Alt Culture, or not.

Vox Day put up a post responding to yet another article on building another culture. Seriously. I hear about or find another article every few months.  Vox mentions the fact that conservative media has never talked about a Castalia House book. I've seen an interview in a Catholic online mag with John C. Wright that only talked about his Tor books, and this was recent. The fact is, the so called media organs of conservatism and Christianity don't benefit from helping relevant material grow. They benefit from being able to whine that the establishment is leftist and dishonest.

Music has largely been hostile to faith and conservatism for decades. Yes, there are exceptions for faith, notably country music, but that's been getting sidelined even there. But you look outside it, on FM stations? Lust filled lefty music is what you find. Oh, you want to go with classical?  You really don't know how left most of the performers are, do you? Oh yes, there are exceptions, and most of them focus on being a better musician. Look at what they do with "reimagings" of great opera: they change the setting, change character sexes, etc., and then, while you still have the story, it's being told in a manner against the original. That's ignoring the garbage pieces that get foundation and government grants. Not going into the Christian music scene.
 
Movies? There's plenty of lower budget stuff out there. Kevin Sorbo's done a ton when he should have been one of the current big stars. A lot of actors even just keep mostly quiet, but have their own rules which have hurt their careers. Neal McDonough is a Catholic who won't do some scenes, and it's moved his career more to supporting roles or antagonists.  But, foreign ventures like the movie Guardians prove that you don't need Hollywood itself to do good looking action films.

Books? Well, just another place where the movers and shakers mostly prefer to stay ignorant. This case, unlike music, I'm glad about. Why? Because their willful ignorance leaves a place for people like me. If those media were actually paying attention to small press and independent  authors, I'd have a much harder time with audience growth. They want to ignore anything but big NY publishing, I'll gladly fill part of that huge gap.

Now, as to other reasons aside from selling the "can we build an alternative culture" article again. Most of it comes down to the fact that people are largely lazy. I've seen it like crazy with people at church that will go to a concert of the youth pastor's cover band, but won't bother with their musician friend's group that's been working for years and building hours of music.  A lot of folks also want to be able to talk about the same entertainment as everyone else. This view of culture is the real culprit.

I won't drift very far into this, but there's a real purpose to culture, which is part of why Andrew Breitbart's statement "Politics is downstream from culture." rings true. The Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper covers it very well in his Leisure: the Basis of Culture.  And the core idea is this: Culture is a part of our worship. The town festivals and celebrations all started as HOLY DAYS, on a very local level. For centuries, the Church funded the creation of a great amount of music, architecture, sculpture, and other art, funding artists both internally and externally of Church hierarchy. Now? Most of that is done by people in "ministry" on the Protestant side, or by clergy who may or may not actually be good at the art on the Catholic side(look at modern Catholic hymnody).  While I could go further, I'm not ready for it to devolve into a rant or grow into a full fledged post on its own.

When you play Social Justice, the world loses.