Christianity and the Culture Machine: Media and Theology in the Age of Late Secularism

Christianity and the Culture Machine is a precedent-shattering approach to combining theories of media and culture with theology. In this intensive examination of Christianitys role in the cultural marketplace the author argues that Christianitys inability to effectively contest the ideology of secular humanism is not a theological shortcoming but rather a communications problem: the institutional church is too wedded to an outmoded aesthetic of Christianity to communicate effectively. Privileging authority and obedience over the egalitarian and transformative goal of Christianity the church fails to recognize how it undermines the vitality of the Christian narrative and message. In the absence of a more compelling vision offered by the official church a new aesthetic can be found forming within the margins of popular culture texts. Despite its past failures in representing the Bible in mainstream film and television the culture industry now offers more compelling versions of core Christian theology without even realizing it--within the margins of the main storylines. This book analyzes the aesthetic principles employed by these appropriations and articulations of Christian discourse as a means of theorizing what a new aesthetic of Christianity might look like. Rocchios innovative challenging thesis is that Vatican IIs project remains unfinished: Catholicism never developed an aesthetic that conveys our mutuality with the divine. Placing works of film and television in dialogue with both the insights of media critics and a meditation on the way of the cross no other book so powerfully brings together aesthetic theory media and a radical theology embracing the example of that itinerant healer who walked with the poor. --John Champagne Professor of English Penn State Erie The Behrend College Vincent Rocchio hails from the hallways of media studies but he got loose and wandered into the church. Thank God. His diagnosis: the culture machine (malls markets movies and all the rest) is not winning because theology is wanting but because the church does not know how to communicate. He argues for a new Christian aesthetic up to the task of communicating the gospel and he finds it in the most surprising places. A brilliant book. --David Toole Duke University Vincent F. Rocchio PhD is one of the founding members of the Ekklesia Project. He has taught at Dartmouth College The College of the Holy Cross and John Cabot University in Rome. He is author of Cinema of Anxiety: A Psychoanalysis of Italian Neorealism and Reel Racism: Confronting Hollywoods Construction of Afro-American Culture.