Liturgy as politics: an interview with William Cavanaugh

You've written about Christian engagement with the entertainment industry, specifically with the Disney organization. Normally Christians' two options in this area are either to look for signs of the gospel in popular entertainment or to shun it because of its immorality. What's your approach?

I don't think we have to choose between embracing and shunning popular entertainment as a whole. I think we can discern what's good and what's bad in it.

My critique of Disney is not so much concerned with the content of its films and other media, though the content is certainly open to criticism. My interest in Disney concerns its sheer power. Disney is an example of the way a few enormous corporations have the power to influence patterns of consumption and homogenize culture, even though the market is free. Millions of parents are stuck buying whatever Disney coughs up, because every other kid at school has Lion King or whatever other kind of merchandise.

How do people end up feeling coerced in a free market? Theoretically, in a free market every individual is free to choose what he or she regards as good. But in a culture without a sense of what is objectively good, all that remains is power. The will is moved not by attraction to the good, but by the sheer power of marketing to move the will. The growing power of huge transnational corporations produces a truncated kind of freedom.

Another concern of yours is the identity of church-related colleges. Do you think such institutions can retain a robust commitment to their theological grounding and also succeed in the competitive market of higher education?

The great irony of American higher education is that in pursuing diversity, colleges and universities have come to look more or less alike. I'm very much in favor of pursuing racial, gender and class diversity within colleges. Pursuing a diversity of mission, however, produces schools that don't believe in anything in particular. Real diversity would mean diversity not just within colleges but among them. If a college is Baptist or Catholic or Methodist, it should not regard that identity as a liability. We are all enriched by places that are distinctively Baptist or Catholic or Methodist. Church-related schools will prosper if they are distinctive, if they give students a reason to choose them over generic schools with no particular identity.

This doesn't mean that within church-based schools rigid standards of orthodoxy must be enforced on all. But there should be enough agreement among a significant proportion of administrators, faculty and students that a coherent conversation can go on. Many college students don't take their education seriously because we train them in irony. We offer them a salad bar of different intellectual methods, positions and worldviews and tell them just to choose what they want--it doesn't really matter. Many modern universities are so intellectually incoherent that they tend to breed cynicism, not intellectual vitality.