Culture Making and the Future: Art, Media, and Technology 

In the 1970s, faculty in the Art Department at Wheaton College (IL) engaged in a decade-long debate over the appropriateness of displaying artwork that featured the nude body in public campus exhibitions. Two studio art professors, Alva Steffler and Miriam Hunter, drove the discussion. Steffler felt Christians should embrace Biblical eroticism and explored this theme through his own abstract sculptures. Hunter, morally conservative and fearful of secularism’s threats to Christendom’s future, “literalized” artworks with nudity by denying multi-valent meaning and insisting on purely anatomical interpretations. I argue that this debate, which extended beyond the art department and engaged the broader campus community, reveals a fundamental tension between the nature of American evangelicalism and the visual arts: evangelicals crave certainty, but visual art inherently resists definitive meaning.  

This work of this paper is to examine how Evangelical media visualizes the landscape of heaven and what these depictions reveal about theological and cultural aspirations. In doing so, it argues that Evangelical depictions of the heavenly topographies consistently present deeply anthropocentric theologies in which heavenly land remains ordered under human-oriented dominion. The paper turns to three primary examples, a Trinity Broadcast Network “Praise the Lord!” soundstage, the film Heaven Is for Real, and the film The Shack. The study analyzes how lawns, parks, and wilderness are imagined in each of these digital "heavenscapes." These landscapes encode distinct ideals: prosperity and privatized wealth, child-centered safety and family values, and controlled pastoral freedom. Together, they reveal an anthropocentric Evangelical dominionist theology, one which impacts more than the beyond, but touches the here, now, and immediate future.

The evangelistic drama Heaven’s Gates & Hell’s Flames (HGHF) promises audiences a glimpse of “what happens one second after you take your last breath.” I argue that HGHF capitalizes on audiences’ simultaneous fears and hopes for their afterlife future by cultivating affective experiences to instill a distinct soteriological message and teach appropriate moral behavior. Originating as a camp ministry in the late 1970s and now performed globally through Reality Outreach Ministries, HGHF dramatizes scenes of sudden death and final judgment in which characters are welcomed into heaven or dragged into hell. By rapidly switching between the two extreme affective registers of hope and fear, HGHF allows audiences to vicariously experience both their anticipation and anxiety for the afterlife. Drawing on my ethnographic research at rehearsals, prayer meetings, and performances, I show how these imagined futures are embodied and repeatedly reenacted, shaping evangelical understandings of salvation, morality, and behavior in everyday life.

A reading of biblical passages like Rev 7:9-17 as a checklist of what must happen to bring about the apocalypse is an ethical hermeneutic that some scholars call consequentialism—the ends justify the means, in this case, the means of using AI to reach "the nations." AI alignment with human good is systemically, developmentally, and theoretically problematic and yet AI proves incredibly influential in an age in which information flow is power. There is no good news of Christian witness when our ethic is simply to reach as many people as possible with information despite the harm of our methods. Such consequentialism aligns evangelical Christians with a culture of power and the politics of Babylon. Creative imaginings of better alignment for evangelical readers may by sustained by post-conservative theological interpretations of apocalyptic scripture.