Christian Citizenship Bulletin No. 51
CHRISTIAN CITIZENSHIP BULLETIN
No. 51 July 2002
Contents
Popular Culture - An Introduction
by John R. Ling
The Christian and Magazines
by Sharon James
The Christian and Newspapers
by Rod Badams
The Christian and Books
by John R. Ling
The Christian and Television
by John Tindall
The Christian and Pop Music
by Ted Williams
The material in this issue of the Citizenship Bulletin is available on the FIEC website at: http://www.fiec.org.uk
Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches
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Fax: 020 8760 5067
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POPULAR CULTURE - AN INTRODUCTION
Welcome to this special issue of the Bulletin with the theme of popular culture - whatever that is. In fact, most of us know what it is, though we might have trouble defining it. Ten years ago, Carl Bernstein, one of the US journalists who unmasked the Watergate scandal, wrote:
(Guardian, 3 June 1992).‘We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.’
Popular culture is ‘an easy hit’ for Christians. We may loathe pop music, ignore Hello! magazine, never read the best-selling books and avoid TV soap operas, yet they still influence us. Why? Because none of us lives outside the world of popular culture - it is very much ‘the world’ of John 15.
Furthermore, we can all moan about too much sex and violence on TV, though few of us have ever phoned the BBC duty desk to complain. But popular culture carries more subtle dangers. For example, the finest music, poetry, films and books all require serious effort to understand them - they challenge the mind. On the other hand, popular culture is typically uncomplicated - it rarely tests the intellect, rather, it is packaged to appeal to the emotions, especially in terms of immediate gratification.
Over time, this can have a corrosive effect. Not only do we become accustomed to being entertained (and how that has influenced modern evangelicalism and church life is another story), but we lose the ability to reflect, analyse and assess.
Yet not all of its influences are necessarily damaging, though many are. Christians need not spurn all of popular culture - understanding what makes the ‘man in the street’ tick is a key to effective evangelism - but we are often too prone to lap up unthinkingly too much of it. This issue of the Bulletin calls us to examine whatever we see, hear, smell, feel and taste. This is the spirit of 1 Corinthians 10:31. Then it wants us to ask, ‘How am I influenced by popular culture?’ and then, ‘Is that too much?’
A good way to assess these influences is to sit down quietly. Now - what comes into your mind?What we think about when we are ‘freewheeling’ is very telling - it tells us what truly governs us. At such quiet times we can easily get agitated and want to pick up that newspaper, switch on the box, put on some music. That’s one of the worst aspects of popular culture - it gets us hooked on trivia. And a mind full of trivia is never going to be the mind of Christ.
Members of the Social Issues Team (our new name!) were given a free hand to write on particular aspects of popular culture - the following pages are their results, recommendations, and warnings. Happy reading, and beware.
John R. Ling,
Chairman, Social Issues Team.
THE CHRISTIAN AND MAGAZINES
Visiting my local branch of W H Smith to inspect their magazine section, I was struck first by the sheer number and variety of magazines available. Whatever your hobby or interest (golf, computers, gardening, or cross stitch) there are magazines to choose from - a sure indication of the health and wealth of our consumer culture. We no longer work to survive - now we work in order to secure our leisure. Certainly we have been given all of God’s creation to enjoy. Legitimate creativity is expressed in some of these magazines. Some of the special interest ones, such as politics, history and so on, maintain a high standard of journalism and comment. Second, I was struck by the overwhelming impression that the majority of magazines reveal our society to be fixated with material well-being and addicted to promiscuous sex.
According to Jesus, the hallmark of paganism is an obsession with food, drink and clothing (Matthew 6:31-32). Pagans don’t trust a loving heavenly Father to provide for material needs, they don’t look forward to eternity - rather they fill their lives providing for their own needs, and trying to enjoy the present. Pagans are not passionately serving the Great God who created them and who sustains them. They are absorbed with lesser gods - food, drink, clothes, sex, home, garden, computer, family, holidays, cars. Some become absorbed with celebrities - sports heroes, rock stars, film stars and royalty - worshipping a created being rather than the One who made them.
We were created to worship God. And if we don’t fulfil that urge to worship by serving our Maker, we turn to lesser gods. And the lesser gods of food, drink, clothing and other temporary things hold out the illusory promise of personal enjoyment, fulfilment and significance. In fact, these lesser gods are only worshipped so long as they please the god of Self. And if one fails, we turn to the next. And then the next.
