Cultivating the Feast of Our Faith Maxie Dunnam outlines a strategy for spiritual renewal
Highlights
from the Confessing the Faith Conference
Thomas C. Oden, Dianne Knippers, Donna F.G. Hailson, Thann
Young, Dennis Kinlaw, Jerry Kirk, and Edith Humphrey
Love Feast Shows God's Grace Boyce A. Bowdon gives insight into successful community care
Encouraging the Faith of a Child Baseball legend Babe Ruth knew firsthand the value of investing in children's lives
Christianity and Other Religions Bill Bouknight reminds us that Truth will always triumph
The Power of a Beautiful Woman Angie Vineyard reports on the high price women will pay for "beauty"
Come, Let Us Adore Him Joseph Novenson contemplates God's divine design in the visit of the Magi
Features
Editorial Let's Connect Some
Dots
Renew Women's Network A Video Visit
The Next Generation The "Real World"is What They See on TV and in the Movies
The Great Commission Discovering Hope in Russian Orphanages
From the Heart Living Like Weasels
Departments
Letters to the editor
News
Youth Jam brings life-changing experience
Attorney fights for religious liberty-and the gospel
UM agency announces cuts in missionary force
Bono launches AIDS awareness tour from United Methodist church
Johnny Cash approaches Judgment Day with faith
“Nobody pays any attention to that stuff. It’s only a story; it’s not real...” Those words, or some to that effect, are the ones often used to dismiss the potential impact, positive or negative, of the latest movie, video game, television show, song or music video on teenagers. “These kids are not stupid. They know the difference between fantasy and reality.....” Oh, that must be why they call it “reality television”.
There’s a reason and a motive why one of MTV’s top rated shows is called “Real World.” I agree that kids are not stupid. But, they can be duped by the same screwy thinking that impacts their parents and other adults. We can usually tell the difference between fantasy and reality, but what we’re not too good at is understanding how fantasy impacts our views of reality.
In the last issue of Good News, we began a series of discussions on youth culture, beginning with this simple idea: the best place to start understanding the currents of this river called youth culture is by watching the surface movements of pop culture. To that end, the stories of adolescent culture are very important.
Carl Sandburg once made the comment, “I meet people occasionally who think motion pictures, the product Hollywood makes, is merely entertainment, has nothing to do with education. That’s one of the darndest fool fallacies that is current....Anything that brings you to tears by way of drama does something to the deepest roots of our personality. All movies, good or bad, are educational and Hollywood is the foremost educational institution on earth.”
One of the reasons that media has such potency is because of what behavioral psychologists refer to as social norming—the theory that adolescent behavior is often shaped by what they perceive to be the normal behavior of their peers. If most teenagers think that their peers are getting high, having sex, or cheating in school, they will be more likely to exhibit those same behaviors. And, clearly, this could produce something of a “snowball effect” in a culture. As perceptions are developed, behaviors adjust, and as behaviors adjust, perceptions develop.
Although social norming as a concept has become prominent as a factor in addressing drug and alcohol abuse, obviously, it has implications for other realms of adolescent behavior as well. This is very much akin to what Reynolds Ekstorm calls mimicry, “the imitative feature in life, by which persons tend to reproduce in themselves patterns of behavior they have beheld in others.” Why does a ninth grade guy wear pants that have a two foot seam in the crotch, and hang down over his rear end in back? Why does a tenth grade girl wear her shirt just the right length to show that “Britney belly” mid-drift? Why are all of the “alternative kids” alternative in precisely the same way?
Sociologist Todd Gitlin puts it this way: “Popular culture is the very oxygen of our collective life. It circulates the materials with which people splice together identities. It forms the imagescape and soundtrack through which we think and feel about who we are, or - as film critic Robert Warshow put it - who we wish to be and fear we might become.”
Any wise youthworker who cares about teenagers will want to become an observer of the culture because it tells us a great deal about the adolescent river. Its images so vivid, its presence so pervasive, its impact so universal - it simply cannot be ignored.
On the other hand, popular art brings with it this disadvantage: it is constantly changing. Romanowski talks about short-lived cultural phenomena that are “the glue of the month.” It is a little like a rafter’s guidebook that describes the course by pointing out “the log that has washed up against a rock forty feet down river from the carcass of the dead fish along the shoreline....” All of these landmarks are quite vivid until the next high water comes along. Then, the guidebook has to be re-written. Which is why sometimes, we gain more by looking at the broad features of the cultural landscapes than the ones flickering across the screen of pop culture. We will talk about some of those factors in the next issue of Good News.
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