Christian Meduiun

[Zeke365]

I have a question for Christian Medium, yes I know two subjects have been talked about in this thread viewtopic.php?f=37&t=66025 and this one viewtopic.php?f=26&t=66078 but I like to talk about the medium as a whole.

This by my own observation not others, but it seems to me that the Christian medium lacks creativity, not to say there aren't any creativity in the medium but they seems to be very few of them. This and there seems to be tendency to copy the world then creating own original identity, this could be in video games, movies (which are getting better), music, and books (sure there some there to.)

Why does it seem like that technology Christians use are about 10 to 15 years behind the world in some sense and why does there seem to be a lack of creativity for original ideas in this medium outside of bible stories which are remade several times?

[Xeno]

This was talked about in the other two threads also, but a large part of the problem is the presence of this idea that criticism of any particular "Christian work," be it a book, a movie, music, or whatever else, is a criticism of the message, and thus heavily discouraged from occurring. In secular media, criticism is encouraged, as it allows someone to know if what they're doing is good or not, but on the Christian side it is muted. Add to this that creating a new genre in anything is incredibly difficult, it is much easier to take an existing genre from whatever medium you're in and adapt it to your needs. This is why Christian books that aren't purely theological in nature tend to fall into the sci-fi/fantasy/drama because that is far less difficult, and if you have a book deal with a publisher that requires so many books be written in a specific amount of time, well it just plain makes sense then. The same goes for Christian music, music is so vast and varied that they could definitely pick from some more obscure sub-genres, but that's not exactly marketable. Musicians know what "sounds" are selling at the moment and they try to capitalize on it by using the same kind of music, but with their own message. The movies, even if they are getting better, are all still pretty bad.

Regarding Christians using antiquated technology, I've got some opinions on that, but they aren't particularly kind due to being entirely based on what I saw back when I was in church; suffice to stay, a lot of them are cheap.

[LecktheTech]

I have soooooooo often wondered why no one has been able to really make a reeaaallllly good Christian movie. It seems like there's nothing interesting to watch at all.

This by my own observation not others, but it seems to me that the Christian medium lacks creativity, not to say there aren't any creativity in the medium but they seems to be very few of them. This and there seems to be tendency to copy the world then creating own original identity, this could be in video games, movies (which are getting better), music, and books (sure there some there to.)

I've wished that there were more creative and well written media, but is not the case with most. Christian Video games are almost nonexistent, but I've heard that the creator of the Five Nights at Freddy's series is Christian. Christian music in my opinion, is much more original. From bands like tobyMac to The Grey Havens, there is much more originality there. One will always have to look far and wide, but it's there. Now, on the topics of books, there fortunately are good books to read. They just tend to be few and far between. For example, Three by Ted Dekker. Very well written.

Why does it seem like that technology Christians use are about 10 to 15 years behind the world in some sense and why does there seem to be a lack of creativity for original ideas in this medium outside of bible stories which are remade several times?

I think that some of the best(current) Christian authors don't care to write books with high tech, but who knows?

[Kaori]

Leaving aside whatever issues there might be in terms of making quality media, we also have a couple of problems in today's society in terms of finding stuff that is Really Good.

One problem is the inevitable one that if you are looking at media (books, music, movies, whatever) created recently, we haven't yet had the benefit of the time it takes to sift through things historically and pick out whatever was best from a particular era and forget everything else. That is, we know what were the best books from the medieval era because those are the ones that survived the tests of time, but things currently being written have not yet been sifted in that way.

Another problem is that our current society in America (and some other places as well) has hideous tunnel vision and is extremely focused on 1) recent things and 2) whatever is being advertised to us.*

*Side note: I recently read in a book about language learning, written by an Irish person, that he is always being asked his opinion on expensive language courses like Rosetta Stone by, in particular, "Americans overwhelmed by marketing and advertisement campaigns."

So if you want to talk about literature, the number of great writers throughout the world who were devout Christians and wrote masterpieces is pretty overwhelming. You have Dante's Divine Comedy, Spenser's Faerie Queene, John Milton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Donne, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and the great novels by Dostoyevsky. Even in the cases where these authors were not inventing genres or techniques per se, you can definitely not say they are not creative. (BTW, just yesterday I was listening to a lecture by an Orthodox priest in which he said The Brothers Karamazov is the best theological work outside of the Church Fathers.) Also, all of those writers are not just nominal Christians but people who were very devout and wrote about spiritualtiy because it was important to them. For a contemporary writer, Marilynne Robinson writes incredibly beautiful and skillful and spiritually-informed literary fiction, but no one has heard of her because this kind of literary fiction does not make blockbuster movies or have the kind of appeal that can be mass-marketed.

