Christian Pandering Update
This article via Eye on the Left:
Here's the gimmick: Take a weird, modern conservative revisionist New Testament and wrap it in faux-hip fashion-mag duds and hawk it to unsuspecting young maidens who otherwise wouldn't get within ten low-rise jean lengths of the gray-bearded dust-choked finger-wagging dogma of King James and all his hoary misogynistic machismo. Clever indeed.And
"Revolve" is actually very much like a mind-control experiment, very much like some sort of sinister trick wherein they, like Christian rock bands, surreptitiously infiltrate a world the girls actually care about and use the teen's own anxieties and angst against them to instill a certain, narrow Christian agenda, induce a fluffy sense of guilt and shame, all while imparting a bleached, sanitized morality that includes not a whit of funk or style or messy icky sex or intuition or sly winking cosmic knowledge. Almost makes "Glamour" look like "The Celestine Prophecy," no?
At a certain level, I actually agree with this guy. As I have stated before, I think Revolve is nothing more than Christian pandering, although I, strangely enough, do respect the motives behind it. And, yes, trying to link makeup tips to spiritual lessons seems horribly trite.
But, I'm also surprised (well, not that much) at the level of invective coming from this guy. Isn't San Fran supposed to be all about freedom of speech? This guy makes Ann Coulter look like Miss Manners. He's downright nasty to the editors of Revolve. Who's to say that waiting on sex until marriage and not wearing immodest clothing couldn't actually be a good thing? Why does that offend him so much? (All you theological nuts: I know why - the question is rhetorical).
Also, why does he keep harping on the "weird, modern conservative revisionist New Testament"? What does he know about textual criticism?
Ultimately, I think the greatest irony is this: Christian publishers, in an effort to be as appealing and non-threatening as possible, have really, really pissed off this guy, who now lobbies accusations of "mind-control" and "ultra-prim" more freely than Former President Clinton launched cruise missiles during his impeachment trial.
September 22, 2003 07:37 AM