Comparison Of Mass Media And American Christianity

At the start of this year, I did not have a very good understanding about what merging religion and mass media really meant. I believed that mass media was only considered to be things such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and television. I previously defined mass media as things that could reach millions very quickly therefore my categorization of what is mass media and what is not was wrong. At the beginning of the semester I would have answered the big question of “What happens when we merge mass media and American Christianity?” with little knowledge of either of the two topics coming into play. My answer was along the lines of when merging mass media and American Christianity we get room for tons of misconceptions about religion, as portrayals

Brett McCracken gives us five metaphors of cool that define what it takes to make something hip in this time period and in this case make religion seem cool. By successfully making religion seem cool we have to make it seem trailblazing, independent, and a lot of other things that down to its core it is not. Converting Christianity into something cool in our society means setting aside the tradition and history of the religion in order to adapt it into something the hip in our society will love, we almost convert Christianity into a short lived trend which it is not. To have Christianity appear cool in today’s society we must market it as such, which means Christianity is marketed hip not naturally hip (McCracken, 201, p. 29). One of McCracken’s metaphors of cool – The “Class Clown” Metaphor: Affirmation through Attention – shows how when we change Christianity to try to market it as cool we lose some of the religion’s value (McCracken, 2010, p. 27). “Once our basic needs are met, we become increasingly concerned not just with ourselves, but ourselves through the eyes of others” (McCracken, 2010, p. 27). In traditional Christianity a Christian would never care about how they are seen by others, only how God views them. By trying to be affirmatively cool through attention from others we have lost some of the core values of Christianity in that “only god can judge me”. By using American Christianity in mass media we are attempting to market it as cool, which to Christianity’s foundation it is not meant to be. “What if it turns out that Christianity’s endurance comes from the fact that it is, has been and continues to be the antithesis and antidote to the intoxicating and exhausting drive in our human nature for cool” (McCracken, 2010, p.