In terms of music, again, if you look at things historically, just to name a few things, you have all of the Catholic Masses that were written by classical music composers, the entire body of sacred classical music (not just Masses but a ton of other things written for performance in church or otherwise as sacred music), and everything ever written by J.S. Bach, who signed every single piece of music he wrote with "Soli Deo Gloria," which means "To God alone be the glory." If you look at the whole history of classical music, it is not a case of Christians asking, "Why does the devil have all the good music?" it is the opposite, it is a case of "Why do the Christians have all this amazing music?" You can even see this in YouTube comments nowadays; I am always seeing positive comments on sacred music by non-religious people saying things like, "I'm not spiritual, but this is an extremely moving and beautiful piece of music."

Again to name one contemporary figure in art ("classical") music, Arvo Part has been the most-performed living composer in the entire world for the past five years in a row, and people of any and every spirituality and even no spirituality find themselves really resonating with his work, and he is a devout Orthodox Christian whose music is intrinsically informed by his faith. Oh, and on the subject of originality, he also completely invented the musical technique that he is always using, and although other composers have tried to imitate it it fails to create the same sense of spirituality as that in Part's music.

In popular music, there are heaps of Christian bands making music in all sorts of different genres and doing a perfectly good job with those genres, like industrial (Chatterbox and AP2), grunge (Grammatrain), Celtic punk (Ballydowse), synthpop (The Echoing Green), and metal (name a subgenre and I will name a Christian band who does it, though Extol is my all-around favorite), but obscure genres are obscure genres and you cannot expect those bands to become broadly known in society at large.

I won't say as much about movies, since there are those other threads specifically devoted to them, but I have noticed that the Christian films that are well-known and that are marketed are the ones that are typically not regarded as being any good (I haven't seen them but do not have a positive impression about the Left Behind movies and God is Not Dead based on people's comments), but there are other ones out there that are good movies but just not titles that immediately leap to people's minds when they think of "Christian movies" because they are more obscure. For example, Romero, Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess, and The End of the Spear; even some shorter and more obscure things, like The Bridge (gospel message in allegorical form) and this wordless short made by some Russian seminary are pretty decent for what they are. But they don't have any marketing behind them, so they aren't on anyone's radar.

I'll leave the issue of what are the society factors that hamper Christians in comptemporary society from making good media for someone else to beat.

[Zeke365]

First of thanks for the responses and I will try to best answer what I can.

First of all when I say Christians using tech and stuff what I mean is that we are now barely in Christian HD blu ray and the world move to digital world. This what I meant when Christian stuff was behind in the times. Though there getting better at caching up.

secondly I know there are some great Christian authors and their creativity in there books, Ted dekker, Frank Pretie, and Eric wilson to name a few.

I wasn't saying there is not any Christian creativity, it just seems what dished out is the same old same old, even there a creative product in the mix it be to hard to find in the stack, was curious why that was.

Fourthly I have discovered that criticism is a good thing, it helps you improve yourself by others telling you what good or bad about your product, though I think I can paint this better light.

Here the main problem when comes down to it. It's that the Christian medium no matter what has been showed in a negative light, therefore any Christian product of any medium will always be bad and poor quality even if it trying to be quality or creative product, it will never shine the light of day because we see it through this negative lens yet we complain that there are no quality Christian stuff. Therefore we complain that everything is bad quality (not everybody just for the sake of augment) this then discourages us to even make quality product because we don't want to receive the harsh criticism others. This how we see the Christian medium or at least at my conclusion

It like if you made something and then the other person said he did not like it then you shut your off the whole idea because that person did not like and no one understands your product and your trying your best to avoid the criticism.

I m not trying to turn this into rant or augment page but I thought I share this because this the conclusion I came up by putting the pieces together and asking why is this?

[K. Ayato]

And why should that surprise you? Jesus Himself said the world would hate us. Even if there came a day that the best Christian whatever came out that was doctrinally AND Biblically sound, the secular world for the most part would either not care or have major problems with it.

Yeah, it sucks. But that's the world we're among.

[Zeke365]

I tend to believe it both on the secular and christian crowd.