Broken Hallelujahs by Christian Scharen

Author:Christian Scharen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL062000, REL012000, REL067000, Christianity and culture, Popular culture—Religious aspects—Christianity, Popular music—Religious aspects—Christianity
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group

Shining a Light

Focus developed a series of age-graded print magazines for children and teens throughout the 1990s. A key feature of this effort was the print magazine and now website on entertainment: Plugged In. Through its popular reviews of media—movies, music, television, videos, and games—Plugged In has grown dramatically in reach, especially since Jim Daly took over as president of Focus in 2005. With the goal of expanding the Focus audience to younger and broader evangelical and nonevangelical Christian demographics, Daly moved to Focus’s first-ever network television ads and worked to use new avenues for distributing content. Plugged In Online gets roughly a million visitors monthly and creates weekly podcasts, one- or two-minute radio and television movie review shorts, and distributes an e-newsletter. These and other aggressive efforts show that Daly was positioning Focus to transition not only through Dobson’s retirement (in 2009) but also into the new century, in which the thirty-minute radio show—if not dead yet—was becoming only one part of a sophisticated multimedia effort at Focus.

While Dobson has not served as a regular author of Plugged In content, his perspective sets the tone here, as it has throughout Focus as an organization. This is not surprising to insiders. Despite his folksy style on his radio show, Dobson is known inside Focus as “controlling,” with a tendency toward “micromanagement.”[173] One can see Dobson’s views on popular entertainment scattered throughout his books and many columns written in response to questions from constituents. Take, for instance, a column Dobson wrote in response to a listener who asked, “I remember adults complaining about the music of my day. Doesn’t every generation of parents think their kids have gone too far?” Dobson took this question as an opportunity to review the popular rap album Nasty as They Wanna Be by the Florida group 2 Live Crew. The album is by all accounts nasty, and Dobson points out that it was banned as “obscene” by a Florida judge.[174]

More revealing, however, is the method Dobson follows in making his case for the problematic nature of this “music” (Dobson puts the term in quotation marks to accentuate his scorn). “At the risk of upsetting our readers,” Dobson begins, “let me list for you—as discreetly as possible—the words that appear in the album Nasty as They Wanna Be. He begins with “226 uses of the f-word” and continues in systematic fashion, detailing all words that could be considered sex-related down to “one reference to incest.” Noting that the album sold more than two million copies, Dobson warns that “youngsters—some only 8 to 10 years of age—buying this ‘music’ typically listened to it dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of times.” While he roundly criticizes those liberal media figures who defended 2 Live Crew on either artistic or free speech grounds for failing to address the actual content of the lyrics, Dobson does not actually quote the lyrics either, nor does he speak with any youth who are fans. He moves from worries about youth listening to this album

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