Amusing Ourselves to Death —
Book Highlights & Its Implications to our Modern-day RELIGION
Book Annotation 6
We’ve reached the sixth annotation of the commentary series on the book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. You can check the previous annotations here!
The emergence of a new series of “Bible magazines,” whose cover format is modeled on teen magazines, with cover lines like “Top 10 Tips to Getting Closer to God “— it’s religion mimicking an MTV kind of world.
I. Decalogue
The Second Commandment of which prohibits the Israelites from making concrete images of anything.
“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth.”
Accordingly, Postman wondered, as so many others have, as to why the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture.
Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of god could enter a culture. People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic injunction. But even if I am wrong in these conjectures, it is, I believe, a wise and particularly relevant supposition that the media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the culture’s intellectual and social preoccupations. (P. 26)
II. Television as the means for Faith-Belief and Religion
Ø The first is that on television, religion, like everything else is presented, quite simply and without apology, as an entertainment.
Everything that makes religion an historic, profound and sacred human activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence. On these shows, the preacher is tops. God comes out as second banana.
The second conclusion is that this fact has more to do with the bias of television than with the deficiencies of these electronic preachers, as they are called. It is true enough that some of these men are uneducated, provincial and even bigoted. They certainly do not compare favorably with well-known evangelicals of an earlier period, such as Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield and Charles Finney, who were men of great learning, theological subtlety and powerful expositional skills. Nonetheless, today’s television preachers are probably not greatly different in their limitations from most earlier evangelicals or from many ministers today whose activities are confined to churches and synagogues.
What makes these television preachers the enemy of religious experience is not so much their weaknesses but the weaknesses of the medium in which they work.
Most people, including preachers, have difficulty accepting the truth, if they think about it at all, that not all forms of discourse can be converted from one medium to another. It is naïve to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in another without significantly changing its meaning, texture or value. They have assumed that what had formerly been done in a church or a tent, and face-to-face, can be done on television without loss of meaning, without changing the quality of the religious experience. Perhaps their failure to address the translation issue has its origin in the hubris engendered by the dazzling number of people to whom television gives them access.
Ø The television screen itself has a strong bias toward a psychology of secularism. The screen is so saturated with our memories of profane events, so deeply associated with the commercial and entertainment worlds that it is difficult for it to be recreated as a frame for sacred events.
Among other things, the viewer is at all times aware that a flick of the switch will produce a different and secular event on the screen — a hockey game, a commercial, a cartoon. Not only that, but both prior to and immediately following most religious programs, there are commercials, promos for popular shows, and a variety of other secular images and discourses, so that the main message of the screen itself is a continual promise of entertainment. Both the history and the ever-present possibilities of the television screen work against the idea that introspection or spiritual transcendence is desirable in its presence.
The television screen wants you to remember that its imagery is always available for your amusement and pleasure.
“Television,” Billy Graham has written, “is the most powerful tool of communication ever devised by man. Each of my prime-time ‘specials’ is now carried by nearly 300 stations across the U.S. and Canada, so that in a single telecast I preach to millions more than Christ did in his lifetime.”
To this, Pat Robertson adds: “To say that the church shouldn’t be involved
with television is utter folly. The needs are the same, the message is the same, but the delivery can change. . . . It would be folly for the church not to get involved with the most formative force in America.”
Ø This is gross technological naivete.
If the delivery is not the same, then the message, quite likely, is not the same. And if the context in which the message is experienced is altogether different from what it was in Jesus’ time, we may assume that its social and psychological meaning is different as well. To come to the point, there are several characteristics of television and its surrounding that converge to make authentic religious experience impossible.
The first has to do with the fact that there is no way to consecrate the space in which a television show is experienced.
It is an essential condition of any traditional religious service that the space in which it is conducted must be invested with some measure of sacrality. Of course, a church or synagogue is designed as a place of ritual enactment so that almost anything that occurs there, even a bingo game, has a religious aura. But a religious service need not occur only in a church or synagogue. Almost any place will do, provided it is first decontaminated; that is, divested of its profane uses. This can be done by placing a cross on a wall, or candles on a table, or a sacred document in public view. Through such acts, a gymnasium or dining hall or hotel room can be transformed into a place of worship; a slice of space-time can be removed from the world of profane events, and be recreated into a reality that does not belong to our world. But for this transformation to be made, it is essential that certain rules of conduct be observed. There will be no eating or idle conversation, for example. One may be required to put on a skull cap or to kneel down at appropriate moments. Or simply to contemplate in silence. Our conduct must be congruent with the otherworldliness of the space. But this condition is not usually met when we are watching a religious television program. The activities in one’s living room or bedroom or — God help us — one’s kitchen are usually the same whether a religious program is being presented or “The A-Team” or “Dallas” is being presented. People will eat, talk, go to the bathroom, do push-ups or any of the things they are accustomed to doing in the presence of an animated television screen.
If an audience is not immersed in an aura of mystery and symbolic otherworldliness, then it is unlikely that it can call forth the state of mind required for a nontrivial religious experience.
The television preachers themselves are well aware of this. They know that their programs do not represent a discontinuity in commercial broadcasting but are merely part of an unbroken continuum.
Indeed, many of these programs are presented at times other than traditional Sunday hours. Some of the more popular preachers are quite willing to go “head to head” with secular programs because they believe they can put on a more appealing show. Incidentally, the money to do this is no problem. Contributions to these shows run into the millions. It has been estimated that the total revenue of the electric church exceeds $500 million a year.
Postman mentioned this only to indicate why it is possible for these preachers to match the high production costs of any strictly commercial program. And match them they do. Most of the religious shows feature sparkling fountains, floral displays, choral groups and elaborate sets. All of them take as their model for staging some well-known commercial program. Jim Bakker, for example, uses “The Merv Griffin Show” as his guide. More than occasionally, programs are done “on location,” in exotic locales with attractive and unfamiliar vistas.
Television is not well suited to offering people what they need. It is “user friendly.” It is too easy to turn off. It is at its most alluring when it speaks the language of dynamic visual imagery. It does not accommodate complex language or stringent demands. As a consequence, what is preached on television is not anything like the Sermon on the Mount. Religious programs are filled with good cheer. They celebrate affluence. Their featured players become celebrities. Though their messages are trivial, the shows have high ratings, or rather, because their messages are trivial, the shows have high ratings.
I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.
The spectacle we find in true religions has as its purpose enchantment, not entertainment. The distinction is critical. By endowing things with magic, enchantment is the means through which we may gain access to sacredness. Entertainment is the means through which we distance ourselves from it.
Ø Television’s strongest point is that it brings personalities into
our hearts, not abstractions into our heads.
If we substitute the word “religion” for Hamlet, and the phrase “great religious traditions” for “great authors of the past,” this quotation may stand as the decisive critique of televised religion. There is no doubt, in other words, that religion can be made entertaining. The question is, “By doing so, do we destroy it as an “authentic object of culture”?
Disclaimer: The contents of this annotation can specifically be found in Chapter 8 of the book, titled ‘Shuffle Off to Bethlehem.’
In the end, the questions remain— does the popularity of a religion that employs the full resources of vaudeville drive more traditional religious conceptions into manic and trivial displays?
Thank you for reading this far! Stay tuned for my last annotation of the book.
