The Christian Ghetto

There's an article over at Townhall about the release of the new Left Behind movie which is being aimed at specifically Christian Audiences. Mark Joseph writes that this is a worrying trend, and compares it to the history of Christian Rock.

Many executives who populated the music industry in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s were all too willing to have devout artists leave their industry and make their statements of faith in the cultural gulag of Christian rock, where they would be sentenced to cultural obscurity. It was the pop culture equivalent of being shipped off to Siberia and being put to work breaking up rocks, a tactic effectively used to shut up freedom-loving Russian intellectuals in the former Soviet Union.

What resulted was two decades of nearly unbroken absence of serious religious faith from the mainstream of pop music.

This is kind of a warped version of the story. First of all, subjectivity aside, the artists who ended up in specifically Christian context usually were the ones who couldn't compete in a larger context. That's how they got there. If a Christian Artist could move units he or she would break through.

Secondly, I think it's just a little arrogant to consign all mainstream recording artists who commented on matters of faith as not "serious."

Frankly I'm pretty sure that if Left Behind could compete in this market, it would. Apparently it can't.

On a side note, if you haven't checked out Slactivist's review of Left Behind, there's no time like the present.