After getting this audio book (ie. see my last post) from Chris Hedges,  I recalled that James K.A. Smith had mentioned him on a blog post a while back (turns out it was in June 2005).  What he says there about it is basically that despite his admiration for the writing of Sharlett and Hedges, he also knows that it’s not these writers who are going to change things.  Here’s the relevant stuff:

From Lapham’s characteristic fundamentalism of the left, through Jeff Sharlett’s foray into the exurban world of Ted Haggard’s megachurch, to Chris Hedge’s hilarious and frightening tour of the National Religious Broadcasters conference.

….

I remain convinced that many of these observations are right on the money—mainly because I’m an insider. I get the jokes because I live with this stuff.

But here’s the rub: I get the jokes because I’m an insider; but it’s precisely because I’m an insider that I know that Harper’s anthropologists aren’t going to change things. All-expenses-paid trips from New York to exotic locales like Colorado Springs will feed the alarmist stance of detached coastal regions, but these dispatches from the twilight zone of the Midwest aren’t going to change the hearts and minds that matter. They’re only going to contribute to the problem. If, as an evangelical, I am horrified by what I see played out under the banner of the Religious Right, I know that countering this won’t be accomplished by witty, sardonic editorials in my favorite magazines—not even witty, charitable editorials for Sightings!

To counter this,  Smith continues, 

what it will take is a patient, charitable transformation of the evangelical imagination from the inside. And that can’t be done by visitors writing for Harper’s. It will take a long-term commitment to re-educating evangelical hearts and minds in the venue of denominational magazines like The Pentecostal Evangel or the CRC Banner—and perhaps even through the airwaves of—gasp!—Christian radio. That will be a calling, not for visiting anthropologists, but resident teachers.

—–James K.A. Smith in his blog, Fors Clavigera: It Only Hurts When I Laugh: Why “Harper’s” Won’t Change America June 22, 2005

I too long for the kind of radio or media to exist as a Church resource to inform the awareness of the People of God.  So much of “Christian Radio” is so vacuous,  and fanatically irrelevant.  The only such media that even address issues such as war,  and Iraq in particular,  do so as a capitulation to the right-wing media obsession with the “liberal bias” and the insistence upon an “America where our freedoms are protected”,  which is shorthand for tacit approval of “whatever it takes” according to the administration.  Otherwise,  they insist,  “we wouldn’t have a place to worship freely” or free expression of religion. 

The massive cultural underpinnings of the great myth of “redemptive” warfare are  ancient, some would say “archetypal”,  But so are a “People of God”,  who desperately need formative underlying “myths” of their own (or, rather  to be attentive to the ones we already have in our history, and to let let ourselves be formed by THAT narrative). 

I have some hope that podcasting might help distribute this kind of needed monologue and/or dialogue as an ecumenical resource to the scattered churches.