Back in 1987 Ted Koppel - the host of ABC’s “Nightline” - was the graduation speaker at Duke University . In his address he deplored our declining moral climate and he reminded his predominately secular audience of the abiding validity of the Ten Commandments. He said God gave Moses Ten commandments, not ten suggestions, and that they “are”, not “were”, the standard of morality.
What was most striking about what Koppel had to say was what went unreported by the media. He told the Duke University class that, “America has been vanatized.” Koppel was referring to the beautiful and incredibly popular woman of the TV game show “Wheel of Fortune”. Vanna White’s main job on the show is to push a button to light up those block letters when the contestant guesses them correctly and when she gets to the other side of the display board she claps her hands. Along with theologian James Montgomery Boice who has also commented on the “Vanna phenom”, I’ve often wondered how can someone who says and does so little and therefore is basically unknown to us be so phenomenally popular. She has consistently ranked at the top of those magical lists of America’s most admired people.
Since we don’t know what Vanna White is actually like, Koppel says, she’s whatever we want her to be. He says, “Is she a feminist or every male chauvinist dream? She is whatever you want her to be. Sister, lover, daughter, friend, never cross, non-threatening and non-judgmental to a fault.” Vanna White is popular, says Koppel, because we can project our own deep feelings, needs, or fantasies onto her TV screen image.
Now I’m not trying to knock Ms. White or her show but her phenomenon does illustrate how TV not only reflects contemporary culture but also shapes it, including the way we think about what’s important in life. In many ways, television is symptomatic of how American culture has become conditioned by and addicted to images meant to amuse us, entertain us, give us a certain feeling . Everything has become sensory; we have to see it, hear it, feel it, smell it, taste it; in other words something is only real or true or significant if we experience it.
In 1985 Neil Postman, a professor of communications arts and sciences at New York University wrote a fascinating book called, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. It’s marvelously insightful and prophetic book about TV’s profound influence on the way we live and think. Postman points out that during the print era when we just had books, newspapers and pamphlets and such, there was a certain distance between the writer and the reader that caused reflection, evaluation and thinking to occur. But in the television era or the age of show business everything is entertainment. There’s no reflection or thinking, only sensual absorption and reaction to disconnected images passing before us. [As an aside, 60% of the high school graduates in this country will never again read a book.
The problem, Postman stresses, is not that TV has too much entertaining subject matter, but that under its influence all subject matter is now presented as entertainment. “In court rooms, classrooms, operating rooms, board rooms, churches and even airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities, and commercials.” Postman says that TV gives us, “news without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure entertainment.” In other words, what Postman puts his finger on, is that TV is not only mindless but it is teaching us to be mindless. On the other hand Scripture, as we read, says “do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind”; TV says be like the rest of the world and be transformed by chasing your feelings. Big difference!
Not so surprisingly this carries over into politics, where image over substance is so pervasive, but it has also profoundly penetrated religion. With more and more emphasis on emotional experience over the Bible and Biblical doctrines, we’re seeing churches mimicking the TV entertainment format. The new orthodoxy in many American churches seems to be everything must be turned into entertainment in order to get people to pay attention to us. Feeling good in church has become such an overriding concern in some places one wonders if they learn anything about God or even lose the presence of God in their worship.
Postman doesn’t write as a professing Christian, but he nevertheless scores this bullseye about televangelists, “Everything that makes religion an historic, profound and sacred human activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence. On these shows, the preacher is tops. God comes out as a second banana.”
The LORD warns His church about being squeezed into the world’s mold and being taken in by its illusions. What Paul warned our fellow believers of in the church at Colossae goes for us today: “Don’t let others spoil your faith and joy with their philosophies, their wrong and shallow answer built on men’s thoughts and ideas, instead of what Christ has said.” [Living Bible]
All of this imagery and appeal solely to our senses is mindless and it has deeply infected the culture. A group of professors at Calvin College in Michigan produced a book about MTV, called Dancing in the Dark: Youth, Popular Culture and the Electronic Media. Bob Pittman, MTV’s channel chairman, is quoted as candidly saying, “Our core audience is the television babies who grew up on TV and rock and roll...The strongest appeal you can make is emotionally. If you can get their emotions going, make them forget logic, you’ve got ‘em’...We make you feel a certain way as opposed to you walking away with any particular knowledge...It’s style, not the substance. At MTV, we don’t shoot for the 14 year olds, we own them.” Wow! Frightening stuff! No wonder we’re in a moral mess.
This unremitting dose of entertainment throws reality out of kilter and fundamentally undermines traditional values. In a moral and spiritual sense, we are amusing ourselves to death. John Leith writing in The Princeton Seminary Bulletin had these observations:“It induces people to find meaning of life in being entertained. Entertainment (soap operas, athletic events, even anchor news which turns great events into spectacles) relieves us of uniquely human responsibilities to think for ourselves, to set goals and to accomplish them. In addition, entertainment distracts our attention from the critical issues of life, and finally, our heroes become not persons of substance and achievement so much as celebrities who attract our attention.”
