I sat down with Brian McLaren Saturday morning to talk with him about postmodernism, the church and the media, and the interview is presented here: 10 Questions for Brian McLaren.

For those of you who don’t follow this stuff (perhaps most of you), McLaren is a controversial Christian pastor and author. He’s a leader in the “Emergent Church” movement, and Time Magazine listed him in February as one of the 25 most influential Evangelicals in America. He’s controversial, because his postmodern perspective allows him to blend the best of mainstream and evangelical Protestantism and ignore the rest. He’s branded a heretic by some. His views on the Christian Right and the power of Christian broadcasters are insightful and provocative. And he believes “the church” and “the media” are both influencing the culture in very similar ways (and not necessarily for the good). Here’s an excerpt:

In the Christian media, I don’t know the exact number on this, but there are Christian radio stations and Christian-owned television stations, all of which I think are incredibly powerful. I think they get people elected. And they’re all owned by a small number of people with a very strong political agenda. Now they tend to complain that the mainstream media have a liberal bias, but of course, their solution to that isn’t to try to give something with more balance; it’s to have an opposite bias. Whenever everybody is trying to counter balance each other, it pretty much guarantees that everything we see veers toward Jerry Springer.