The Wondering Years: How Pop Culture Helped Me Answer Life’s Biggest Questions

by Knox McCoy

the giraffes literally cannot even with all of this lion-cub cuteness.

It was often pop culture that helped me fill in the gaps of my understanding—sometimes in hilarious ways, and sometimes in ways that were accidentally profound. And that’s what

in church I learned about a myriad of people in the Bible, but that didn’t mean I understood them. I just had a name, an action, and every now and then their motivation. To me, they were all mostly flat

characters. And though I was flatly earnest, this left me unable to grasp whatever spiritual application I was supposed to be taking from the story. That is, until I created real-world analogies using the lens I was most familiar with as a child: sports. It was then that these flat caricatures became round dynamos of complication and motivation.

As kids, we slowly broaden our circles of understanding until we have a pretty good handle on things. But that’s a lot more difficult than it seems because we’re all born in the middle of everything. An entire world is happening around us, and as young humans we’ve just got to figure out how to jump onto an intellectual merry-go-round that’s going two hundred miles per hour.

We try to convince ourselves that we can think our way to more perfectly understanding God. We believe in our ability to accumulate clues that will help us hack our way into better standing with him.

There’s a cheesy cliché you’ve probably heard: “Not all who wander are lost.” But the truth is, not all who wonder are lost either. I like that because it gives me room to be specifically uncertain within a larger, faithful certainty.

Even now, routine and the status quo feel like freedom to me. Conversely, discomfort and the distress of unfamiliarity feel like ruin. But really, I have it backward. Comfort is bondage; it promises faux relief. Discomfort and unfamiliarity are gifts that provide a type of freedom that buoys, broadens, and always benefits me in the long term.

And in all honesty, my Christianity was mostly built upon this premise: objectifying people into opportunities—both in how they were someone to convert, but even more how they could help buoy my self-satisfaction with my faith exploits.

I am part of a generation of evangelicals who struggle to balance the simplistic spiritual perspective we internalized as children with the more complicated notions and cultural conflicts we experience now as adults.

Some Christians see grace as a kind of heavenly Febreze that ensures that our souls smell like cotton candy instead of burnt hair, but I find it more helpful to think of grace as permission. Not permission to pursue sin and live in disobedience, but permission to explore the education of our failures without being shamed.

wasn’t necessarily disagreeing with any of these things; I just wanted to ask the question, but I’d been conditioned to feel like that was an incorrect and disobedient impulse. Because to ask meant to doubt and to doubt made you like that Thomas fella who always seemed characterized as the next-sketchiest disciple after Judas, even though now, with the benefit of age, Thomas is the disciple I most identify with. Not because he doubted, but because he thought it was a worthy thing to articulate a doubt so that he could better understand.

My discontent and doubts, they weren’t the work of the Devil or scarlet letters I’d have to brand myself with. Rather, they were breadcrumbs leading me to a faith that required more work, but they would also lead me to a faith that was infinitely more realized and abundant than I ever could have thought.

Often with Christian entertainment, the goal is for something to be affirmational more than it is to be authentic or artistic.

Taking something that is secular and making it look Christian is a specific kind of tomfoolery where Christians think we can just graft ourselves onto something and it will totally be fine. But when we do this, we fail to remember that the God we serve is a creator, not an imitator, so why is Christian culture content to consistently reappropriate the runoff of popular culture in a less interesting way?

It is my genuine hope to influence and improve everyone around me in a way that heightens the best parts of them and their story and teases out the goodness inherent to all of us. Personally, I love the idea of playing the role of Samwise Gamgee to modern culture’s Frodo Baggins. Strong both in heart and spirit, steadfast in love, and able to resist the pull of evil? That’s the kind of noble character I’d be honored to share a description with.

consideration.

I went through a similar consideration but came to the opposite conclusion. Why do you assume Jurassic Park got the nature of dinosaurs right?

Even though I’d been taught that he had created me in his own image, my entire life was spent reducing him to mine.

No matter how contorted the relationship, our parents always exist in a state of heightened symbolism. They aren’t just people; they are totems for good and for bad and for a place where we aren’t who we are now as much as who we were as kids.

but none of those things were authentically mine.

It was like a mindfulness on low heat, much different from the way I used to turn on the high heat of religion in bursts before turning it all the way off.

God would always be bigger than I could conceive, yet more accessible than I could ever know.

More than anything, God spoke to my heart and revealed that he really was fine with questions. Because at the end of the day, he knows that the answers to all the questions I’m wondering about, and have been wondering about for all these years, they’ve always led back to him. So why wouldn’t they still?

That goes for God, who we are in relation to God, and how helpless we feel when trying to understand why Kevin didn’t just call the cops in Home Alone.