Not Your Mother's Morals: How the New Sincerity Is Changing Pop Culture for the Better

By Jonathan D. Fitzgerald

“[Fitzgerald] explains how the new sincerity movement in contemporary pop culture is making way for moral storytelling in unlikely places.” —Jonathan Merritt, author of Learning to Speak God from Scratch
 
In Not Your Mothers Morals, Jonathan D. Fitzgerald argues that today’s popular music, movies, TV shows, and books are making the world a better place. For all the hand-wringing about the decline of morals and the cheapening of culture in our time, contemporary media brims with examples of fascinating and innovative art that promote positive and uplifting moral messages—without coming across as preachy. The catch? Today’s moral messages can be quite different than the ones your mother taught you. Fitzgerald compares the pop culture of yesterday with that of today and finds that while both are committed to major ideals—especially God, Family, and Country—the nature of those commitments has shifted. In his witty, expressive style, Fitzgerald explains how we’ve arrived at the era of New Sincerity and why its good news for our future.
 
“A great, quick read . . . jam-packed with explorations of art, politics, media and pop culture that show how we’ve moved from being June Cleaver’s society to being one that begs you to just tell it to us like it is—flaws and questions and all . . . Jonathan’s book puts all of the proverbial pieces together into one witty journey that will light up any culture lover’s brain.” —The Good Men Project
 
“Jonathan Fitzgerald is an astute observer of Christianity in Western culture. By turning ‘conventional wisdom’ on its head, he shows us some truth we would not otherwise have seen.” —Tony Jones, author of The New Christians
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9781625391704

Book preview

Not Your Mother’s Morals

How the New Sincerity is Changing Pop Culture for the Better

Jonathan D. Fitzgerald

Copyright

Not Your Mother’s Morals

Copyright © 2012 by Jonathan D. Fitzgerald

Cover art to the electronic edition copyright © 2012 by Bondfire Books LLC.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

See full line of eBook originals at www.bondfirebooks.com.

Electronic edition published 2012 by Bondfire Books LLC, Colorado.

ISBN ePub edition: 9780795332999

For Mom & Dad

Thanks for teaching me right from wrong…

And letting me watch TV.

Acknowledgments

Patton Dodd, you rescued this book by seeing what it could be and then got right to work making it happen. For your skills as an editor and for your friendship, thank you. I’m also grateful to Christopher Ferebee, whose patience and constant encouragement helped me find the best home for this thing.

To all the publications and their editors who let me explore these ideas in their pages: The Curator, The Huffington Post, The Daily, and especially SoulPancake and my editor Chris Wood; you were among the first to believe in this idea, thank you.

My close friends, fellow writers, and students: I’ve driven so many of you crazy talking all this out over the past three years and I’m grateful to every one of you for arguing with me, challenging my notions, reading early drafts, and ultimately still bothering to talk to me about it at all. I promise I won’t say the words New Sincerity for at least a year.

I dedicate this book to my mom and dad, but am equally grateful for the support from the rest of my amazing family.

And to Stephanie. You’ve suffered the most for this book. Thank you for letting me talk and talk and dream and talk. Thank you for being my toughest critic and greatest encouragement.

To my writing partner, who doesn’t say much but listens a lot, my dog, Sgt. Pepper.

And finally, to you, reader: thank you for taking a chance on this book and reading all the way to the end. I sincerely hope you like it.

Contents

Introduction: Why Listening to the Devil’s Music Didn’t Destroy My Soul

The Morals of our Stories

God, Family, and Country: The Morality of the New Sincerity

The New Sincerity: It’s Here, It’s Sincere, Get Used to It

The Best of the New Sincerity

What’s So Moral about Sincerity? (Or, Lady Gaga vs. Madonna)

God: Or, You Know, Whatever You Call Him

How Rock Music Got All Sincere

The God of Comic Books

Family: From Happy Days to Happy Endings

All in the Modern Family

Freaks and Geeks and Funny People

The Big, Happy, New Sincerity Family

Country: How it Became Cool to Care about America

From Cold War Cynicism to Yes We Can

Caring About Trash

It’s Cool to Change the World

Afterword: Everything You’ve Just Read Is Already Irrelevant

About the Author

Introduction: Why Listening to the Devil’s Music Didn’t Destroy My Soul

When I was a kid, I knew The World was going to Hell in a hand basket. I didn’t know what that phrase meant—still don’t, really—but I knew that it was one of the only times I could get away with saying hell, because it wasn’t swearing. The World was actually going there.

In my conservative, evangelical-before-we-knew-what-evangelical-was upbringing, Hell meant that very literal—perhaps underground—place where real flames burn real, bad people forever. And The World meant non-Christians, as in be in the world, but not of it. Evangelicals often refer to any not-usses, any thems, as The World.

So, The World was on a steady decline to the pits of Hell, which began, well, when it all began—when the literal Adam and Eve ate the literal apple, handed them by the literal snake that literally was Satan in disguise and sin entered into the previously pristine world. This descent had been on a pretty steady clip for most of human history—which we knew to be about 5,000 years—but had, in recent decades, ramped up thanks to the emergence of popular culture and its slump into moral relativism and a if it feels good, do it attitude.

If you want to get a sense for what it was like to grow up in this culture, all you have to do is recall every stereotype that relates to Christians and popular culture—the Church Lady from Saturday Night Live is a good place