Making readers want more and more
But these lesser gods never satisfy. Advertisements promise ultimate enjoyment, fulfilment, beauty. The consumer bites the bait. He buys the new car, and feels like James Bond during the first drive. But two years later? He’s salivating over the adverts again. Our society would fall apart if people stopped wanting more and more and more. And the ultimate purpose of many magazines is to make people want more and more and more. Without advertisements, popular magazines (for men, women, teenagers and pre-teens) would go out of business. And today as never before, advertising relies on sex. Food is described in sensuous terms. Much of fashion advertising verges on the pornographic. Scantily clad females adorn cars, sofas, even filing cabinets for offices.
Popular magazines serve to introduce new products. A product did not even exist last year, but we now realise that life is insupportable without it. New recipes are promoted which use trendy ingredients (at a suitably inflated price). Fashions change, so new clothes and accessories must be purchased. Trends in home decoration (and garden decoration) shift, and so the spending goes on. A new line of children’s toy is invented, and your life won’t be worth living unless junior keeps up with his mates at school. A new brand of cosmetics is launched which means that wrinkles will be banished forever.
Women’s and men’s magazines
The majority of magazines are purchased by women. In the mid-twentieth century an increasing standard of living meant that there was a demand for ‘housewives’ magazines (Good Housekeeping, Women’s Own, and the like), which provided information on cooking, home-management, and the new products coming onto the market. Fashion and beauty advice, and romantic fiction were also staple fare.
Then there were the more sophisticated glossies, such as Vogue. But the sexual revolution of the 60s changed everything. You didn’t want to admit to being a housewife anymore - women embarked on independent careers and didn’t have to depend on a husband economically, so they could now ‘play the field’, just like men. Thus the advent of magazines like Cosmopolitan and Company, which became ever more frank about sex.
The front cover of Company in the April 2002 issue promises, ‘The thirty dirty sex tips to try tonight’ (which include having sex with another woman, having a three-some, and sleeping with two different men in twenty-four hours). The target audience of More is women in their early twenties - but is widely read by teenagers. It regularly features a ‘position of the fortnight’. The more traditional ‘housewife’ type of women’s magazines don’t go that far, but the romantic fiction has become more explicit, as have the real life stories. The advice given out in the agony aunt columns has been dogmatically non-judgmental for decades.
During the 90s, fashion and beauty product adverts were aggressively targetted at men, and efforts have been made to entice men to buy magazines at the rate that women do. During the last fifteen or so years new magazines such as GQ and Esquire have been promoted. Then there have been magazines such as Loaded and FHM, which exploit the ‘lad’ culture - sex, alcohol and sport as their main themes.
Teen and pre-teen magazines
The pre-teen age group now has considerable disposable income, and cosmetics and fashion manufacturers target them through magazines such as Girl Talk (fashion, pop, advice, beauty). While seemingly fairly innocent, such magazines, aimed at seven to ten-year-olds, are all part of the scene where little girls are feeling the need to look good, wear cool clothes, have a great figure, and wear cosmetics.
Back in the 60s, magazines for teenage girls dished out advice on spots and may have answered questions about the first kiss. But today, for many teenagers, teen magazines are the number one source of information about sex.
‘Jane, 16, says that teenage magazines positively encourage young people to experiment. “You hear that everyone is doing it and it makes you more curious about what they are talking about and when you read the teenage magazines it makes you feel that it is OK to do it. It makes you feel really special in a group because when you tell people [about your sexual experience] everyone sits round discussing you and it makes you feel really good and really important."’
Take Bliss. A typical problem page featured a letter from a 15-year-old girl whose boyfriend ‘went off her’ because of her lack of pubic hair. The advice columnist advised her to be proud of her body without challenging the fact that she was having intimate relations under the legal age of consent. Certainly the magazine carries a disclaimer, saying that 16 is the age of consent. But the continual assumption is that underage youngsters are having sex. The editorial policy is ‘to inform, not to judge’.
Or there are magazines such as Sugar and Just 17. Agony aunts initiate children into sexual experience, and make pre-age-of-consent sexual activity seem utterly normal. More and more primary children are ‘dating’ - forming deep boy-girl friendships based on physical attraction and romance. Thus by the time they are 13 or 14 it is ‘almost inevitable’ that they will end up engaging in sexual activity. An increasing number of young teens (and their advisors, such as agony aunts) are adopting the view that they are within the law if full penetration has not taken place - even though a whole range of sexual activities are practised.
