Don't Stop Believin'

Pop Culture and Religion from Ben-Hur to Zombies

Robert K. Johnston, Craig Detweiler, Barry Taylor

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781611642629
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

Elvis Presley. Andy Warhol. Nike. Stephen King. Ellen DeGeneres. Sim City. Facebook. These American pop culture icons are just a few examples of entries you will find in this fascinating guide to religion and popular culture. Arranged chronologically from 1950 to the present, this accessible work explores the theological themes in 101 well-established figures and trends from film, television, video games, music, sports, art, fashion, and literature. This book is ideal for anyone who has an interest in popular culture and its impact on our spiritual lives. Contributors include such experts in the field as David Dark, Mark I. Pinsky, Lisa Swain, Steve Turner, Lauren Winner, and more.

© Brad Barket/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

The Oughties

As the third millennium dawned, our faith rested in technology. Broadband made it possible for us to interact with each other anywhere at any time, to explore and express ideas, to buy and sell online, and to research anything via the Internet. We experienced the world from the comfort of our chairs. Services provided by Google, Facebook, and Twitter became so ubiquitous that they became verbs. YouTube allowed users to broadcast themselves, no matter how mundane or arcane the subject. Apple’s sleek designs made iPods indispensible friends. Cellular technology transformed our phones into multimedia devices—we listened to music, played games, watched movies, and accessed the Internet with complete, wireless mobility.

Globalization benefited many countries, especially China, India, and Brazil. These new economic powerhouses reconfigured the socioeconomic shape of the world. The Human Genome Project confirmed our connections on a micro level. America elected its first African American president on a campaign that utilized social media and graffiti art.

A new generation embraced the throwback innocence of High School Musical. Glee blended sexual experimentation and eclectic spirituality into a musical mashup. (Only in Glee’s rarefied air could an episode like “Grilled Cheesus” make utter sense.) File sharing devastated the music industry, allowing fans to download entire music collections via BitTorrent. DVR technology undercut the TV business with viewers zipping past formerly pervasive commercials. Audiences flocked to computer-generated fantasy films like Shrek, Finding Nemo, and Avatar. Hollywood turned to comic books (Spider-Man), toys (Transformers), and theme park rides (Pirates of the Caribbean) for “new” ideas. The affordability of digital cameras and editing allowed documentaries like Bowling for Columbine, Super Size Me, and An Inconvenient Truth to achieve unprecedented social impact. With Catholic priests in the news for cases of sexual abuse, author Dan Brown tapped into suspicions regarding church authority to elevate the sacred feminine in The Da Vinci Code.

It was a time of environmental upheaval, even as eco-consciousness became part of our daily lives. Nature reminded us of its fury—tsunamis in the Pacific Rim devastated Thailand and Indonesia, Hurricane Katrina wiped out New Orleans, and huge earthquakes rocked China, El Salvador, and India, to name only three.

But the Oughties will be remembered for the rise of global terrorism. The 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center—followed by additional bombings in Bali, Madrid, London, and Mumbai—brought religion back to the forefront of public life. The twentieth century had consigned religion to the private sphere, but these terrorist attacks, rooted in the rise of global fundamentalism, thrust religion back onto the world stage. The “new” atheists like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens decried religion as the root of what ails us. Nations responded to terrorist threats with lengthy and protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an obsession with security. A global financial crisis followed in the wake of overspending and fear. Religious literacy became an unlikely currency in a highly mediated era.

Banksy

Banksy is an anonymous British street artist, activist, filmmaker, and leading figure in the contemporary street art movement. He works with various mediums, including stencils, paint, print, mixed media, and site-specific installations. His art is politically charged and socially minded, often combining his signature stencil technique with sardonic aphorisms, irony, and satire in order to critique prevailing power structures and socioeconomic inequalities. Common targets include capitalism, imperialism, authoritarianism, war, and pollution.

Banksy was born and raised in Bristol, England, sometime in the early 1970s. He became an active graffiti artist amid the Bristol underground, an ethnically diverse subculture known for its awareness of racial tensions and hybridity, in the early 1990s. The movement fostered the development of hybrid musical genres such as Drum ’n’ Bass and Trip Hop. Some observers contend that the sparseness of Banksy’s stencil style and his sensitivity to social issues typify the ethos of the Bristol underground scene.

