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"Who's Editing the World" by John Fischer PASTOR OF THE WEEK heard weekdays at 5:30 pm WCIF Day Sponsors
- those who underwrite the cost of an entire broadcast day.
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Who's Editing the World
A new Utah based video company edits popular Hollywood films for concerned viewers. CleanFlicks sells already-edited versions of many best-selling videos, but it will also cleanup any movie you send for $12. That's $12 to eliminate nudity, violence, and bad language from your video monitor. Highly violent movies like Gladiator and The Patriot cost even more, up to $17 an edit. And now, according to a Christianity Today report, another studio will soon release movies with scenes digitally doctored instead of cut. Kate Winslet is no longer topless in Titanic, bullet wounds disappear in The Matrix, and swords, reminiscent of biblical plough-shares, have been beat into Star Warsian light beams in The Princess Bride. While the success of such a company points out that a significant amount of people are troubled by Hollywood's frequent emphasizing of gratuitous sex, violence, and language, the simple solution of editing these things out poses problems of another kind. In some ways, the whole industry of contemporary Christian products
and
What seems to go unexplored in all of these pursuits is the intrinsic legitimacy or illegitimacy of these things we are copying and editing. It's as if we've created a decaffeinated world without ever bothering to consider the value of drinking coffee to begin with. And herein lies the greatest danger: By marketing a culture as edited for Christians, we are tacitly approving everything that survived the cutting floor. For instance, Christian music now has its own Christian stars glorified by their smashing good looks, their professional entourage, and their glitzy ad campaigns. What's been changed? The lyrics, primarily. They are mostly about God and living the Christian life. We hope the lifestyle of the singers are commendable (this is not always the case) so that they are positive role models as well. But their music, and the package it is delivered in, shows little difference from the world's. Whenever we talk about a contemporary Christian editing of culture in any way, the largely overlooked question is not what to edit; it is what doesn't get edited - what gets left behind (no pun intended). What are we swallowing whole in our culture, thinking all along that we have the safe version of it? Maybe the bad language has been removed, but what about the materialism, the self-indulgence, the personal autonomy, the glorification of money and position and power, or the relativistic messages that permeate Hollywood, such as "Do what your heart tells you to do"? I worry that the ideals the Christian community is carelessly buying from the world are far more dangerous and insidious than the scenes and the language we are editing out. C. S. Lewis once wrote that it is not overt books on materialism that make a person a materialist; it is the materialistic assumptions in all the other books. In the same light, what assumptions are we inadvertently adopting from the world around us in our "safe" Christian subculture? What gets passed through the sieve of our editing process? In Jesus' words to the Pharisees, "You strain at a gnat and swallow a camel." Take the bad language out of a bad movie and you still have a bad movie. You can digitalize a corset on a nude Kate Winslet, but you can't digitalize certain values into the story that are not there to begin with. We run into problems when we assume that the culture can be somehow
Can pop culture be made safe for Christians? I think it is highly doubtful. And even if it could be done, it's a bad idea. I believe Christian consumers are being picked clean by a Christian industry that is making big profits off safety while robbing individual believers of the responsibility and challenge of thinking for themselves and interacting in the world at large. The more Christians depend on these pre-edited products, the less tolerant they are of the world and the less able to function in it as knowledgeable, compassionate representatives of the Gospel. We have an industry supposedly doing what every Christian needs to be good at: exercising a God-given mind in the pursuit of God and truth in the world. Harry Blamires, author of The Christian Mind, wrote, "There is no longer a Christian mind." He may be right. Or at least if there is a Christian mind, it is too lazy to take on the world. Our cultural thinking is much too flabby because a Christian culture excuses us from this task. Truth of the matter is, the Christian mind is a much better editor than any film critic with a knife. If we are going to indulge in popular culture, it would be much better to interact with the real one than to create a supposedly safe alternative to it. The alternative is neither safe nor important when it comes to why we are Christians in the world. In the end, nothing is safe in this world. Christians need to
be discerning of everything they consume. Christian products are
perhaps the most dangerous because we receive them with a false assumption
of safety. Wouldn't we be better off either dealing with, or rejecting
entirely, the real world?
John Fischer's column "What in the World Are We Doing?"
appears regularly
For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men.
It
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