Book Review: Plugged In
This book review was included in the March 2020 Meadowcroft Monthly. For an archive of all book reviews, click here.
What in the world do we do with culture? Do we ignore it? Embrace it? Give it the side-eye? It’s hard to know how to apply what we believe to the cultural air that we breathe and the works of culture that we interact with. Daniel Strange gives us a way forward in Plugged In.
Tim Keller wrote the foreword for the book and sums up Strange’s work well:
(Cultural analysis) never means simply beating on people from the outside, saying, “I am right and you are completely wrong.” Nor is it merely a way to show how up-to-date and relevant Christianity is. It involves both respecting and contradicting. It means challenging people, but showing them that their efforts fail on their own terms. And it means offering them, on gospel terms, what all human hearts rightly need…
Strange begins by briefly summarizing some inadequate approaches to culture that all of us are prone to. We can “look in,” meaning that we try to just stay within the confines of Christian community and attempt to ignore the larger culture. We can “lash out” - an angry response that usually includes a reference to cultural decline. Or we can “look like” which means uncritically embracing culture and being indistinguishable from the world.
As you’ve probably guessed, Strange is not interested in advocating for any of these approaches. He would like to see us “engage” culture. And wait, what is culture? He defines it as “the stories we tell that express meaning about the world.”
Strange moves on to explain why we should care about culture, He then explains how certain types of culture can help us see both the goodness of God and also what is wrong with the fallen, sinful world that we live in.
The book even has a chapter entitled “Can I Watch?” This is helpful because many of us struggle with what we should put before our eyes and ears when we turn on the TV, go to the movies, read a book or listen to Spotify. He suggests questions we can ask ourselves before interacting with a piece of culture, and even applies the five “solas” of the reformation to the main question of “can I watch?”
Towards the end of the book, Strange gives examples of the type of analysis he has been pointing us towards - featuring edited work done by some of his students. One of his students wrote about Adult Coloring Books (“ACBs”). I have never purchased an ACB. I probably never will. I’m quite sure I simply rolled my eyes when I first heard about them. But rather than mere eye-rolling, Strange (and his student) looked deeper to try to understand the phenomenon - exploring the vision of the good life that they put forward (usually “untainted natural worlds”), exposing how the hope given by ACBs falls short of the hope given by the Gospel, and then showing how ACBs can be redeemed when appreciated for what they are. Strange and his colleagues give us a humble way to interact with all kinds of culture without falling into the trap of calling them “all good" or “all bad.”
We all interact with the culture around us (even if that interaction consists of trying to ignore it), and we need tools to do this in a way that helps us to enjoy God’s common grace and point others to His goodness, especially revealed in Jesus. I highly recommend Plugged In.