Banksy also cites the Situationist International, a Marxist avant-garde artists’ collective that used a subversive technique called détournement in the 1950s, as a significant influence. Détournement endeavors to turn expressions of capitalist systems, such as advertisements, against themselves by altering their meanings through subversive pranks and juxtapositions. In his book Wall and Piece, Banksy writes, “Any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not” is “yours to take, re-arrange and re-use.” He has proclaimed that the true vandals are the corporate institutions that endeavor to make us feel like we are defective unless we purchase their products.

Banksy’s art is not limited to critiques of consumerism. His work consistently assumes an antithetical posture of resistance toward authoritarian systems and institutions that he views as propagators of social injustice, inequality, and oppression. In Wall and Piece, Banksy claims that, “The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It’s people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages. As a precaution to never committing major acts of evil it is our solemn duty never to do what we’re told, this is the only way we can be sure.”

Banksy has employed this spirit of anarchism in attacks on the institutionalized art world, which he views as an elitist enterprise comprised of the “trophy cabinets of a few millionaires.” In the early 2000s he mocked the system by performing a series of subversive acts that involved sneaking his own works of art into museums such as the Louvre, Tate Gallery, and Museum of Modern Art. More recently, Banksy has turned his gaze to the street art scene itself, directing the Academy Award nominated film Exit through the Gift Shop, which met with some controversy concerning its legitimacy as a candidate for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Banksy’s subversive proclivities led many to question the viability of the film, and some maintain that the film is indeed a hoax.

The artist’s allegiance to anticapitalist principles has also been questioned by critics who observe that prices for his works at auction have commanded upwards of half a million dollars. In a 2007 interview with The New Yorker, Banksy said that he was uncomfortable with the money his work commanded, stating, “I don’t think it’s possible to make art about world poverty and then trouser all the cash, that’s an irony too far, even for me.” In the same interview he made the incredible and unverifiable claim that his solution was to give all the money away.

Whatever the case, it is clear that Banksy’s sympathies lie with the oppressed and disenfranchised. The anonymity the artist maintains allows his work to function as a sort of urban lament, providing a voice of protest against a myriad of social injustices. In 2005, he produced a series of paintings on the Israeli West Bank barrier depicting the efforts of Palestinian children attempting to circumvent the wall of concrete that stands between them and the Holy Land. In the scene, one little girl tries to use helium balloons to carry her over the wall, while a boy endeavors to traverse the boundary by means of a painted-on ladder. That same year, the artist produced a series of stencils depicting tortured Guantanamo Bay detainees in Cuba, London, and New York, indicting the powers that be by writing their sins, quite literally, on the wall.

CHRISTOPHER MIN

David Beckham

Football (soccer) star David Robert Joseph Beckham OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) was born in Leytonstone, England, in 1975 and has become one of the most recognizable sports figures on the planet. Since debuting at age nineteen for Manchester United in the English Premier League in 1995, Beckham has enjoyed major success with a number of football clubs and at one point was captain of the English national team. He became one of the highest paid footballers in the game when he signed a three-year deal with Manchester in the late 1990s and has continued to generate a huge income through contracts and endorsement deals throughout his career. His earnings culminated with a contract worth an estimated $6.5 million a year when he signed with LA Galaxy to become the figurehead for American soccer in 2007.

Having emerged through the ranks of youth soccer, he honed what were to become his signature abilities—dazzling passing skills, precisely placed long-range free kicks, and a spot-on crossing ability—through a lifelong commitment to training. Rumor has it that he used to practice barefoot in order to gain a sense or feel for the ball. So legendary is his ability that a 2002 movie, Bend It like Beckham, showcases his influence. The movie tells the story of Jess, the young daughter of Punjabi parents, who is infatuated with soccer and overcomes parental resistance and gender biases to achieve success. The film hints at the larger import of Beckham, for it is not only his ability on the field that makes Beckham a phenomenon but the fusion of a number of things (sport culture, celebrity power, and commodity culture) that make Beckham a global celebrity whose fame transcends the sport that gave rise to him. In November of 2003, he was declared the Greatest Pop Culture Icon in the world on the VH1 cable network’s show of the same name, above Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Madonna, Martin Luther King, and a host of other figures.

When the LA Galaxy signed David Beckham in 2007, his celebrity was evident in the welcome he received. Los Angeles heralded his arrival not only by the usual round of press conferences and sports-based interviews but also by celebrity-hosted parties and a frenzied, paparazzi-driven outpouring of almost cult-like fascination with his every move. His debut game for the Galaxy was a celeb-fest, with everyone from Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes to then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in attendance. His celebrity wife, Victoria Beckham of Spice Girls’ fame, only added to his star power and cultural fascination.

