Essentializing the Evangelical - Reception

This is a paper that I have developed for a class I am taking at New York University on Interpreting Popular Culture.

I would love to hear your feedback and recommendations.

If you have missed any parts of this paper, you can click on the following hyperlinks:

Part One: Introduction
Part Two: Defining the Evangelical - Melting Pot or Mosaic?
Part Three: Constructing the Mythology of the Evangelical
Part Four: Defining Evangelical - The KKK Evangelical Mythology
Part Five: Representation - Kook
Part Six: Representation - Kon
Part Seven: Representation - Konquistador
Part Eight - A Multiplicity of Representations that Break the Mold
Bibliography
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Within the study of popular culture, there are many facets which require exploration. These include:

1. Production
2. Content
3. Medium of Communication
4. Audience

The first section deals with issues of the culture industry (production) developing representations (content) communicated by a variety of media such as television, magazines, fashion etc. (medium). The second section of this paper looks at the audience who receives the produced, mediated message - and how they negotiate this message (accept/ reject) and relate it to their everyday lives. These are issues of reception.

Any good reception theory of media recognizes that consumers are not passive recipients of media, but are rather active agents who help contribute to the production of meaning. Despite the dominant kook idea that evangelicals are quite naïve, there is a great deal of serious criticism which takes place within evangelical circles.

In this section:

1. I will first of all explore this evangelical culture of critical engagement of media culture.

2. I will briefly illustrate the history of textual poaching in evangelical media culture.

3. I will draw on two music groups which model cultural shifts in the tone of evangelical cultural engagement. I will also illustrate how there is a ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams, 1978) that captures the emotional sentiment and tipping point in reception to such representations.

My hope is that this section will help to illustrate that while the representation of evangelicals does need to diversify, that there has been an exploration of strategies to get around this limitation, and that from that has emerged a growing, but increasingly diverse sub-culture.

Go to Part 10: Reflexivity Among Evangelicals When Engaging Popular Media Culture