One of my adult volunteers sent me a link to “Guitar Praise” the other day, a Christian-music Guitar Hero, and since I’ve also recently run into “Dance Praise,” a Christian-music Dance Dance Revolution, a link on Sean Gaffney’s blog caught my eye as I was doing a read-through of his old posts today.
It’s from GameSetWatch, a gaming site, reviewing “Guitar Praise.” It’s a long article, so here are some tidbits:
The gaming community greeted the story with exactly the kind of all-caps, spluttering incredulity one might expect. One droll commentator at Boing Boing quipped, “The game refuses to boot on Sunday mornings, so I hear.”
A book or song cannot ‘follow Christ’. As an adjective the word is, in essence, a term of marketing targeting a product specifically at Christian people. As a result it is an objectionable label to have applied to a music video game which self-evidently cannot be Christian. Indeed, the terms use infers that the real Guitar Hero and its ilk are, in turn, somehow ‘Unchristian’, a damnation by inference.
Christians should not be demanding video games prefixed with a faith label, as if that cheap and easy classification provides some kind of invisible moral safety net for their and their children’s media consumption.
Rather, believers should simply be demanding good and beautiful games that delight in creativity, make people happy, present or explore the world in interesting ways and maybe, just maybe enable us to catch a glimpse of their God, from whom all good things are claimed to flow.
C.S. Lewis said something similar about Christian books: “We don’t need more people writing more Christian books. We need more Christians writing good books.”
For another reflection, here’s Walt Mueller on “Why I Don’t Live in the [Christian] Bunker” originally published in Youthworker Journal in May/June 2005:
A few years ago, I excitedly mentioned to a fellow youth culture analyst that I’d just seen a powerful film that God used to melt my heart and open my eyes to the reality of abuse and its horrid lifelong effects on kids. “What film was that?” asked my friend. “Good Will Hunting,” I replied. He looked at me in stunned disbelief, then proceeded to question my wisdom and spiritual maturity. “You mean to tell me that you actually watched and enjoyed Good Will Hunting—a movie with 273 uses of the ‘f’ word?” “Yes,” I replied. “God really used the film in powerful ways. And by the way, when I came out of the theater and looked at my wife, the first thing I said wasn’t, ‘Hey honey, that was a f***ing good movie, don’t you think?’” Sadly, you and your students will miss it—and a whole lot more— if you live in the bunker.
Youth ministers are dishonest when we try and assume our students only want Christian music, games, videos, books, and brands in general. While we are called to set an example and use materials that purposely glorify God, I think the game reviewer made a terrific point when he called for believers to “demand good and beautiful games that delight in creativity.” We’re too worried, in general, about where our examples come from. But one of the things Jesus did most often was to take some ordinary object in the culture and make people think about it differently. He didn’t demand His followers live in a cocoon or start a chain of Christian bookstores. The faith Jesus taught was always present to His disciples because what He taught them engaged things they were surrounded by and re-imagined them, giving them more meaning than the world did.
Marketers make millions each year off Christians’ fear- fear of culture, fear of confronting ideas we disagree with (or fear of those ideas seeming more powerful than ours), fear of temptation and fear of those we love leaving the Body of Christ. And that’s sad.
If I believe that God created everything, and that Christ’s work can redeem everything, I don’t need to fear my students’ music, movies, or games. I only need to ask God to show me how to use them to make my students think.