According to prevailing thinking, this is inevitable. A typical counsellor says, ‘We can’t stop young people having early intercourse. If they are going to have sex we must make sure they will do it in a way that will not affect their mental and physical health.’
Philosopher Roger Scruton maintains that such thinking arises from the philosophy of Sigmund Freud, who taught that children are intrinsically sexual beings.
‘Freud believed that ‘sexual desire proceeds from the “libido”, which is an instinctive and impersonal force. Personal love has been squeezed from the picture [and replaced with] an obsession with the genitals. Not surprisingly if you think of sexual desire in that way, you will attribute it to children. Freud’s theory has contributed substantially to the corruption of sexual morals in the modern world. It is now orthodoxy to think that children are sexual beings, that their sexual feelings are malleable and can flow in any direction, that what we mean by chastity is merely repression, and that innocence is another name for unconscious desire. These assumptions underlie the repulsive lessons in sex education that the national curriculum is now forcing on children - lessons designed to facilitate sexual activity long before personal love is possible.’
Scruton argues that the Freudian view, that children already experience sexual urges and that ‘repression’ is an arbitrary taboo, leads to the conclusion that sex with children is alright. This thinking feeds paedophilia. He maintains that, before Freud, the purpose of moral education was to delay sexual activity until the age when it could be integrated into a responsible (adult) life. The aim was to integrate sexual desire with adult love - ‘to make it part of the great existential choice that was marriage sexual desire is a creative force only when integrated into the moral life’ (Sunday Times, News Review, 8 April 2001).
Whatever the cause, the government and educational establishment, as well as the producers of teen magazines, believe that young teenagers can have sex without affecting their mental and physical health. They can’t.
Just as unbridled consumerism leads to covetousness not contentment, so promiscuous sex leads to ever-increasing lust, rather than fulfilment. God created one man for one woman for life. The exclusive commitment of marriage is designed to provide security and trust. Nowadays there is no societal stigma attached to pre-marital sexual activity. Perhaps the majority of youngsters will be deprived of the joy of giving themselves to their marriage partner - for the first time, and then enjoying an exclusive relationship for life. And as sexual experience without permanent commitment never satisfies, it is not surprising that people turn to ever more perverse experiences - but are still unfulfilled. Thrills are sought from ever more perversion and even violence.
A very quick trawl through what was on offer in W H Smith left me sickened at how - for commercial reasons - young people and children are being lured into consumerism and permissiveness.
Concerned parents may like to know that CARE distributes American Christian magazines for children and young people. Free sample issues of Brio (for 12 to 16-year-old girls), Breakaway (12 to 16-year-old boys), Clubhouse (8 to 12-year-olds) and Clubhouse Junior (4 to 8-year-olds) are available on request (CARE for the Family, PO Box 488, Cardiff, CF15 7YY).
Conclusion
For many who never make a trip to church to acknowledge their Maker, a trip to the newsagent to select a magazine offers an alternative. The magazine may offer the dream of a new-look home, a new car, a new me, or strategies to pick up a new partner. Competitions keep the dream alive - if you’re very lucky you’ll get your home or yourself ‘made-over’ for nothing!But the dream fades, and another magazine has to be purchased next month. Or the magazine selected may provide personal details of the lives of current celebrities - feeding the cult of idol worship.
A cursory glance through a selection of popular magazines - ranging from supermarket freebies, through the weekend colour supplements, to the glossy banks of magazines at the local newsagents, tells us that the people around us are hungry and thirsty, and that this hunger and thirst will not be satisfied with the most delicious new Jamie Oliver recipe, or the great value wine crate, or the fantastic new summer wardrobe, or the wonderful computer system - or the most passionate sexual encounter. They will always, but always, want more. We have been made for God, and we are restless, covetous, dissatisfied, lustful and ambitious - until we fall before Him in worship. We then discover that His glory, His beauty, His joy, His mercy, His creativity is so absorbing that our hearts at last are filled.
