The challenge of living with popular culture may well be as serious for modern Christians as persecutions and plagues were for the saints of earlier centuries. Enemies that come loudly and visibly are usually much easier to fight than those that are undetectable. It may have been easier for the Corinthians to eat meat offered to idols than it is for us to enjoy pop culture innocently. Idolatry is obviously foreign to Christian values. Even idolatrous ideas are not too difficult to identify and resist. But a sensibility is much more evasive and subtle and the church in America is not as alert to the problems of the sensibility of popular culture as the church in Corinth was to the significance of idol worship. Instead, while critical of some of its content, the church has a virtually uncritical attitude toward the form of popular culture. In fact, the church has adopted those forms without much resistance, in the alleged interest of promoting its message. But the message has thereby suffered, and so has its members.

Popular culture’s greatest influence is in the way it shapes how we think and feel (more than what we think and feel) and how we think and feel about thinking and feeling. As missionaries have taken the gospel to new cultures, it has always been tempting to recast the message of redemption in familiar forms, but some of those forms are inappropriate as vehicles of holy truth, either because they introduced fatal distortion or misunderstanding, or because they were so intertwined with ungodly practices that their affiliation with the gospel seemed to sanction the very behavior the gospel should have challenged. Yet the church still behaves as if the forms of culture and the role they play in our lives, are value-neutral.

Leaders need to become more sensitive to the way forms communicate values. The challenge for evangelical leaders is to be able to stand back and ask, not "if," but to what extent their movement and their churches have embraced certain cultural forms for the sake of expediency. Church leaders need to ask to what extent the cultural sensibilities associated with the church reflect the objective concerns of Christian truth, and to what extent they reflect the subjective standards of the spirit of the age. The call to escape the bondage to the sensibility of popular culture is not a call to asceticism. Christians can enjoy pop culture without compromising Biblical principles as long as they are not dominated by the sensibility of popular culture, as long as they are not captivated by its idols. But this requires a great effort and this book provides some wisdom to encourage the discernment necessary for such a worthy task.

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