Vampires, Werewolves and Zombies...and God

I once heard a pastor talk about the difference between biblical hermeneutics and cultural hermeneutics, and how every good pastor needs a bit of skill in both. Usually seminaries spend the bulk of their time training future and current pastors in biblical hermeneutics (i.e. the art and practice of interpretation). My seminary, for example, dedicated huge amounts of resources towards teaching students to be proficient in the biblical languages (Greek and Hebrew), as well as in the skills needed to study passages of the Bible on our own.

Yet as pretty much anyone who is a part of a congregation knows, it doesn't matter how many Hebrew words a pastor has memorized if they don't know understand or care about the people they are preaching to. One thing that I'm learning over and over again as a preacher is how important it is to not only study the passage that I think I'm being called to preach on, but also the people that I'm being called to preach to.

So, with that in mind, what's up with zombies?

You can talk all you want about werewolves and vampires, but it's undeniable that zombies have held the day in terms of the strangely popular. Video games, movies, even poetry (how about some zombie haiku?

With nothing to eat,
while passing the highway ramp,
I leave the city.

You can find a whole book of such poems at Borders)...zombies are clearly a phenomenon to be reckoned with by anybody trying to understand pop culture today. And while getting pop culture won't tell you everything you need to know in order to understand a people, it certainly helps.

So, what does the popularity of zombies tell a preacher about the culture and people they're trying to reach? Obviously this is too broad of a statement to really treat in the limited space we've got here, but let me at least propose a few directions we could go in.

1. We like irony, especially the comic kind

Irony is a tricky thing to really break down, but I think the above Far Side by Gary Larson says all that needs to be said. If you think this is funny, it's because you like comic irony (thank you to Wikipedia for reminding me of this picture). The whole zombie thing sets up a lot of different avenues for comic irony. As weird as it sounds, our affection for the ironic makes reanimated dead people walking around hungry for brains a laughter-rich situation for a lot of us.

Short answer: as long as zombies are popular, our sense of irony is alive and well.

2. Zombies will lose their appeal once we talk about them too much

I came across this great prank pulled in Austin that featured someone changing the highway roadwork signs to say "ZOMBIES IN AREA! RUN". This is funny in popular culture as long as the right people laugh about it. But if it starts happening too much, if zombies become too mainstream, their appeal will quickly diminish.

For me, this points to a desire to both be "in" and to have only a select few "in" with us. In other words, sometimes the things we like become so because of the group of people who like them. Thus once too many people like something, it's not likable anymore. This is starting to sound suspiciously like zombies are a lot closer to fads like Zubaz and Hypercolor Fabrics, and that we're a lot shallower than we think we are. I'm not sure...what do you think?

3. We love a good bad guy

One of the great things about zombies is that they are pure evil. They are just like all of us in every way (i.e. every demographic group can be covered), yet their condition makes them totally alien. Not one demographic group will ever be offended by any zombie movie or video game. In this sense, when you need to choose a bad guy, they are even better than Nazis.

One direction this might point us in, then, is our desire to have a simple enemy, rather than the complex characters real life offers us. Nowhere in real life do we have a purely evil human enemy. Yes, you might hate your manager, but the reality is they've got their own stories and issues. The theological reality is that God loves them just as much as he loves you.

Not so with a zombie.

And I think that's why we like them.