As we move into the New Year and continue our spiritual disciplines, including Bible reading, we can’t help but wonder if the Christian life can be lived in this culture anymore. I have good news: it can! And it’s not theory. On December 23, the Wall Street Journal published a full-page interview with commentary about Pat Boone. I commend the article in its entirety. Here are some snippets:

If you’re under 50, you may not recognize the name Pat Boone. Consider this: For most of the latter half of the 20th century, there wasn’t a person in America who didn’t know who Mr. Boone was and what he stood for. He was the All-American; the kid in the white buck shoes; the clean-cut alternative to early rock-’n’-rollers like Elvis Presley, Little Richard and Chuck Berry; the star of a dozen Hollywood movies, none of which contained anything resembling profanity, social subversion or a love scene. Life magazine put Mr. Boone on its cover in February 1959, dubbing him “The Million-Dollar Idol of U.S. Teen-Agers.”

…“Back then being the All-American kid was popular, and being a family guy was popular, going to church was popular, and all of that was OK,” he says during a recent interview in his memorabilia-filled office on the Sunset Strip. At 88, Mr. Boone is spry and sharp and, despite our presence in the godless wilds of La La Land, not the least bit hesitant to quote Scripture to a complete stranger: “When the wicked are in authority, sin flourishes, but the godly will live to see their downfall” (Proverbs 29:16). A well-thumbed Bible stays on his lap for the entirety of our 3½-hour conversation. “This is my 40th year to read straight through the Bible, word for word, from beginning to end.”

…Sixty years ago, when he moved his family to Los Angeles, he paid $159,000 for a house on a 1.2-acre lot at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and N. Beverly Drive. He still lives there. “I turned down $20 million for that house,” he says matter-of-factly. “I’m going to be offered more than that, I know.” But he won’t sell. That house is where he and Shirley, his wife of 65 years, raised their four daughters. It’s where Shirley died in 2019.

…From the beginning he was intent on charting his own show-business path, one that wouldn’t force him to sell his soul in exchange for success. “When we moved to California, I said consciously to Shirley, ‘We’re not going to live by Hollywood standards, we’re going to live by Tennessee standards.’ ” I might have guessed what they are, but he spells them out: “Bible-believing, churchgoing, standing for righteousness, morality—the things that people in Tennessee just take for granted and they don’t take for granted out here anymore.”

…The America of the 1950s is fading from memory. The animal spirits unleashed by the birth of rock-’n’-roll have run wild in the land for nearly 70 years. The fabric of the country has been torn and stitched back together so frequently that it’s become almost unrecognizable. Nothing now is as it was then. Except Pat Boone. He is the same guy at 88 as he was at 18: an American square. And proud of it.

God bless Pat Boone, and God bless Matthew Hennessey and the Wall Street Journal for writing and publishing an article like this.

Go out into the world uncorrupted, a breath of fresh air in this squalid and polluted society. Provide people with a glimpse of good living and of the living God. Carry the light-giving Message into the night… (Philippians 2.15, MSG)