Today, while watching American Idol, I saw a side of Russell Brand that I had long suspected existed but had never actually seen, a side of his personality that was genuine, scaled back a little from his usual schtick, and actually genuine.  I had suspected that he had a real and humble and genuine and funny side of his personality that was beneath the mask of a modern Lothario, the false image of a debauched and irresponsible mess.  I had suspected such a genuine person existed behind the false persona because he recently married Katy Perry, another famous star in today’s culture who hides a no-nonsense and genuine person (genuine enough to write a song that reflects her true worldview “I Do Not Hookup”) aside from the bi-curious sextoy image she has cultivated in her own hits like “Teenage Dream,” “California Girls,” “Hot ‘N Cold,” and especially “I Kissed A Girl.”  Most people forget, if they ever knew, that Katy Perry began her musical career as a Christian singer, and despite her public image, it seems as if she never lost a deep-seated moral view beneath the persona of a glamorous and hypersexual young woman.

What is it that leads people like Russell Brand and Katy Perry to put up a false front of sin and debauchery when in reality they seem as relatively ordinary and decent people?  As a concerned observer of modern culture, it troubles me that people who are decent on their own would feel the need to put a fake front of immorality (if not amorality) that they themselves do not genuinely practice in their own lives, as if they would lose their popularity and standing as cultural figures if their deep-seated decency and morality were open for all to see.  It is deeply troubling that such a facade of foppery (on the part of Brand) and hypersexuality (on the part of Perry) would be a calculated act of deception, but it seems to be so based on the wide gulf between their image in movies and music videos and the life they appear to live.   It should go without saying that I like and respect the real and authentic self, at least as near as I am able to determine it, rather than the carefully cultivated (and deceptive) public image.  But if two decent people feel the need to put on a public face that is so repellant in order to gain popularity within our culture, what does that say about the state of our culture?

In the Harry Potter series of fantasy novels, one of the darkest creatures in the world of wizardry is a creature called a dementor.  A dementor is a fearful and parasitic creature of the spirit world that seeks to rob people of their souls and feeds off of fear and despair, taking special pleasure in tormenting those who have suffered serious trauma by causing them to relive their unhappiest moments over and over again.  The only way to keep those foul demon-like creatures at a distance, in the series, was to cast a spell known as the patronus, a (false) projection of one’s hopes and dreams and “happy thoughts” that the dementors could latch on to instead of draining the life and happiness from the “real” person underneath.

It would seem as if, perhaps without consciously realizing it, both Russell Brand and Katy Perry (and who knows what other Hollywood stars) deliberately put on a false mask for the paparazzi and other parasites of show business rather than have their true and authentic selves drained of hope and filled with despair.  When I think of the fate of a damaged soul like Janis Joplin, or of an authentic star like Heath Ledger, who seemed to pour his very being into every role, both dying tragically in large part due to the demented celebrity culture around us, I shudder a little.  What profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?

We might think that the lives of movie stars and musicians are somewhat frivolous, and therefore dismiss popular culture as unworthy of our study and examination.  That said, popular culture is extremely important for a large portion of our society.  Many people learn how to live, how to dress, how to talk, how to behave, how to believe, from perfect strangers they hear on the radio or see on tv or the movies.  The seemingly meaningless worlds of art, literature, music, fashion, and entertainment are the places where the behavior of progressives, and the eventual habits of even more conservative people (who are merely a few decades at most behind the trendline of decadence from the emergent culture of the time) are shaped.  We may not like to admit this, but we cannot help but be influenced by the wickedness around us.

Since we are dealing with a decadent and demonic culture, we cannot hope to save ourselves from perdition merely by holding on to the obsolete traditions of a bygone age, that have their own mixture of good and evil and that merely serve as an earlier operating system of the sin and corruption that we must all face in distinct ways depending on time and chance.  Merely holding on to traditions is not enough, because those traditions are themselves corrupt, at least in part.  Merely seeking to turn back the clock to an earlier culture, no matter where we turn, is not enough, because at all times and all places humankind has been faced with a culture that is a mixture of good and evil.  There is no golden age of human history to go back to where we can find a pure and uncorrupted world.  Every society and age possessed its own problems, its own hypocrisies, its own unexamined and unspeakable sins.

So what are we to do then?  If we desire to escape judgment for following in the sins and depravity of our age, we cannot replace something with nothing.  If our current culture, and the predominant culture of all human history from the fall of mankind into sin and error to today, has been corrupted and influenced by evil, then we must be a part of the effort to replace that corrupt culture with a godly one.  It is not merely enough to speak out against the evil or mixed cultural artifacts of our time (such as Russell Brand movies, the music of Katy Perry, or the Harry Potter novels), though we ought to recognize and mark the evil and error to be found there.  We must go deeper, though, and create a godly culture to replace the ungodly one around us.

We cannot do this task alone.  We need godly people of all abilities to participate in this effort, whether it is to create godly works of history so that the truth of our past as it relates to the plan of God is made plain and that the lies and propaganda efforts of the wicked historians are exposed and brought into the light, or godly works of art, literature, music, fashion, radio, television, movies, science, math, agronomy, business, politics, cooking, or any other sphere of human activity.  The task is a great one, but if we desire to escape the incubus of the demonic culture around us, we need to fill up the cultural vacuum left behind with a godly and uncorrupted culture, or another more-or-less corrupted culture will fill in the empty spaces in the absence of a godly alternative.

It is my fond hope that ere I die I may at least see some effort made in the creation of a godly (counter)culture, so that I may know that I had some small part in helping to not only hold on to the decaying remnants of the past, but to reverse the spread of evil in the world that I was cursed to see and suffer from.  Why do we feel content to curse the darkness rather than shine the harsh light of day upon the corrupt culture around us?  If we are wise, and fulfill our God-given responsibilities, we may yet help create a world where decent people need not hide their light under a bushel, but have a lampstand to place it on so that they in turn may provide a practical example of godliness in a decent and upright culture such as the world has never seen.  Let us therefore seek to labor in the construction of this godly culture, whose designer and maker is our Father in Heaven above, and whose construction manager is our elder brother, Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.