a word before we begin

Let me begin, My Friend, by telling you something about myself, so that you know from the very first page what sort of person is writing to you. I am not a woman who hides from the world’s entertainment behind drawn curtains. I watch a great deal of it. I watch movies from the gentlest G all the way up to the hard R, across nearly every genre there is, comedy, action, drama, and, yes, horror. I listen to all kinds of music, country and Christian and pop and a good deal besides. I have eaten freely, you might say, from the whole smorgasbord that the world sets out. So when I write to you about discernment in these things, understand that I am not writing from a fearful crouch, banning what I have never seen. I am writing from the middle of the feast, as one who has learned, sometimes slowly, how to sit at that table with my eyes open.

And I must warn you of something with a smile, before we begin in earnest. This little booklet is going to describe a great many specific things, real movies and shows and the rest, the ones that are around me as I write. I will not name them outright, but you will know them well enough, and if you are reading this many years from now you may not know them at all, the way you can tell the age of a photograph by the clothes. The examples will have aged. I know it, and I am doing it on purpose anyway, because specific examples teach far better than vague ones, and the men I learned from were never afraid to date their own teaching with the particulars of their day. So if my examples have grown old by the time you read this, do me the kindness of simply plugging in whatever your own age has put in their place. The titles change. The principles do not. That is rather the whole point.

So here is the question this booklet is about, and it is not the one you may expect. The question is not whether it is a sin to watch and to listen. The question is how a believer takes in the stories of a world that does not share his faith without being slowly, quietly discipled by them. For that is the real danger, and we will come to it. This is the posture of the stranger in Babylon brought to bear on the screen and the speaker, on the thing piped into your eyes and ears for hours of every single day.

chapter one

the great storyteller, and the two ditches

Before we talk about how to handle the world’s stories, you must first be persuaded of something you may never have stopped to consider: that stories are not idle things, and that taking them in is never a neutral act. We speak of entertainment as though it were a way of switching the mind off, a harmless rest. But nothing is doing more to form you, day by day, than the stories you let in.

This is not a suspicious or a fearful idea. It is simply how God made us. We are creatures shaped by story. It is no accident that a great deal of the Bible comes to us not as bare lists of rules but as narrative, the account of a people, a history, a drama of fall and rescue, and that when the Lord Jesus wished to lodge a truth deep in a heart, He so often did it with a story. A parable slips past the guard that a lecture would raise. You can argue with a proposition, fold your arms against it, but a story gets in under the arms and works on you from the inside, shaping what you love, what you assume, what you take to be normal and good, all beneath the level of where you are paying attention.

Now turn that truth toward the screen, and feel the weight of it. The average soul in our day takes in hours of story every day, far more preaching, if we are honest, than he will ever hear from any pulpit. And nearly all of it is written by people who do not believe what we believe, who hold a different idea of what is true and good and real, and who are, whether they intend it or not, teaching that idea to everyone who watches. The screen is a pulpit. The song is a sermon. They are forming the loves and assumptions of all who sit under them, hour upon hour, year upon year.

The screen is a pulpit. The song is a sermon.

I do not say this to frighten you back behind the curtains; we shall see that the answer is not retreat. I say it so that you will take the whole matter seriously, and stop imagining that what you watch and what you hear is doing nothing to you. It is doing a great deal to you. The only question is whether you will be passive under it, formed without your consent, or whether you will learn to take it in awake. Everything that follows is about learning to do the second thing.

And you will remember that the road of the stranger in Babylon runs between two ditches, and that a soul can pitch off into either one. It is no different here, on the narrower ground of what we watch and hear. There are two ways to get this wrong, and most Christians have fallen into one or the other, often without ever knowing there was a road between them.

The first ditch is the ditch of swallowing it whole. This is the believer who consumes whatever is put in front of him and never once asks who made it, or what it is preaching, or what it is quietly teaching him to love. He watches as the world watches, laughs as the world laughs, absorbs as the world absorbs, and never brings a moment of it before the Lord or under the light of the Word. He is being discipled by Babylon every evening and would be astonished to hear it called that. He thinks he is merely relaxing. In truth he is sitting, night after night, under a pulpit that hates his God, and taking the sermon in without resistance.

The second ditch is the opposite, and it catches the more earnest sort of believer, which is exactly why it is so deceptive. It is the ditch of banning it all. This is the soul who, rightly seeing that the world’s entertainment can corrupt, draws the wrong conclusion and flees the whole of it, sealing himself and his family inside a bubble where nothing the world has made is permitted to enter. It feels like holiness. It looks like devotion. But it is the retreat we already named in the first booklet, the lamp hidden under the basket, and it forfeits both the genuine goods that even a fallen world can produce and the very engagement we were left in the world to practice. A believer who has fled all contact with the culture’s stories has not conquered the danger. He has only run from the field.

And between the two ditches runs the narrow road, which is the whole subject of this booklet: to engage with the eyes open. Not to swallow blindly, and not to flee in fear, but to take in the world’s stories awake and discerning, accountable for what we plant in our minds, able to receive what is true and good even from an unbelieving hand while naming and refusing the lie woven in beside it. That is the road. Let us learn to walk it.

no wicked thing before mine eyes

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sources & notes

  1. Masahiro Mori, “The Uncanny Valley” (Bukimi no Tani), Energy 7, no. 4 (1970); trans. Karl F. MacDorman and Norri Kageki, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine 19, no. 2 (2012). Mori observed that as a figure approaches human likeness without quite attaining it, our affinity gives way to a sense of eeriness, an effect he found to be heightened by movement. The phenomenon is commonly cited to explain the unease produced by lifelike dolls, wax figures, motion-capture animation, and stop-motion figures.
  2. The reference is to the so-called Satanic Panic of the 1980s and early 1990s, a moral panic in which fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, along with heavy-metal music, were widely alleged to promote occultism, and were opposed by a coalition that included many evangelicals and advocacy groups such as Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons (BADD). See Joseph P. Laycock, Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015).
  3. 1 Samuel 28, the medium of En-dor, on which faithful interpreters have historically divided among three main views: that God permitted the actual spirit of Samuel to appear (so, e.g., many older expositors); that the apparition was a demonic impersonation counterfeiting Samuel; and that the medium was a fraud whose ordinary trickery was interrupted, to her own alarm, by a genuine divine act. The present author inclines to the second. Cf. the discussion in the standard commentaries on 1 Samuel.
medium