Cultural Significance of Changing Conservative Baptist Worship : Doom of Religious Culture in Entertainment Age?

Abstract

The study is to discuss how modern popular culture influences the church in terms of the relationship between worship and culture. The author assumes that worship is the comprehensive cultural actualization of the church, in which the inside and outside cultures of the church encounter each other. The author is particularly interested in popular culture’s impact on conservative congregations. The conservative churches are supposed to stand against secular culture. This supposition is not so clear and convincing as to articulate always the borderline between secular culture and non-secular culture. Conservatism today in religious domain may be quite ideological; we may face a secular conservatism in actuality. The article takes the Southern Baptist Convention churches for a typical case to inquire into the subject matter. The churches are not only one of the representative conservative churches but also the largest protestant denominational group in North America the most influential protestant region in the modern world. Above all, the Southern Baptist churches have inherited the Separatist tradition of England and the old continent, which struggled to separate the church from state and the less Christian multitude. The separatist ideal was to establish pure church in both spirituality and culture. In addition to the separatist heritage, the Southern Baptists are sectionalized by their environmental peculiarities. All these notwithstanding, the Southern Baptist churches adopt show business culture into their worship after all. Methodologically the study is not to analyse the current secular aspects of the Souther Baptist worship but to trace back the historical developments of the traditions so as to find out what possibly made them as they are now from their own perspective. And the research does not find any definite causal relation between the past and the present. What this means is that secular culture in their worship is an accidental intrusion from the outside. The article shows that the force for such intrusion is the ubiquitous dissemination of modern mass culture propelled by the modern technology and media, whose persuasive appeal lies in entertainment as against the expositive Christian traditional culture.