About Us

Christ and Pop Culture exists to acknowledge, appreciate, and think rightly about the common knowledge of our age.

Christ and Pop Culture began in 2007 as a podcast. It was a way to address what we saw as a void in Christian criticism; popular culture was either being ignored or mishandled by most evangelical cultural critics. Our project began with a focus toward the arts, addressing the worldview implicit in television shows, popular music, and film. Over time, our understanding of “culture” broadened from “industries” (the music industry, film industry, etc) to also include the practices and creations that form our local, national, and international communities. We began to consider topics like politics, hospitality, parenting, and online communication.

Christ and Pop Culture has always been changing, from podcast to blog to online magazine. We seek to be careful about our methodology, thinking deeply about how to engage and show appreciation for popular culture without falling into some of its implicit pitfalls.

Over time, we’ve come to believe that a focus on quality over timeliness, appreciation over condemnation, and intellectual independence over the party line is the best way to address popular culture in the truthful, sober and vigilant way that Scripture commands us to. We challenge our writers to search for evidences of grace and the possible pitfalls inherent in the culture we all participate in.

The primary motivation behind the site is the simple acknowledgement that popular culture is everywhere, and that no Christian can avoid it entirely. It shapes who we are, how we are, where we are, and why we are. It’s our entertainment, our food, our job, and our transportation, and all of the things in between that are accessible, mass-produced, or affected by things that are. It’s both the common knowledge and the common sense of our age.

Our goal is to acknowledge the good, the beautiful, and the true things no matter how trivial or inevitable, to indulge in and enjoy examples of common grace we find in the world without uncritically embracing the worldviews they flow from. We aren’t interested in redeeming, baptizing, abandoning, or dominating culture; we desire to be a faithful presence, honoring God and edifying our neighbor as we wisely participate in culture.