January 5, 2015

Editorial

“Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near” (Phil. 4:5, NRSV).1

If there are advantages to be found on long-haul trans-Pacific flights (trust me: they are usually no better than the rare chocolate mint accompanying a nearly inedible meal), one is that you get to conduct an informal and multihour survey of the media habits of your fellow travelers.

With the advent of seatback personal entertainment systems on most international flights, you can effortlessly see 20 or more displays of viewer-chosen content at every moment of the flight. The ordered elegance of the Mozart echoing through my headphones seems an absurd, unworldly sound track for the mayhem and violence crashing on almost every screen in view. Could the same species that composed the reverent passion of “Laudate Dominum” also manufacture the spectacles of gore and multibody violence my fellow passengers are calmly consuming with their salted snacks?

I wince and quickly look away as a curved medieval saber arcs through the flesh of yet another half-clad villain. Slow-motion blood spurts, drop by drop, across a nine-inch screen, as if producers were loath to let even one go by unnoticed. Headless corpses sprawl hideously across the battlefields where tens of thousands of human and mythic semi-human creatures gratuitously break God’s sacred sixth commandment.

Spare me the highbrow, eyebrow-arching lectures claiming there is no proved connection between violence observed and violence enacted.

Could this be entertainment? What part of viewing death by disembowelment is even remotely re-creating or life-giving?

We grieve, and justly, terribly so, for every ISIS murder posted to YouTube. We shudder at the casual depravity that takes another’s head as one might pluck a flower. National leaders step to the microphones in Washington, D.C., and Paris to warn the perpetrators of “grave consequences”—a euphemism for more violence, more corpses. But then these same administrations offer vast tax advantages—at public cost—to entertainment companies that create even more horrible images to be “enjoyed” on laptops, tablets, wide-screens—and the back of 23B.

Spare me the highbrow, eyebrow-arching lectures claiming there is no proved connection between violence observed and violence enacted. Give those, if you dare, in Mosul or Mogadishu. A culture fed on visual violence will ultimately pick up—and use—the blades, the guns, the bombs with which its heroes solve their problems. Why patiently negotiate with an adversary you can slam against the further wall? Why search for common ground when you can stain that ground rich crimson with their virtual—or real—lifeblood?

Is this the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount? What act of self-excusing foolishness exempts us in our entertainment from Christ’s call to “turn the other cheek”? People who intend to one day dine with the Prince of Peace do not feast themselves on zombie epics or glory in the death of enemies, real or imagined, onscreen or in Oman.

Were the number of dead enemies—killed in 500 million daily video games2 and viewed with glee in cineplexes everywhere—ever aggregated, we would soon discover that we are destroying virtual human beings at a rate that would decimate the world’s actual population of 7 billion several times each day. Those who doubt the relevance of Revelation’s terribly true prophecies have only to see the evidence of what, in wish fulfillment, we are doing to our race each day. In fact, compared to what is playing on 6F, the Apocalypse described by John would be awarded only “T” for “Teen.”

This is the moment for the church of Jesus to divorce itself—both rationally and loudly—from the culture of bloodlust and violence with which our world is infatuated. We must be brave enough to say no to both the entertainment industry and to our own children, for whom such mayhem is becoming mild. And we must step into the media gap our newfound morals will create with content—excellent, well-drawn, and deeply relevant—that surrounds us and our families with the stories we could imagine Jesus telling.

“The world is passing away, and the lust of it, but he who does the will of God abides forever” (1 John 2:17, NKJV).3


  1. Bible texts credited to NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission.
  2. Robert A. Lehrman, CSmonitor.com, Mar. 18, 2012.
  3. Texts credited to NKJV are from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1979, 1980, 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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