But perhaps the most interesting aspect of Beckham’s influence lies off the soccer pitch where he honed his gifts and made his career. He has contributed to the redefinition of masculinity in the late twentieth century. Beckham is perhaps the first footballer to attract large numbers of female fans in what has traditionally been a male-dominated sport. It has been said that men want to be him, and women want to be with him. Men admire him for his athletic gifts, which he has always linked to hard work and relentless commitment to excellence, but he has also been very forthright about his love of style and fashion. He appeared publicly in a sarong and is famous for continuing experimentation with his own hairstyle. He has also championed male grooming such as eyebrow waxing and facials. “I’m not scared of my feminine side, and I think a lot of the things I do come from that side of my character,” declared Beckham in his 2000 biography, My World.

Beckham is also a renowned family man, frequently photographed in the role of husband and devoted father, ferrying his children to school and accompanying them on after-school outings. None of this is particularly radical or out of the ordinary, but his celebrity power has been instrumental in countering typical gender stereotypes and collapsing old perceptions about what it means to be male. Personal grooming and beauty products have long been seen as more feminine, but Beckham has succeeded in breaking that view and creating a new man—commonly termed “metrosexual”—who values attention to appearance, personal grooming, and the discovery of manhood in actions and attitudes that have long been dismissed as not part of what it means to be truly male. This element, even more than his sporting ability, is Beckham’s greatest contribution to popular culture.

BARRY TAYLOR

The Daily Show

Few would have predicted that Comedy Central’s blockbuster series The Daily Show would rise from a spoof of network newscasts to become the primary news source for a generation alienated by politicians and the reporters who enabled them. It began modestly in 1996 with host Craig Kilborn, who seemed content to upgrade his mockery of pop culture from Talk Soup. But Kilborn clashed with the creator of The Daily Show, Lizz Winstead, and her growing interest in political news. Kilborn’s exit made room for Jon Stewart to slip behind the desk in 1999. Stewart emerged as “satirist-in-chief” during a remarkably contentious decade in American politics.

The Daily Show has been an anchor for Comedy Central, generating more than 2,000 topical episodes. It earned numerous Emmy Awards for the sharp writing team led by executive producer Ben Karlin. It also spawned the bestselling America (the Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction, whose audio version won a Grammy for Best Comedy Album. The Daily Show launched correspondents Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, and Ed Helms into major comedy careers. In 2005, The Colbert Report was spun off as a pointed satire of partisan news programs like The O’Reilly Factor. The unwavering braggadocio of the Colbert character grew into its own cultural phenomenon, with fans forming “The Colbert Nation.”

While some may reduce The Daily Show to a mockery of newscasts and the political process, Stewart and his creative team became motivated by more than laughter. In an era of post-Monica-gate cynicism, Democratic and Republican party conventions provided ample material for satire. The Daily Show’s election coverage, “Indecision 2000” (and 2004, 2008, and 2012) offered authentic bite, with correspondents securing genuine scoops. Stewart has interviewed countless senators, cabinet members, and heads of State. What inordinate influence for a self-proclaimed “faux news” program.

After the traumatic events of 9/11, The Daily Show took a hiatus during a time of national mourning. Stewart returned as the voice of New Yorkers and Americans changed by a daunting day. Once the United States went to war in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), The Daily Show offered a sober dose of sanity. A prophetic purpose emerged in the wake of the Defense Department’s near media blackout with The Daily Show’s coverage of a “Mess O’ Potamia.”

Stewart’s most galvanizing television moment may have occurred on somebody else’s show. In 2004, he took the hosts of CNN’s Crossfire, Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala, to task for not reporting the news in a conscientious and insightful manner. He insisted, “You’re doing theater when you should be doing debate.” Stewart pleaded, “Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America.” Crossfire was canceled shortly after Stewart’s appearance. Yet some questioned whether The Daily Show could hide behind claims to be a fake news program when guests like John Kerry were campaigning for elected office.

Stewart and Colbert eventually dropped nonpartisan pretense with their “Rally to Restore Sanity/March to Keep Fear Alive.” Held on the Washington Mall one week prior to the November 2010 election, the rally lampooned Glenn Beck’s earlier “Restoring Honor” event. Stewart’s stated goal was to convince a polarized America to “take it down a notch.” While the rally included plenty of humor, Stewart concluded...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Don’t Stop Believin’
• List of Contributor
• The Fifties
• The Sixties
• The Seventies
• The Eighties
• The Nineties
• The Oughties
• Conclusion: The Mystery Discerning Business
• Notes