Understanding what drives popular culture is crucial for the church - whether we are consumers or creators. It will help us relate to the stories, the poetry, the idolatry of our times - and so to speak powerfully to our culture's hopes and fears.
The title playfully reflects what I think has happened to us. We may not be so bold as to claim to be cultured, but most of us are to some degree or other popcultured. Popular culture, or 'pop culture' as it's often referred to, suffuses our lives. The opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games in London was testament to how much we now identify ourselves by the popular culture we create and consume. In 1948 the opening ceremony London summer Olympics used only military bands. The most spectacular event was a twenty-one-gun salute and the release of seven thousand pigeons. In 2012, $42 million was spent on a three-hour ceremony held together by different forms of rock music and designed to impress the world.
In a popcultured age it made sense to have the evening designed by a movie director, Danny Boyle, and to showcase the work of actors, dancers, performance artists, sculptors, clowns, storytellers, comedians, musicians and DJs. There were references to the high culture of Shakespeare and Elgar, but the emphasis was on pop culture: James Bond and Harry Potter, the Beatles and the Sex Pistols, Chariots of Fire and the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners Lee.