Your God is Alive and Well and Appearing in Popular Culture

by John Wiley Nelson

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0664248667
• ISBN13: 9780664248666
• Release Date: January 1977
• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Length: 217 Pages

Customer Reviews

Interesting but incomplete

Nelson purports to examine American popular culture AS A RELIGION -- as a form of contemporary worship, with its own careful and consistent belief structure. Approaching this from a critical, Christian point of view, Nelson is remarkably perceptive and accurate about what Americans believe, and about what they want from Western movies, TV, country music, and popular magazines. He brings out goals and underpinnings in American thought which are so deeply ingrained and taken for granted that we rarely recognize them on a conscious level. His criticism allows us to draw them out, look at them, and see if we really agree with what we've been ingesting for the past 50 years or more. While this is invaluable and quite intriguing, there are some drawbacks to Nelson's book: 1. It was written in 1976 and therefore doesn't take into account many of the more recent permutations in American pop culture (though its approach will allow us to do this quite easily); 2. His chapter on detective ficiton focuses exclusively and somewhat inexplicably in John D. McDonald's Travis McGee series -- hardly the epitome of American detective novels (why not Chandler, or Hammett, et al.??); 3. His religious analysis -- disassembling American popular thought from a Christian point of view -- never goes far enough, leaving much of the work to be done by the reader. One finishes the book wondering just how much American thinking can be adopted by the contemporary Christian, and what is to be rejected. While I don't object to being asked to think, I believe Nelson missed a golden opportunity to lay out some scriptural responses to the lines of thought he so perceptively analyzes.