Rapture Culture

"Readers occasionally express anxiety about the influence of secular culture and sometimes roundly condemn it, but rarely does this concern inhibit the buying, renting, or consuming of popular culture in its broadest possible sense.  So-called secular culture mixes readily- at least in practice- with Christian culture, and Left Behind is a significant part of this mix for many...The cultural influences are tangled, and evangelicals rarely separate themselves from popular culture even as they occasionally complain about its immoral content." -Amy Frykholm in "Rapture Culture"

I find this statement by Amy resoundingly true.  I remember when the Left Behind  series started to be ridiculously popular, and my parents along with the rest of our church and other family friends started reading them, discussing them, and passing them along to other people.  The series adapted for children started showing up in the classrooms of the private Christian school I went to through 9th grade (which, for the record, prohibited any of us from reading Harry Potter).  The books were a huge deal and it's interesting to me how much they've disappeared from "Christian conversation" and the circles that my family is still involved in.  Every one was talking about them nonstop for a while, but just like any other trend, their presence and significance has dissipated, in my opinion.  Frykholm's Intro and first chapter were really interesting to me, someone who grew up in a very Christian family and community, due to attending a private Christian school. What she says in the above quote is so true in my family and nearly every other family I know decently well from church or school.  The lines have blurred significantly between the "Christian" subculture that Amy talks about and popular, secular culture.  When she talks about the Left Behind series being one of the first literary works to expose the bluriness of these lines, it made me think of William P. Young's The Shack.  It's also stirred up controversy in Protestant circles and part of the reason for that, I think, is how it's been recognized by secular culture.  It's been all over the shelves in Barnes and Noble and multiple of "non-Christian" places.  I feel like part of the reason these two cultures are coming together is not because popular culture is getting any "better" morally, but because many Christians have started to do what the example of Sarah in the first chapter of Amy's book has done.  What Christians today constitute as a "godly life" is far different from what my grandpa, as a Methodist minister, would have advised.  Maybe this is more the beginning of what Whitman wanted to see in the future when he wrote Democratic Vistas- a basis of religiosity in America, not one big religious group or way of living, but a culture infused with religion and the individual agency of having your own beliefs and deciding for yourself what constitutes a godly life.  This mix of components from a religious culture and from popular culture is really interesting and something that I think will continue to shift and build into something that hasn't been seen in America today.