what are the elements of contemporary culture that the preacher must engage with in twenty-first-century Britain? What are the issues to be negotiated and the pitfalls to be avoided if the twin errors of dogmatic irrelevance and cultural surrender are to be avoided? In this regard ecclesial expectations and the homiletical objective will always need to interact with contemporary culture to establish an appropriate balance in the preaching task. A weekly sermon for a well-established and historic congregation will be shaped differently from an evangelistic preaching opportunity in a university mission. The task of this chapter is to map the current cultural landscape as it affects preaching, to note its implications and to look for signs that might help us shape the task to hand.
Contemporary British culture
What does it mean to be British? From Norman Tebbit’s notorious ‘cricket test’ to determine immigrant integration into the UK to Gordon Brown’s call to celebrate national identity and embrace the Union flag in the wake of the 7 July bombing in London in 2005, there have been repeated attempts to define ‘Britishness’. The difficulty of the task is cast in high relief by the lack of success of all those who have attempted it.
While many lament the passing of an overarching ‘British culture’ and the increasing fragmentation of wider society, it would be a mistake to assume that there was nothing to be said. There are a range of common themes that run through our shared life. They may not be of the quirky ‘stiff-upper-lip’ variety that was supposedly illustrative of our national stoicism, but they are integral components of our wider cultural experience. They may lack the ability to restore a substantive social cohesion, yet they form a part of the tapestry of our shared life that it is important for any preacher to have in view. More than that, they form the contours of the landscape we inhabit, the cultural environment in which we live.
There are any number of trends and observations that it would be interesting to explore, but outlined below are those which might be of particular concern to those charged with preaching God’s Word.
Entertainment
Back in 1985 Neil Postman wrote his classic text, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. In it he charts how the ‘age of exposition’ has given way to an ‘age of entertainment’. Gone, now, are the days when public political debates could go on for hours in an orderly fashion as a series of speeches and rebuttals. Similarly, in the Church the day of the great revivalists like Jonathan Edwards and Charles Finney had passed. These were men of learning whose sermons were laced with theology and doctrine. Edwards, for example, read his tightly knit and closely reasoned expositions, not trusting himself to extemporaneous utterance. If his hearers were to be moved by what he said, they had to understand him first.
The developments in technology that led to the arrival of television overwhelmed the expositional age that was rooted in the printed word. Rationality and substance were supplanted by the seductive nature of visual images and thus the nature of public debate was redefined by the ‘supra-ideology’ of TV as entertainment. Indeed, communication and debate were now mediated by, and subject to, a technology defined by show business. As Postman shrewdly observed, if television is our culture’s principle mode of knowing about itself, ‘television is the command center of the new epistemology’ (1985, p. 78).
It is sobering to realize that estimates indicate people between the ages of 30 and 50 have watched an average of 40–50,000 hours of TV and some 300,000 advertisements.
The advent of 24-hour television news is illustrative of the demands of communicating content within the constraints of a medium defined by entertainment. A story only lasts as long as it can remain interesting or evoke an emotional response on the part of the audience. New angles can be explored and the speculation by commentators and pundits that precedes, accompanies and follows after events is constantly refashioned to maintain interest. When interest wanes, stories are dropped before ratings fall. This bears no relation to the substance and significance of a story, only to its ability to keep the attention of the viewers (Davies, 2009; Rosenberg and Feldman, 2008).
Narrative
If television has been the dominating medium of the last generation and it has embedded entertainment as the key component of communicating ideas within contemporary western culture, then it needs to be remembered that the staple diet of TV is story, and the narrative form heavily influences the whole viewing experience.
Narratives are impossible to escape. Like the air we breathe they are all around us. Most obviously in novels, films and TV programmes narratives actually inhabit the full range of human experience from our historic myths and legends, through conversational anecdotes to our own personal histories with their dreams and nightmares. Some have argued that narrative is so widespread that it must be one of the ‘deep structures’ of our makeup, somehow genetically ‘hard-wired’ into our minds (Abbot, 2002, p. 3). Certainly the early indicators of narrative ability begin to appear in children in their third or fourth year. You only have to witness their sheer delight at having a story read to them or their appetite to watch and re-watch a favourite film or TV programme to appreciate that narrative is fundamental to our human makeup. Indeed, without the ability to construct and understand stories it would be very difficult to order and communicate our experience of time.
The power of storytelling is in the way that the unfolding plot of a story mimics our own experience of life and the way reality unfolds sequentially for us as people. As such, narrative produces the feeling of events happening in time and evokes a personal and often emotional response from those listening to it. Whether true or false in what it depicts, it appears to replicate life. This is the reason for its penetration of our collective imagination and its dominance as a means of communication over against more analytical approaches. For the journalist Robert Fulford this is ‘the triumph of narrative’ (1999, pp. 15–16).
Narrative is so all-pervasive that it is impossible to ignore. Indeed, it would be unwise to do so.
Consumerism
It was the Christmas Eve edition of the Chicago Tribune in 1986 that provided the first recorded use of ‘retail therapy’.
We’ve become a nation measuring out our lives in shopping bags and nursing our psychic ills through retail therapy. Freely and enthusiastically embraced by shoppers around the world, it is the explanation of choice to account for the trip to the shopping centre to buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have. But it makes us feel better!
There can be no doubt that one of the most significant developments of the second half of the twentieth century, if not the most significant, was the rise of consumerism. Historically the patterns of consumption and commerce within the life of a culture were expressions of the core values of the society. At some point within living memory this relationship flipped. As Craig Bartholomew points out, the idea of consumerism points to a culture in which the core values of the culture derive from consumption rather than the other way around (Bartholomew and Moritz, 2000, p. 6).
The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman identifies three key elements in contemporary consumerism (2007b, pp. 82–116). The first has to do with identity. What we consume defines who we are by association with a particular reference group. It is a sobering exercise to sit down and ask ourselves what our clothes, our car, our house, the possessions that we value highly actually say about us. More telling are the things that other people see and associate us with. Bauman makes the point that consumer goods come with a ‘built-in’ identity, they are rarely value-free. Of course, the possibility of redefining ourselves and becoming someone
