There is an almost insuperable hostility among church people toward culture.  It is conventional to blame this attitude on the fundamentalists. Inasmuch as they have scoffed at culture, swaggered across every stage that would hold them to speak condescendingly about beauty, and since they have flaunted their homespun, poorly-executed diversions, the accusation has stuck. They worked hard at creating this impression; it seems ungenerous to deny them a paycheck. The man who said "culture is driven by ungodly forces" deserves a handsome bonus in his envelope. Let's not be stingy about this.

But if you think that American religious culture is shaped today by fundamentalists, you need to have holes drilled in your head to let the evil spirits out.

Christianity Today is not the official spokesrag for fundamentalists. John Wilson is not a member of any church that is famous for the Gospel. Todd Fadel does not hold music clinics at The Wilds.

Incidentally, CT has just published its 2007 Readers' Choice Awards. Check it out. Read the thought questions that follow each CT review. There's your enlightened evangelical culture right there.

Think about this for a moment:

Wilson doesn't know what he's hearing and he can't tell us. So he publishes it! He's like a monkey at a chess tournament: he is registering sensory impressions but he cannot explain what they mean. He wouldn't know a Réti opening from a hole in the carpet. He is the "Books and Culture" editor for the magazine of evangelical conviction. And there are pastors and church workers out there who continue reading Christianity Today. They want to know about books, bands and movies. CT is where they go.

Greg Howlett doesn't know what he's talking about either; his appeal is to progress, by which he clearly includes an evolution in the acceptance of dissonance, whatever that could mean.

Garlock makes a ministry out of debasing our tastes. And Garlock is not some Bible Institute sophomore with an electric piano and a burning love for movie music. He is the editor of the fundamentalist hymnal.

Fadel instructs the musically illiterate to participate in alt-worship and then passes it off as "improvisation".

Meanwhile hundreds of fundamentalists around the country gather to giggle at sacred things and make light of God's social order. Is this because they are cultivated enough to understand Oscar Wilde or because they are not?

All of these are excellent examples of people who do not understand what culture does. As Arnold noted, "...our Puritans, ancient and modern, have not enough added to their care for walking staunchly by the best light they have, a care that that light be not darkness; how they have developed one side of their humanity at the expense of all others, and have become incomplete and mutilated men in consequence."

There is a seldom-recognized consequence of being serious: you don't indulge dilettantes and philistines when they speak about sacred things.