In the recently released film Matrix Reloaded there is a discussion about cause and effect (‘fate’, or the ways in which our choosing are determined by greater factors than our own willing) and the hero Neo Anderson (Keanu Reeves) stresses the importance of choice. Neo, it seems here, is a modern person.

We are faced repeatedly with many choices to make. Some choices seem quite simple – which brands to purchase, stores to buy in, restaurants to dine in, even towns to shop in, clothes to wear. Others are more complex and less frequent – how to get the amorous attention of someone who has caught our eye, which schools to send our children to, which house to get a mortgage for, who to vote for (assuming we have enough faith in our politicians to make the choice to vote in the first place), and even which spirituality to adopt.

But as Christians we need to be more than a little suspicious of the very language of ‘choice’ that seems to be so important to who we are supposed to be in modern societies ruled by the market. Talk of ‘choice’ can obscure several things, and encourage us to imagine that freedom is the freedom to choose (just think how Bush recently spoke of terrorists as enemies of ‘freedom’, and spoke in the same breath of defending ‘our American way of life’), and that choices are made freely without wider repercussions. But, put starkly, our choices are not merely our own – everything we choose affects others at some level, affects the range of possibilities open to them, and can even affect their well-being. Our seemingly simple choice of Nestlé products, for example, has disturbing ramifications for women and children in ‘third world’ regions.

Christians should be able to remind society that our choices are not ultimately important – they do not define ultimately who we are. Instead, an ultimate choice has already been made – "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:8). God in Christ has chosen to be our God, the One who has died and now lives for us. It is in that responsible choice of being-for-others-in-Christ that we have our freedom. That is a very different kind of freedom from the one promised by the contemporary cultures of being-for-myself.

In another very dark film, Twelve Monkeys, there is a scene where the character played by Brad Pitt, confined to a sanitorium, reflects on true madness: "The cry of humans ‘let’s go shopping’ is the cry of the lunatic." In an age where western governments hunt for weapons of mass destruction (only in the ‘wrong’ hands, of course, they are a bad thing) should Christians not equally ask about our ‘weapons of mass distraction’, for the sake of social sanity? That is a challenging question, and a lot is at stake in the way we answer it!