This article put me in mind of a tee-shirt I saw in a boutique in Newcastle last week. It was one of those double layered things with a rough cut about it, canary yellow with a gothic-style crucifix prineted on it and some gothic lettered Latin which appeared, on closer inspection, to be the words from Matthew or Mark's account of Christ's baptism.
What is this about? Because it is not an isolated incident in the fashion/cultural industries at the moment, as the referenced article points out. I think that there is a big clue in the style: it's Gothic, it seems to connote things like, Van Helsing, Buffy and other borderline horror/magic/occult programmes and films. I would suggest, then, that our reading of this needs to start with that context. -A battle between good and evil in which the Crucifix is a talisman of protection or an amulet of power. It is also resonant with the themes of death and sexuality [like Madonna said once; the crucifix has a naked man on it] which is heavy in Gothic-related cultural artefacts.
The good thing about this, from a Christian point of view is that the idea of good and evil is alive and that a major Christian symbol is seen as powerful in that nexus. The challenge is that the conceptualising of good and evil is pretty shallow: it is hard to see why one is to be preferred over the other sometimes; it's kind of dualist. Yet for all that it cannot entirely go with the dualist idea since somehow at rock bottom some things just are good: friendship and love, pleasure not pain.
The other difficulty with a lot of contemporary thinking/sentimentalising about good and evil is that it is first defined in relation to the individual and power is seen as something we use for good or for ill.
The divine/spiritual is impersonal and even divine power is something that is controlled by individuals, there is no real concept that God might have a personal stake or that we migh need to fall in with God's ideas; rather 'the force' [to borrow language from another mythos for a moment] is neutral, to be bent to our agendas. In this way, tacitly, good and evil tend to be seen as human constructions, and therefore somewhat realtive [!].
Our challenge is to articulate a view of good and evil that makes sense of the 'just is' goodness of friendship, love etc and roots it in the 'just is' goodness of personhood which is so intimately related to them. What we need to strive for is presentation of a Christian viewpoint whereby thinking of good and evil aside from a personal God seems implausible or at least strange. I suggest that we need to be able to say that creation is good and that evil is an aberration parasitic upon the good [cf CS Lewis]. The intuition of Creation-cetntred spirituality is right at this point; we need to start with celebration of what is recognised as good. What is also needed though, is to be able to articulate an account of goodness that doesn't elide or minimalise evil in a way that too much creation-centred spirituality and theology seems to [I couldn't ever see how it would make sense in inner-city Bradford, for example].
I think we need to pay attention to the Gothic strand in contemporary popular culture: we can learn much about what we need to put over and what themes are most resonant.
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