BY ROY ADAMS
"I'll shake your hand and I'll go on from here. But if I were ever to pass you along in life again and you were laying [sic] there dying of thirst, I would not give you a drink of water. I would let the vultures take you and do whatever they want with you with no ill regrets."
he words came from Chicago truck driver Susan Hawk in a venom-laden speech before the jury panel on the final episode of the first Survivor, the television series that captured the attention of tens of millions of people in the United States and around the world during the summer of 2000.1 Her blast was directed against fellow contestant Kelly Wiglesworth for Wiglesworth's deceptive conniving, as Hawk saw it. Comparing Wiglesworth to a "rat" and Survivor winner Richard Hatch to a "snake," Hawk ended her invective with a caustic coup de grâce: "I feel we owe it to the island spirits that we have learned to come to know to let it be in the end the way Mother Nature intended it to be. For the snake to eat the rat."2
"Reality TV" it's called, featuring programs (with participants such as Hawk) designed to shock a jaded contemporary viewing audience and grab the attention of a public satiated with boredom and turned off by Hollywood's perennial plastic fare. People want to see real life, the genre's creators apparently concluded, real blood and gore. So these survivor-type programs typically depict mammon-seeking souls bathing in mud and filth, shacking up with strangers, eating vermin-anything to be "real" and to win! Hawk had just lost.
Survivor's message runs counter to the philosophy and ethics of Jesus, as near an antithesis of Christian values as one can get. It's the "survival of the fittest" syndrome, the old dog-eat-dog approach to the human predicament. And it's symbolic of the downward drift of the whole culture that Hollywood was able to pull this off with no significant outrage from the general public.
Where were Seventh-day Adventists while all this was happening? And how did they react to the series' raw promotion of human greed and depravity?
Over the years I've noticed a readiness on the part of many Adventists to level their cannons at the church-for its coldness, its insensitivity, its narrow-mindedness. And without necessarily denying the need for such criticism (truth be told, I've given some myself), I've often wondered about our silence when it comes to taking on the general culture. Indeed, there are troubling signs that, far from not confronting the culture, we're actually being co-opted by it.
Not infrequently, "secular" writers and commentators manifest a deeper indignation than we do. When the Washington Post reported on the speech quoted at the top of this editorial, for example, it used the occasion to hurl a devastating, backhanded condemnation of the whole Survivor phenomenon. "Throughout history," the paper said in an editorial note to the piece, "great orators have delivered speeches that have captured the spirit of their times." giving as example William Jennings Bryan, Winston Churchill, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Then with withering sarcasm the paper added: "On Wednesday night [August 23, 2000], . . . Susan Hawk delivered a passionate oration . . . that captured the ethos of our own less heroic era." "As a public service," it finished toungue in cheek "the . . . Post hereby presents the full text of Hawk's already-legendary 'Snakes and Rats' speech."
It was a subtle indictment of our superficial times. And it's the kind of critique I'd like to see coming from Adventist Christians-strong, informed, credible. On a whole range of issues.
Not all of us have the competence to do it. I don't--and that's not to pass the buck or to be coy about it. The kind of Adventist I have in mind here is an engaged participant in the public arena: up-to-date on politics, sports, business, culture, the media, the arts; well-read, well-rounded. "A person about town." Yet staunchly Adventist.
There are Adventists like that. May they have the courage to step forward and confront the culture-its coarseness, its creeping crudeness, its pagan drift.
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1 Washington Post, Aug. 25, 2000, p. C1.
2 Ibid., p. C3.
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Roy Adams is an associate editor of the Adventist Review.
