We Were Born to Die

In Response to Lady Gaga vs. Religion?

http://jesus-meetpopculture.blogspot.com/2012/01/lady-gaga-vs-religion.html

Much attention has been paid to Lady Gaga in her quest to find unique ways of incorporating religious elements into her music and music videos. In Veronica's blog post, she excellently articulated the different ways in which Lady Gaga has given her own personal, and often controversial, vision of Christ images in her music. As I watched Lady Gaga's past few music videos on youtube, I was instantly reminded of another artist.

If anyone is familiar with Lana Del Rey, she also has recently released a song which channels a more elegant, refined Gaga. Del Rey's lyrics as well as imagery within her music video speak multitudes of the way in which she has interpreted the lyrics. She manages to juxtapose the imagery of American culture with Christianity, and ultimately equating it with death.

In her video, Lana sports a crown of flowers, as she sits upon her throne on the altar (as a priest would), in what looks to be some sort of sacred Cathedral. The music video itself is flooded with symbolic imagery; very similar to what Gaga does in her own videos. It seems as though the usage of Christian symbols in this and other videos has gained popularity and become the norm.

Christians on TV: God Warriors

Before the reading week, we examined how Christians were portrayed on Television and how this has affected the general public's view of Christians and the Christian community as a whole.

From the beginning, I noticed that the ways in which Christians are portrayed on narrative broadcast television and the ways in which they are portrayed on reality TV. Narrative TV characters are mostly politically correct, reasonable and moral depictions of who Christians are and what they represent. Reality television on the other hand, has taken a turn for the more extreme. Why? Because that's what gains ratings. Apparently, that is what people want to watch. It is the case in so many train-wreck reality TV shows.

Here is an example of the most extreme Christian reality TV personality to grace primetime television.

Here we have the "God Warrior" herself: Marguerite Perrin

Perrin was featured on the show Trading Spouses , in the episode we can see that she comes from an extremely religious household, and for the sake of reality TV ratings, she is sent to live with a family who practice witchcraft and look to astrology for prayer and any type of religious insight. Of course, Perrin is outraged by this, and upon her return home, frantically explains to her family that "they were not Christian!!!!!!" and were devil-worshippers.

Watch it for yourself here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOpva_iit-8

As you can clearly see, Marguerite's behaviour is completely outrageous. As a result of the portrayal on this show, people may see Christians in a negative and satirical fashion. Many people may take this example and make the generalization that all are like this. Upon reading some comments on youtube, I noticed that a lot of people criticized Christianity, even to go so far as to say that this woman's behaviour made them embarrassed to be Christian.

However, when I did a search about Marguerite Perrin... I found websites that portrayed her as a calm, loving mother and Christian who was accepting of differences. It led me to the conclusion that Christians on TV suffer from stereotypes which depict them to be overtly extreme and irrational beings -- almost to say that you would have to be an irrational and bigoted individual to believe in Christianity itself.

I guess that's just some food for thought. Looking forward to what other people thought!