Essentializing the Evangelical - Subversive Textual Poaching in Evangelical Subcultures

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
Part Nine - Reception
Part Ten - Reflexivity Among Evangelicals When Engaging Popular Culture
Bibliography
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There are some significant theories that have emerged in the past couple of decades in the field of media and cultural studies that are particularly relevant when considering evangelicals’ reception of popular cultural products. The work of cultural theorists Michel de Certeau (2002) and Henry Jenkins III (1992) are of particular interest to this subject.

In his book, The practice of everyday life, de Certeau speaks of ‘l’homme ordinaire’ or ‘the ordinary man.’ A person is their own silent master of everyday experience – creating their own text as they navigate through the hectic streets of their life (flaneur). As the individual walks through the streets, they exercise resistance and produce their own unique urban space. This act is what de Certeau calls ‘textual poaching’ (de Certeau, 1984). For more on textual poaching, see this posting.

He says,

Reading introduces an ‘art’ which is anything but passive. …Imbricated within the strategies of modernity (which identify creation with the invention of personal language, whether cultural or scientific), the procedures of contemporary consumption appear to constitute a subtle art of ‘renters’ who know how to insinuate their countless differences into the dominant text.” (de Certeau, 2002, xxii)

Henry Jenkins re-appropriated de Certeau’s ideas into his study of fan cultures in his book Textual poachers: Television fans and participatory culture (1992). Fans, he suggests, take elements of media culture and rework them into their own narratives. These fans pro-actively ‘rework the text’ (like de Certeau’s flaneur). They are not simply passive consumers, but active producers of new meaning. They ‘remaster’ media – shifting the power from simply being the producers to the fan becoming co-producer. This type of poaching Jenkins calls ‘an art-form’ (Jenkins, 1992, 27). He says that poaching is “…an impertinent raiding in the literary preserve that takes away only those things that are useful or pleasurable to the reader” (Jenkins, 1992, 24),

Historically, evangelicals have been famous for their act of textual poaching. In the late 19th century, The Salvation Army re-appropriated all sorts of forms of popular media into their evangelical identity. Dianne Winston elaborates:

Since arriving in New York in 1881, Salvationists had waged a stealth campaign, seeking to adapt popular media for religious purposes. By spiritualizing media – whether parades, pageants, or dramatic presentations – the Army engaged in a bold crusade to transform an advanced industrial society into the kingdom of God (Winston, 2002, 115)

While this initially might sound reminiscent of the konquistador image described earlier in this paper, this comment needs to be read in the light of the culture and language of the colonial era – this isn’t to justify it, but rather to situate it. What I find fascinating about 19th century groups like The Salvation Army is their willingness to break with the sanitized, elitist, exclusive style of church during that period – choosing a church-for-the-masses alternative. To speak in the vernacular of the east end of London was critical. Tapping into circus, pageantry, tunes from the public house, uniforms for the dispossessed – this was radical for the time. When asked why hymnals were being replaced with sanctified bar-tunes, the co-founder of the movement –William Booth – is noted as saying the famous evangelical textual poaching line: “Why should the devil have all the good music?” (Winston, 2000).

This mindset has translated into contemporary evangelical culture too – particularly with the emergence of contemporary Christian music. Christian rock pioneer, Larry Norman illustrated this in the 1970s (Norman, 2006). He re-appropriated William Booth’s words to justify ‘insinuating the difference’ of rock and roll for evangelical purposes. He received a great deal of criticism for ‘breaking out of the mold,’ but his pioneering initiative gave birth to the modern idea of contemporary Christian music.

Since then, the process of ‘textual poaching’ has become a massive industry which includes animation, fashion, almost every genre of music from bluegrass to straight-edge/hardcore, film, fiction, even the candy market has been infiltrated with products like ‘testa-mints!’ (Hendershot, 2003). Is it possible that this knock-off culture can also help forge the creative new artforms Henry Jenkins speaks of?

While many evangelicals have resisted models like The Salvation Army and Larry Norman, these alternative evangelical sub-groups have always existed… However, they have been gaining greater momentum in the wider body of evangelicalism in recent years. This group doesn’t fit into the traditional image of evangelicals as isolationist and protectionist. Heather Hendershot suggests that “Evangelical media producers often take styles and genres that non-evangelical youth might use to articulate ‘resistant identities’ (themselves heavily commodified) and respin that resistance in previously unimagined ways” (Hendershot, 2003, 28).

In this next section, I will provide two illustrations of this process.

Part 11 Soon to follow...