D. A. Carson, The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 46:
I do not want to succumb to the elitism that makes sharp distinctions between popular and high culture.
[Footnote] See, for example the telling review of Kenneth A. Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture (Westchester: Crossway, 1989), written by William Edgar and published in Westminster Theological Journal 53 (1991): 377–80.
From Bill Edgar’s review:
Despite the many attractive features of this book, and the welcome emphasis on apologetics for the ordinary modern person, this reviewer has serious reservations about some of its basic assumptions. The most questionable is the concept of popular culture itself. Myers divides the cultural world up sharply between those things that belong to basically good high culture, and those that belong to basically problematic popular culture. He equates high culture with tradition, and attributes to it such characteristics as focusing on timelessness, encouraging reflection, requiring training and ability, conforming to the created order, referring to the transcendent, etc. (p. 120). By contrast, popular culture focuses on the new and instantaneous, is a leisure activity, appeals to sentimentality, is individualistic, and tends toward relativism. [Read more…] about Popular and High Culture