Sharon James
THE CHRISTIAN AND NEWSPAPERS
The influence of the press may not be what it was say, thirty-five years ago, in the days of editors like Hugh Cudlipp and Harold Evans, but as a pillar supporting our democratic freedoms - especially the freedom of speech - it still stands unrivalled.
As a vehicle for communicating ideas and attitudes, it is certainly not the power it once was. Indeed, the press has, over the last thirty years, lost a lot of ground to television, which has dominated the mind-setting of the last few decades by its cheap and ‘samey’ menu of soaps and comedies, and its brief and over-simplified treatment of news and events. But the press has also had to contend with the electronic media revolution, churning out its millions of videos and CDs for human consumption.
Forty years ago, my late father spent two hours a night reading the Birmingham Evening Mail. It was as though he saw it as his public duty to do so. He hardly used the telephone and his only other available medium was the ‘wireless’, which was never merely ‘on’, speculatively or permanently. It was only ever switched ‘on’ for particular programmes. Within so limited a media ambience, the newspaper had a pivotal place and influence. It was as fundamental to domestic lifestyle as the hearthrug and crumpets toasted on an open fire. Now is not like then. The humble newspaper is now more at the margins - not as crucial to life as we once knew and lived it.
Having said that newspapers still sell by the millions - something like 13 million nationals every day in the UK. The ‘redtops’, or tabloid press, dominate with The Sun the best seller with daily sales of about 3.5 million and a readership of perhaps 7 to 10 million. ‘Can that many people really be wrong?’, we may ask. The ‘broadsheets’ are less popular, but The Telegraph still manages to shift almost 1 million copies each day. The Sundays are led by the ever-popular, but ghastly News of the World - can 4 million of the British public think of nothing better to do on a Sunday than buy this trash and read it before washing the car?
In line with popular culture, the press has increasingly seen the need to ‘entertain’ its readers in order to maintain its market share in competition with other media. This has detracted from the erstwhile goals of ‘informing and persuading’. These latter objectives are still discernible, but both in content and in style the desire to ‘entertain’ - either by the use of brilliant columnists, or trivial subject matter - seems paramount. As though they were news, the press now reports on the dramatic events taking place in the fictional soaps. Consequently even The Daily Telegraph carried an article about the fictional death of John Archer in The Archers. In days when objectivity is generally under threat, this further erosion of the distinction between fact and fiction is hardly a welcome tendency.
All this is not to say that the press does not have a major and vital part to play in our corporate life and in fashioning our values. It has certain advantages, which other media cannot match. One is that it is an indelible record of what is said and described. Today’s newspapers may be shredded for the hamster tomorrow, but other copies of the same journal will be placed in archives and libraries for a century or more. The second great advantage of the print medium is its ability to offer news in depth. The amount of coverage that a newspaper gives to a subject or an event can be decided issue by issue and day by day. Television and radio are compelled to be brief, and, even worse, to give equal time to the important and to some of the less substantial happenings of the day. Television offers currency without having the ability or capacity to provide moment. Newsprint can give us moment in an extraordinary way.
One recent, probably unique, example of this was on the morning of 12 September 2001. Most of the morning newspapers produced a supplement, the front page of which was covered with one dramatic picture of the New York devastation. In more than one of those supplements the only words on the front consisted of the date, ‘11 September 2001.’ Printing the date said that, ‘Yes, this really happened.’ Printing nothing else ‘said’ that no words could match the immensity of the event. Print is powerful. It can utter - it can withhold. By such a range of treatments, it can still speak to the world. Television just cannot do that.
How should evangelical Christians regard the British press of today? Consider the following five points.
1. By being grateful that it is still there. The crisis of the late 1970s was very real. Two or three titles were extremely near to closure, including The Times. Had they gone to the wall, with 1984 approaching, there would have been an Orwellian level of concern about our democratic integrity. They only survived because they fell into the hands of wealthy individuals or media groups willing to ‘hang in there’ for the sake of the kudos of owning a well-known British title, or because the financial losses were relatively painless in a global context, or in the unjustifiably-wild optimism of better times ahead. Then came Eddie Shah and the events that led to the Wapping revolution. His series of free papers, based in Warrington, rescued the national newspaper industry from the union stranglehold, which was killing it.
