The first of many tangents: On "secular".

Growing up in the church one cannot escape certain dichotomies: Old and New, Life and Death, Faith and Doubt, True and False, Light and Dark, Right and Wrong, and before too long you become accustomed to looking at the world through these bifocal lenses of either or. I don't have a problem with that. I believe that there are objective standards, many of which we can know through study, observation and experience.
There is one popular division however that I do not believe in at all: that is the distinction between "Christian" and "secular". I think that this is probably the most diabolical institutional marketing ploy that the religion of Christianity has come up with. The advent of church bookstores selling "Christian Literature", "Christian Artists", "Christian Clothing", and every other marketable merchandise is the biggest and most obvious blight in most grand-scale evangelical churches today. To label anything "Christian" for the sole purpose of increasing sales is a travesty to faith, and an insult to consumers.
In seeing a bookstore at the back of a sanctuary I'm always reminded of the sole instance of pure righteous anger that Christ enacted against people, throwing the moneychangers out of the temple. The NKJV translation records it this way in Mat. 21:12: "Then Jesus went into the temple of God and drove out all those who bought and sold in the temple, and overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves."
I believe wholeheartedly in art. I believe that legitimate art is a true expression and that Christians should be amazing artists given all that there is to express in a relationship with God. However, the distinction between Christian and secular work, be it art or otherwise, has only managed to secure a market for mediocrity and censorship where the greatest works of devotion, expression, and truth should exist, and succeed, by their own right and merits, especially given the subject matter.
I know a lot of people who readily dismiss honest expressions by struggling people because it depicts situations and circumstances of sin, doubt, hatred, death, and every manner of darkness that Christ came to banish in the light of such amazing grace that any counter argument is dissolved in the bending, consuming blaze of enlightening glory, and yet, in so doing they deny the artists the opportunity to communicate, and so hold over them the shading parasol that essentially denies them the love, grace and acceptance of God through Jesus that would set them, or those who subject themselves and relate to such expressions, free.
There is legitimacy, if not truth, in every human experience. You cannot deny the feelings and circumstances of others, especially their suffering, their pain, their doubt, their sin, their loss, their happiness, their lusts they believe to be love, or any other transient impetus of expression, because if you do, you limit their capacity to receive the gift of redemption God is offering to them through Christ as it becomes increasingly difficult to communicate through walls of censorship and judgment labels like "secular" erect.
We are to be in the world, but not of the world. To those cloistered away in homes devoid of Rock n Roll and restricted movies I would caution that sterile environments are, by definition, hostile to life, and Christ came to give us life abundantly, not necessarily through R-rated movies, though if you saw "The Passion of the Christ" you'd know that the life of Christ is hardly family viewing fare, but there is real life in the stories, songs, pictures, and words of the world wary (and often weary) artists out there. They are worth knowing in their due degrees for the lessons that transcend and speak of that which we know without their knowing, and also to be better armed and aware of the ways of humanity, in all measures of depravity, while they can be dissected, understood, and defeated in the comforts of the home and as such, may not become the surprise attacks of the enemy in the unfiltered reality in the world outside your doors.

Just a thought.

- TPS