Daniel Radosh’s Rapture Ready! is one of those books where, as soon as you finish, you wish you could go back in time and revisit something you wrote previously, now that you actually know what you’re talking about. In this case, that would be my dispatch from the Focus on the Family bookstore in Colorado Springs. At the time I wrote that Christian pop culture was about added value: product + God = better product. But there’s actually a pretty intense debate, as Radosh’s book makes clear, over contemporary Christian performing arts. Should Christians try to work within the secular system and promote their values through actions? Should they shun the system and purge their pop culture of non-Christian references? And beyond that, should they really be focusing so much on profits rather than, say, prophets?
It’s a fascinating book; Radosh checks in on Christian music festivals, Christian wrestling, Christian chick-lit (and its End Times counterpart, Christian pit-lit), Christian stand-up comedy, Christian Batman (“Bibleman”), Christian raves, Christian sex workshops—you name it, really. Anyway, check it out. And in the meantime, here’s a clip of Psalty the Singing Songbook, my favorite revelation (sorry) from the book; he’s like a mix of Ronald McDonald and Spongebob, if Spongebob weren’t an agent of the homosexual agenda:
