TWU Today Archives Part 4: A Plea Against Evangelical Kitsch

My journey through the TWU Today Newspaper archives continues as I consider another article I wrote waaay back in ninety-six.  This one must have been good because as I recall, it prompted my friend Steve to write an indignant letter to the editor in reply.

The article includes standard buzzwords of the evangelical lexicon in the 1990s — “the Lost” and “pseudo-Christian cults” and “New Agers” — but it also raises some legitimate concerns about the use of bumper stickers — and kitsch culture generally — as a means to propagate the Gospel. As Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message, and a bumper sticker simply is not a great medium for meaningful communication. Is this really the way we want to bring the Gospel to the world?

As I observe in the article: “While the Jews believed that God’s name was too sacred to utter, we’ve saturated our culture with phrases like ‘Jesus saves’ or ‘God is love’ until they’ve become meaningless cliches.”