As mentioned in part 1 of this short series on Dick Staub’s The Culturally Savvy Christian, the first three chapters fall under the Savvy heading. The central theme that Dick unpacks throughout the book is, The culturally savvy Christin is serious about faith, savvy about faith and culture, and skilled in relating the two. In chapters 1-3 he takes a critical look at American culture and American Christianity.

To be brief, neither comes off looking so good in The Culturally Savvy Christian.

Dick does a great job of describing American pop culture in the first chapter. To summarize, pop culture in our time is superficial, soulless, very powerful, and spiritually delusional. A longish quote from chapter 1,

We buy things we don’t need, made by people who don’t know or care about us, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t really like! Humans are called to produce, not just consume. When the mall becomes the center of social life, and young and old alike regulate their emotions through purchasing new stuff, we are looking at serious signs of dehumanization.

The idea of being “fully human” came up repeatedly in our conversation with Dick and it’s one that I expect to see much more of in the next sections of the book.

There are Christians who will applaud Dick’s analysis of pop culture. That applause should be held until chapter two is read, as the American version of Christianity is analyzed. Like other cultural observers, Dick sees three general ways Christians often respond to their world: cocooning, combating, and conforming. While each of these is rejected as unhelpful, it is the tendency to conform that receives the most attention and leads to this quote from New York Times columnist Walter Kirn, “Christianity doesn’t compete with pop culture. It is pop culture.” Staub seems to agree with this anaylis dubbing this conforming tendency, Christianity-Lite.

The final chapter is a helpful review of what it means to be human: creative, spiritual, intelligent, relational, and moral. Knowing these characterisitics as well as “the story we are in” is key for Staub.

Our way back, our only hope, is to know the universal story we are in, to understand where we are in it, and to write a better outcome than the one we know find ourselves expecting.

It is to this outcome that we will turn to next.