Report on a Workshop: “Living in Both Worlds: Embracing the Spiritual in Pop Culture”

By Katherine Carlson In a society saturated by violence, the question, “How do we navigate the consumer culture?” comes to mind as the gap between traditional values and violence promoted by the media increasingly widens. Today in his workshop, “How Does Pop Culture Reinforce Conflict or Encourage Healing?” author Gareth Higgins discussed the need for people in the United States to find the spiritual within our culture, focusing particularly on movies and film. He urges viewers not to avoid the sometimes unsavory cinema or to live in separate spheres of church and pop culture, but to embrace both as an opportunity to learn from one another. Higgins supports the medium of film as a potentially positive means of experiencing mainstream society. In this way, he encourages people to engage with popular culture on a higher intellectual level because many films offer the viewer the opportunity to relate to issues of fear, power, relationships, or morality without having to experience the extreme circumstances presented on the big screen. This ability to find relatable material within our often flimsy Hollywood flicks is beneficial but also identifies a problem: the inundation of and fascination with violence. Higgins refers to this as the “myth of redemptive violence,” where in contemporary culture the ideal that from chaos, or violence, order emerges. The generic superhero movie, incredibly popular with U.S. audiences, follows this basic pattern, where an individual undertakes saving the world by strong-arming the bad guys, leading to a predictable happy ending. Despite the mass appeal of attractive celebrities portraying superpower-wielding or gun-toting heroes, Higgins asks, “Are we going to continue to feed off this myth? How can we make nonviolence as cool and as sexy as dropping a bomb? This is our question, and movies are our most important mechanisms to convey information to the public. I think we can do it.” Often, it is not the quality of an idea, but the coolness. Higgins recommends that viewers ask themselves, “Why do I want to see this?” when attracted to overly gory or incendiary film, to prevent promoting violence for the sake of violence. Stopping this cycle on a purely personal level, however, is simply not enough. After his prepared lecture, discussion was opened to the workshop participants, who probed deeper at this national problem. The lack of ability to equip our children to navigate the consumer culture as peacebuilders was a key point touched upon. With the absence of structured sharing about popular media, young people are left to conform to popular standards. Communities should become more involved with book and movie clubs to promote more faith-based interpretations of the consumer culture. “Gareth Higgins, Ph.D., has worked as an academic and activist, and is a freelance writer and research consultant specializing in Northern Ireland affairs, religion, peacemaking, film and post-modern culture. He is the co-chair of the zero28 Project, a post-sectarian peace building initiative.” (From the “about the author” blurb for his book How Movies Helped Save My Soul: Finding Spiritual Fingerprints in Culturally Significant Films.)

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