As a consequence, in an age of clean and full-colour print, it now requires a much lower circulation to maintain a newspaper or magazine in healthy economic circumstances. Advertising rates can be more competitive, cover prices cheaper. This makes it possible for minority interests to sustain journals effectively, as well as giving national, regional and local newspapers a buoyancy they did not have before. The existence of so diverse a press, giving a voice to hundreds and thousands of people and perspectives, strengthens the stability and safety of our democracy. It allays suspicions, and contributes to an open society. Given the great importance of freedom of expression, evangelical Christians need to recognise that this freedom will involve allowing many column inches to those who want to undermine the gospel and the ways of the Lord.
2. By being sceptical about its motives and values. Our major newspapers do not suffer from a low level of self-esteem. At different times they see themselves as the defenders of everyone who (they judge) deserves defending, the arbiters and definers of the public interest, the occupiers of every stretch of moral high ground, the possessors of an absolute right to action and access, and the champions of free speech.
On the other hand, many of our national newspapers are guilty of brazen hypocrisy, such as the recent campaign by the News of the World to ‘name and shame’ paedophiles, some of whom it got seriously wrong, while not ‘naming and shaming’ itself for pandering to the sexual appetites of its readers every Sunday for the previous forty years.
Unbridled cheque-book journalism is another evil. Papers were falling over each other to sign up the witnesses at the Rosemary West trial, and this practice is now a major feature of all high-profile trials - so much so that legislation is now likely to be introduced restricting arrangements for offering payment, or the hope of payment, to witnesses. In every case the papers whose cheque-books win claim a public interest justification, and the ones who lose try to make themselves look like the upholders of moral rectitude. Next time the roles may be reversed.
There is also a pernicious lack of objectivity, such as in some, though not all, of the so called ‘sleaze’ and ‘cash-for-questions’ cases involving politicians in the period 1996-97. Finally, there is the endless diet of salacious editorial content available daily on the tabloid menu. Papers are more concerned about their right to publish such things, and about how it affects the circulation war, than about the effect it may have upon the reader.
The shortcomings of the press are compounded by the weakest system of regulation of all the industries, with the possible exception of the Advertising Standards Authority. The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) is a form of self-regulation, since its members represent the newspapers they control. And its performance has been notoriously inconsistent. Only a week or two after trumpeting the policy that it could act only in response to a complaint, the PCC jumped in with both feet taking the initiative over a royal story without waiting for any formal representations. No-one can put trust or confidence in such a body.
The viewpoints advanced by the press need to be regarded with scepticism as well. Some people at The Daily Telegraph may believe in God, and many of its assertions and perspectives show that this is so, and are welcome. But it also believes in Steve Jones, giving vast publicity in August 2000 to his book Almost Like a Whale, which has been heralded as a modern restatement of Darwinism.
3. We should be grateful that the standard of writing in the quality press and the intellectual periodicals at present is extremely encouraging and creditable. The range of issues covered and views presented seems as vast as ever. All these are the elements of a robust, free and accessible press. We should read as much as we can in order to understand the general moods or opinions of the day, the priority issues of the moment, the arguments being advanced, and the way in which they are put. Are they well-documented and substantiated, or are they indignant, mocking and belittling and full of over-generalised, wild assertions? From the way in which a case is put we can often learn a lot which will enable us to judge its merits, or to identify its weaknesses. Consideration of all these aspects will enable us to see how far the world’s agenda has moved away from God’s, and therefore from Scriptural priorities.
4. We should contribute to it. One of the best ways of contributing is by encouraging evangelical Christians to make journalism their career. While I was pursuing a press career other evangelical Christians sometimes asked how I could be a Christian and a journalist. They had the idea that it was an incurably decadent and scurrilous sphere of activity. My answer was always the obvious one, ‘There’s nothing inherently wrong about being a journalist. It’s how you do it.’ I came across a number of Christians in the press over the years, but there did seem to be fewer than there should have been. Prospective candidates will need an already-existing ability to write - it won’t come later. They also need a compulsion to express themselves, and, in addition, a thickish skin. A fairly confident personality, and a broad interest in the world around them, will also help.
More than ever the press is now also open to outside contributors, whether through submitted articles, or by means of readers’ letters. Christians with the skill to write should do so. Careful thought is needed in choosing the right issue and the right publication for articles, or in selecting the point to make in a reader’s letter. Over the past year the letters’ columns of both The Times and The Daily Telegraph have included quite a number of letters from evangelical Christians, including some associated with the FIEC. Many pastors are occasional contributors to Thought for the Week columns in local newspapers. Every little helps, and every contribution adds to the sum of knowledge in the same way that as we sing hymns in church we are adding to the praise of God.
