Yesterday's service, with its focus on the discipline of chastity, was a passionate call for us to live pure lives, not just in refraining from sexual actions that are outside of the good boundaries God created for sex, but also by guarding the "gates" of our souls by being careful about the images we let in. Jeff argued that those images we let in can turn into ideas, and ideas turn into values, and values turn into actions.
As a part of that argument, Jeff suggested that Christians in our culture have probably become too tolerant of the images that we'll allow ourselves to see in mainstream media (movies, tv, etc.). Thoughtful and dedicated Christ-followers have differing viewpoints on what's appropriate viewing for the person trying to "make a covenant with their eyes." What do you think? Does Paul's statement, "'Everything is permissible for me' - but not everything is beneficial" have any bearing here? Does the overall moral sense of a movie make any difference? What do you think a non-legalistic yet vigilantly pure entertainment ethic looks like?
Post your comments below, and check back for what others are saying.
1 comment:
I have found myself saying, lately, that those things which I find most offensive (and, as is often the case, most titillating) are a far cry from what the mainstream evangelical sub-culture might consider offensive (and, I would wager, titillating). Most of the television and film I watch is intended for a very grown up audience. For whatever reason, it seems that the media content which feels free to portray truthful characters, relationships and conflicts are also those which portray those character’s foul mouths, the physical intimacy or physical enmity of those relationships and the pain of the concomitant conflicts. The portrayal of sexuality, even sinful sexuality, in a truthful and sincere narrative allows for good conversation, questions and self-examination to arise about our own (often sinful) sexuality.
I think the “overall moral sense” of a movie absolutely makes a difference, as does the quality of the drama. Just because there is nudity or sexually explicit content in a film, tv show or other piece of media does not automatically make it bad for us. Alasdair MacIntyre, a well respected Christian ethicist says in his book “After Virtue” that we need to understand human action in “narrative wholes” in order to judge their merit or sinfulness. If he is right, we cannot just say (as some very public evangelical voices have) that the presence of nudity or sexual themes are bad in and of themselves. We ought to look at the context or the “narrative whole” in which they are presented. There are two examples that I find particularly upsetting, though I rarely hear the evangelical mainstream address them:
It is when sexuality is attached so often to the cheap and shallow in our media that I find myself reaching for the remote control. Using a woman’s (or man’s) body to sell us cars, electronics, cologne, or any other unit of materialistic narcotics attaches the beautiful gift of sexuality to a modern value of consumption. It teaches us that sex is about taking and meeting my desires. John Paul II, in his book “Theology of the Body,” teaches us that the meeting of a man and a woman in the act of sex is about mutual self-giving, ideally unhindered by shame, which is a kind of self pre-occupation.
I’m equally aghast when men and women’s bodies are attached to violence in a sexually implicit way. I recently rented a film (the name of which I will omit) because its packaging promised that it might be so bad as to be entertaining (this is a pathology of mine I don’t have the space to explain here). In this film, an attractive young woman in scant clothing dispatched several armies of nameless, faceless men with guns and swords and bombs. Linking sex and violence in this manner teaches us that sex is about power, a tool to dominate one another with. In Genesis 3, God warns Eve that this will be a consequence of their sin in the Garden. It is a perversion that we ought to flee from.
While I readily admit that my sensitivities are not the sensitivities per se, I think that it is a worthwhile task to question the basic assumptions about what ought to be offensive and what might make us uncomfortable, but may ultimately help illumine our own character.
If I may end frankly, I think it is the commercials we ought to be more scared of than the programs between them.
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