Alternative Popular Culture

Alternative Popular Culture

Alternative popular culture is basically the opposite of everything that is popular. Simply put, it is those elements outside the effective dominant culture are described as either alternative or oppositional. The distinction between them is that the former has no desire to impose its values on the general society while the latter does.

One place to begin that is suggested by the deficiencies in popular culture as described above, would be the church. The Church can be a community that displays loving and redemptive authority, thereby offering an alternative to the dubious populism promoted outside. Several cultural critics have argued that one of the major crises of modern society is the crisis of authority. The Church does not love its neighbors (or her Lord) if she mimics populist or egalitarian manners and thereby adds momentum to the debilitating suspicion of authority that afflicts our age.

Secondly, the Church can insist on its identity as an inter-generational community. It can do this structurally, by refusing to segment congregations by age, and temperamentally, by recovering a biblical respect for maturity and rejecting popular culture’s infantilism, thereby offering to children a goal of growing up. Popular culture exalts perpetual adolescence.