Ps 119:37: Turn my eyes away from gazing at worthless things, and revive me by your ways.
1. “Sacrality of space”: not that a space, such as a room, is sacred itself, but it becomes sacred, that is, set apart for the purpose of the divine Word, with the introduction of say a cross or crucifix, praying in silence, wearing vestments and kneeling, reading Scripture. Even, “…a gymnasium or dining hall or hotel room can be transformed into a place of worship”. In our little mission here in Lexington, Virginia, we, and many other missions, have done so in funeral homes and other odd spaces and here in the main library’s community room. One visitor from a neighboring congregation e-mailed me following worshiping with us on Holy Trinity Sunday:
“That was a wonderful worship service
yesterday, truly the Church gathered around the Word. Meaningful in
every sense, studying the Word together, Law and Gospel properly divided
and preached in their purity, the sacrament rightly administered. The
wonderful hymns were uplifting; for a moment you could imagine the
Church in heaven and on earth worshiping together the Three-in-One and
One-in-Three. What a wonderful day.” (emphasis my own)
3. Marketing of religion: Television is for selling and religion can sell itself and only by doing so can religion have an audience. One time watching the Hour of Power from the Crystal Cathedral, Robert Schuller was hawking that day, “The Positive Thinker’s Bible” in which all the positive passages were highlighted in blue, kind of like an enthusiast’s version of the Jefferson Bible. Most of those offers are ‘free’…for a donation, but the real danger is selling the faith, actually, selling out the faith. Postman:
“The executive director of the National
Religious Broadcasters Association sums up what he calls the unwritten
law of all television preachers: “You can get your share of the audience
only by offering people something they want.”
You will note, I am sure, that this is an
unusual religious credo. There is no great religious leader—from the
Buddha to Moses to Jesus to Mohammed to Luther—who offered people what
they want. Only what they need. But television is not well suited to
offering people what they need. It is “user friendly.” It is too easy to
turn off. It is at its most alluring when it speaks the language of
dynamic visual imagery. It does not accommodate complex language or
stringent demands. As a consequence, what is preached on television is
not anything like the Sermon on the Mount. Religious programs are filled
with good cheer. They celebrate affluence. Their featured players
become celebrities. Though their messages are trivial, the shows have
high ratings, or rather, because their messages are trivial, the shows
have high ratings.” (page 121)
4. The Danger of Idolatry:
“…I think it is both fair and obvious to
say that on television, God is a vague and subordinate character.
Though His name is invoked repeatedly, the concretenenss and persistent
of the image of the preacher carries the clear that is he, not He, who
must be worshiped. I do not mean to imply that the preacher wishes it
be so; only that the power of a close-up televised face, in color,
makes idolatry a continual hazard. Television is, after all, a form of
graven imagery far more alluring than a gold calf.” (pages 122-123)
“Meanwhile in New York City at St.
Patrick’s Cathedral, Father John J. O’Connor put on a New York Yankee
baseball cap as he mugged his way through his installation as Archbishop
of the New York Archdiocese. He got off some excellent gags, at least
one of which was specifically directed at Mayor Edward Koch, who was a
member of his audience; that is to say, he was a congregant. At his next
public performance, the new archbishop donned a New York Mets baseball
cap. These events were, of course, televised, and were vastly
entertaining, largely because Archbishop (now Cardinal) O’Connor has
gone Father Sakowicz one better: Whereas the latter believes that you
don’t have to be boring to be holy, the former apparently believes you
don’t have to be holy at all.” (page 93)
Conclusion:
Dear reader in Christ, please understand I like TV and television per se has been one of my major interests over the years. Television showed us in the ‘60s, the civil rights movement, the assassination of a president, and the Vietnam War. We watched live on TV as man stepped foot on the moon. It is a source of entertainment but Prof. Postman’s critique demonstrates the danger regarding television: all the major aspects of life are now to be entertainment and this has had consequences for the Church. The church is also amusing itself to death. I think that the “worship wars” is really between TV style worship and actual worship.
My conclusion has been over the years we need education about television and the internet itself.
Prof. Postman:
“Twenty years ago, the question, Does
television shape culture or merely reflect it? held considerable
interest for many scholars and social critics. The question has largely
disappeared as television has gradually become our culture. This means, among other things, that we rarely talk about television, only about what is on television—that is, about its content.
Its ecology, which includes not only its physical characteristics and
symbolic code but the conditions in which we normally attend to it, is
taken for granted, accepted as natural.” (page 79; bold-face emphasis
my own)
The television commercial is the most
peculiar and pervasive form of communication to issue forth from the
electric plug. An American who has reached the age of forty will have
seen well over one million television commercials in his or her
lifetime, and has close to another million to go before the first Social
Security check arrives. We may safely assume, therefore, that the
television commercial has profoundly influenced American habits of
thought. (page 126)
Think of how many families we know in which the television has become a third parent, a very powerful parent. In the latest Imprimis from Hillsdale College, the article is by Dr. Anthony Daniels about his work as a physician among the poor in London:
I should
mention a rather startling fact: By the time they are 15 or 16, twice as
many children in Britain have a television as have a biological father
living at home. The child may be father to the man, but the television
is father to the child. Few homes were without televisions with screens
as large as a cinema—sometimes more than one—and they were never turned
off, so that I often felt I was examining someone in a cinema rather
than in a house. But what was curious was that these homes often had no
means of cooking a meal, or any evidence of a meal ever having been
cooked beyond the use of a microwave, and no place at which a meal could
have been eaten in a family fashion. The pattern of eating in such
households was a kind of foraging in the refrigerator, as and when the
mood took, with the food to be consumed sitting in front of one of the
giant television screens. Not surprisingly, the members of such
households were often enormously fat.
