Should Christians do the ‘Harlem Shake’?

Imagine in a perfectly ‘modern’ world, where everything needs to be done with a reason, which in turn is nested within a system of beliefs. People will think twice before mimicking the act. Everything must go through the scrutiny of reasoning and strict rationalisation. Questions like, ‘Why should I do it?’ ‘What is it?’ ‘How to do it properly?’ must be answered and the whole logic must adhere to the system of beliefs (meta narrative) before the idea was allowed to be translated into action.

However, that age has passed. Now people pick and choose any cultural elements which make sense to them and incorporate them into their lives and actions. One of the postmodern characteristics is the tendency to ask ‘what use is it?’ instead of ‘what is it?’ or ‘why is it so?’. For this reason, as long as ‘Harlem Shake’ serves a certain needs – be it the need to be relevant or the need to have fun, people will embrace it without much consideration.

Thus, Shellnutt calls for Christian to be careful:

Regardless of what the ramifications are for this particular song, Christians—whose faith relies on the context of its own teachings and symbols—generally need to take interest in where cultural phenomena come from and what they mean.

The same impulse that has us thoughtlessly clicking and sharing viral videos trains us to disconnect the thing in front of us with the story behind it. Our lives as Christians are all about the story of the Gospel, and we don’t want our traditions distanced from that story…by us or anyone else.

I think she brings out a very important point – that there is now a danger of Christians unknowingly detaching their acts with the Gospel story. If we consider why some of the Christians are following this trend, we might find that most of them will tell us that they ‘didn’t think too much’, or even respond by asking, ‘wasn’t it fun?’ They just do it because they are postmoderns – not that they know it. In a modern world everything that we do is linked to a set of belief or meta-narrative. In the postmodern world we mix what we like to do and form our own stories. That means, although they are Christians, they are from ‘planet postmodern’. They are susceptible to distancing their acts from the Gospel story, and subsequently having the tendency to form their own story. One of my earlier post explored this issue, which manifests itself in an increase of eclectic taste for spirituality.

So should Christians do the ‘Harlem Shake’? I think that’s a wrong question to ask and fall short of tackling the heart of the matter. Instead, we should be asking, ‘how do we help Christians today to hold on to the Gospel story, since they are, as Newbigin put it, the hermeneutic of the Gospel?’ Judging the phenomenon is pointless because the interpretation of the phenomenon has been made difficult amidst the cultural chaos of the day. In the past people are settled within a certain cultural tradition. The world as we knew it was a cultural mosaic. Today we are increasingly facing a force which tends to take various cultural elements of others to form a new self-made subculture, crossing geographical and traditional cultural  boundaries. Meanwhile, the under-threat traditional cultures are reacting against the tide, resulting in a cultural landscape which is often hostile but certainly fluid, fragmented and mixed. As a result we are now living in a cultural kaleidoscope. So it is hard to pin a phenomenon down and properly classify it today, let alone criticise it.

Furthermore, soon there will be another meme around the corner – will people go on examining every little bit of its origin before they adopt it? The postmodern Christians will not care nor they have the aptitude to do so. It is against their nature. They will just go for it. So instead of criticising them or the phenomena, should we not consider how to engage them and help them to live for Christ even under such influence? The real danger, as Shellnutt points out, is not with the phenomena nor is  with the threat of the present cultural norm which has the subtlety to detach our acts from our faith. It is with Christians leaders and thinkers who disregard the need to contextulise their approach of teaching or ways to engage with the postmodern generation, thinking that the modernist approach would make sense to the postmoderns. Perhaps we should refer to Paul’s Areopagus experience, where he expertly contextualise his approach as he persuaded the pluralistic Athenians, while holding on to the Gospel story. Some may listen while others not, but contextualisation is no more an option for Christian mission in today’s world.