Celebrityism is the new belief system born out of the show business era. It is the illusion that things don’t happen unless famous people make them happen. A few years back the farm bill was bogged down in Congress and couldn’t get it through; so the chairman of the Agriculture Committee asked three Hollywood actresses to come to a hearing and testify in support of his bill; they were Jane Fonda, Jessica Lange, and Sissy Spacek. When they testified the media came and the legislation went through. What is curious is that none of these women grew up on a farm or worked on a farm or knew anything about farm policy but each had played farmer’s wives in the movies.
Now some of you may be saying to yourself, come on Brown, give it a rest; you’re being too harsh; what harm does stardom and a little glitz and fun do? Well, I recall Phil Donahue’s interview in the early eighties of Jerry Hall, who’s fame was that she bore Mick Jagger’s second child out of wedlock, having lived with him eight years. Donahue asked such scintillating questions as “what was it like to bear the child of a rock star legend’ and she responded ‘well I was just lying there.” That’s tame I guess compared to the talk shows today.
Or take the case of Al Cowings became an instant celebrity because he drove O. J. Simpson around the LA freeway system in a white Ford Bronco that was seen by millions around the world on TV. Before the Simpson trial I recall reading Cowings was at big international convention signing autographs for $20 a pop. You could choose between photos of L. A. freeway or Cowings in his former pro football uniform; for $25 he’d autograph your football; his agents said he wouldn’t sign anything undignified such as photos of the Ron Goldman-Nicole Brown murder scene. By the way, the backdrop for his signing table was a white Ford Bronco.
I agree with Chuck Colson who has frequently pointed out that the problem with celebrityism - preached and celebrated in popular culture - is that we’re creating moral role models. We’re exulting immorality, degeneracy and the ‘what’s in it for me’ ethic; no wonder we have a crisis on our hands: teenage pregnancy, child abuse, kids killing kids, the disintegration of virtue, honor, responsibility and authority. By calling that which is wrong right and encouraging everyone to do their own thing -’if it feels good, it must be good’ - and by glorifying those who do those things - we’ve created a generation of moral eunuchs. And celebrities have become the chief agents of moral change, not the Church.
How’d we get in this mess? Alexander Solzynitzin, the Russian Nobel prize winning novelist and great Christian prophet who stood against Soviet communism and told the world about its gulags, perhaps the greatest writer and mind of this century, put his finger on the reason. He said that after the 1917 Russian revolution when things began to disintegrate, there was an old folk saying that went, “Men have forgotten God and that’s why these things have happened.” Solzynitzin said that - “You can sum up the 20th century with the same old Russian proverb “Men have forgotten God, that’s why these things have happened”.
What do we do about the mess? Can we do something?
First, we in the church need to grasp a deeper sense of God’s holiness and a profound sense of our sinfulness and just how much we need desperately need God’s grace; we need to understand the basic human dilemma is that God is holy and we are not; and the only way out - the only reconciliation - is the Cross of Christ.
Second, we need to think Christianly, that is beyond ourselves, knowing there is transcendent meaning and purpose for life and that there is objective truth and moral absolutes, and that we all, everyone one of is accountable to God for our thoughts, words and deeds.
Third, we need to understand that we are called to challenge the wisdom of this age. As we read in 2Corinthians 10:5, “we are destroying every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God”. Whether we like or not, we are soldiers engaged in spiritual warfare. We’re battling for the souls and eternal destinies of our children, our grandchildren, our families, our friends and our neighbors.
We want them to know grace and decency and honor and virtue and beauty and truth and love and to know that there is significance and substance to life. We want them to know human worth and dignity are fixed by the image of God, not by the image of TV. There is no greater cause, brothers and sisters in Christ; it demands much of us: courage, faith, discernment, obedience , perseverance, and charity. But God supplies what we need and what He requires of us.
In the final analysis, however, the only real solution for the disintegration of contemporary culture rests on an outpouring of the grace of God - we can and should pray for it but we can’t command it, create it or somehow leverage it out of heaven but we can be responsive to it.
As disciples of Jesus Christ we have been blessed with the privilege of being used of God to proclaim His Good News to a bad news world. He makes the invisible kingdom visible through us; The Good News is that there is hope. We are not the hope of the world; we can only point to the One who is. We draw each breath and live each day in light of eternity knowing this world is not our real home but its a dress rehearsal for one that is. Therefore, right now counts forever.
Next time you’re in downtown Washington and you see those magnificent buildings - the Capitol, the White House and all the monuments - the great images and symbols of power, status and influence of this world. Remember that one day they’ll all be gone and then recall the words of Handel’s Messiah - “The Kingdoms of this world have become the kingdom of our Lord and His Christ.” AMEN.