. He is theologically and philosophically indiscriminate (a virtue in my eyes), and he celebrates truth wherever it is found. This, it seems to me, is an excellent model for the posture toward culture that he recommends throughout the book. Because of his wide range of source material, his approach to bridging the worlds of culture and theology is both dynamic and accessibly deep—he uses complex ideas but explains them in understandable ways.
Bailey begins by defining his terms: in the first chapter, he describes culture as the host for meaning, purpose, and identity. We all start from a cultural location, so to understand culture is to begin to understand our place in the world. Next, he takes up the task of evaluating the bugaboo of critical theory (gasp!). Drawing on his first metaphor of culture as host, he argues that theology can also serve as a gracious host, adding guests to the conversation rather than rejecting others’ ideas and ejecting their holders from the room. This conception of theology requires the cultural critic to complicate easy narratives—but it allows for depth and complexity to develop within cultural stories. Like people, cultures are not one thing. Next, Bailey moves on to discuss how culture forms the ethical imagination. Our moral framework is the place from which we see. Bailey encourages us to see this not as a cage, but as a foundation: The goal is to see as far as we can from where we stand. We must choose how we use the stability and power we gain from that foundation, and ideally we will use them in service to others.
These first three chapters cover the basics for the newcomer to cultural engagement, but in my opinion, Bailey really shines on the religious and aesthetic dimensions of culture in the latter half of the book. He argues that in a world rife with distractions, “engagement with culture must shift from distraction and consumption to creativity and contemplation, becoming a means to more grounded and meaningful lives.” The religious dimension of culture, Bailey suggests, values something of supreme importance and attempts to connect us to God and each other—but it can take a thousand misguided forms. Still, we all have to reckon with the transcendent elements of the world—love, success, death, and so on—and culture is going to tell us how to approach them. Which leads to Bailey’s final chapter on the aesthetic. He writes, “Art has long been the surrogate for a religious faith because of the transcendence it triggers and the community it creates.” The religious impulse leads to the aesthetic in an attempt to make sense of our world. It’s the context where we “play with the possibilities of life in this world.” What then is the Christian’s task in the world? Bailey here calls on Andy Crouch’s thesis in Culture Making: Christians criticize the culture by creating more culture. That’s real engagement.
In the book’s conclusion, Bailey returns to his main objective: to help us interpret our world. In lieu of rejection or replacement as our lenses for cultural engagement, Bailey recommends a new stance characterized by non-reductive curiosity, non-dismissive discernment, and non-anxious presence. At times I had lost the thread of this main idea as he described different dimensions of culture, but Bailey weaves his previous streams together helpfully and clearly at the end with a dynamic interpretation of cultural practices that offers a soft critique of James K.A. Smith’s work on liturgy. Liturgies, Bailey argues, have more than just an “official” meaning and can take on meaning from their practitioners, rather than only influencing them. He ends by suggesting that theology is the integrative discipline, binding many disparate parts together: “Theology moves among other disciples ‘as one who serves’ (Luke 22.27), reminding every discipline of its place before the face of God and discerning the mystery of God’s work in our midst.” Overall, Bailey’s proposals are clear and practicable, and Interpreting Your World provides a fresh and refreshing take on understanding our place in the world, evaluating the culture that surrounds us, and connecting with that culture in a creative, winsome way.
Alex Sosler is Assistant Professor of Bible and Ministry at Montreat College, Assisting Priest at Redeemer Anglican Church, husband to Lauren, and dad to Mariela, Auden, and Jude. He is author of two upcoming books: Love as Learning: Christian Higher Education as Pilgrimage (Falls City Press) and Theology and the Avett Brothers (Fortress/Lexington).
Interpreting Your World: Five Lenses for Engaging Theology and Culture was published by Baker Publishing Group on September 20, 2022. You can purchase it from their website here.