5. We should pray for it. This will not be a fashionable suggestion, but it is an undeniably good one. Pray for Christians already working in journalism, at whatever level. The better ones will always rise to the top. Pray for their daily opportunities and output, not only as writers, but as Christians, mingling personally with a wide range of people, some of them wielding great influence. Pray for wisdom for those able to write articles and letters, and for the impact of these contributions on those who read them. Given that about one million people buy The Daily Telegraph each day (there will be considerably more who read it), the potential influence of one letter can be colossal.
The press is here to stay. It will change with the developments of technology and the demands of people’s lifestyles. In mature nations the press will always have a significant place in the esteem of individuals, and even if the product often falls woefully short of Christian principles, it will continue to be strongly supported and valued by those seeking a well-ordered society. Given that the Bible urges us to support a well-ordered society, evangelical Christians should do all they can to ensure that our press is as positive an influence as it can be.
ROD BADAMS
(a professional journalist from 1964 to 1976)
THE CHRISTIAN AND BOOKS
Do you read much? A recent survey showed that we spend about 35 minutes each day reading - that is, 11 minutes reading fiction, 17 in newspapers, and 7 on the internet. But Christians are avid book readers. We are the people of the Book. We all treasure this library of 66 books of adventure, history, sex, drama, poetry, war, romance - we read it, and it affects us like no other book, that’s because it is like no other book, for, ‘Your word is truth’, He said in John 17:17.
Libraries, readers and authors
But there are other books - do you read them too? Some people obviously do. In the UK, there are 4,630 public libraries and in 2000, they cost us taxpayers £770 million and dealt with 430 millions loans. That works out at about seven books at a cost of £13 for each of us. Some people, somewhere are reading a lot of books.
And above all they are reading adult fiction, which accounts for about 52%, or almost 223 million library loans. The greatest proportion of this is general fiction (23%), followed by mystery and detection (12.8%), light romance (10.1%), and historical fiction (2.3%). The other types are war (1.3%), and short stories (0.9%), with, perhaps surprisingly, westerns and science fiction at only 0.7% each.
But public library usage is in decline. Contrary to this wane in book borrowing, book publishing shows no sign of abating. In 1995, there were 8,610 titles published in the UK adult fiction market, whereas in 2000, the figure was 10,860, with over 60% as paperbacks. And there is no doubt that we are buying them - book sales are up by 25% - for the UK publisher’s annual revenue totalled £3,176 million, with the UK consumer’s market accounting for £1,530 million, or about £25 for each one of us.
And what is being read? The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, plus books by Wilbur Smith, Terry Pratchett and Philip Pullman - it’s like a roll call of fantasy and paganism. As others have said, when true religion is removed from a society, some primitive belief system will always come in and fill the hole.
So despite the distractions of television, shopping, drinking, sport and all the other pastimes, the British public has not given up on reading. The decline in book borrowing from libraries has more than been balanced by book buying from the more user-friendly bookshops.
Christians and Christian books
Mind you, there is one sector of the population that appears to have almost quit reading books - the Christian. At least, Christians do not seem to be reading Christian books. The startling statistic is that the average UK Christian visits a Christian bookshop only once a year, and even then, may not actually buy a book. Compare this measly datum with the US situation. The US public has always bought religious books - 34% of all US adults will shop in a Christian store in any six-month period, and 32% will buy books there.
So what Christian books do Christians actually manage to read? Of course, the Bible is still the best-selling book, throughout the world. But what else? This is impossible to answer - there is no independent measure, no publisher’s Christian Top Ten. Nevertheless, some generalisations can be made. For example, all Billy Graham’s books are always big sellers. Currently, Christian fiction is the chic genre. The nine (so far) titles in the end times novels of the Left Behind series by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye are huge, with sales in excess of 30 million. The other current bestseller is Bruce Wilkinson’s The Prayer of Jabez. Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine that much of the output of Christian pulp will still be read in forty, let alone four hundred, years.
Christian publishing and bookselling has changed, and both have now become extremely competitive. What passes for Christian literature has broadened - publishers, who in days gone by could be relied on, are now producing unreliable material. Christian bookshops are struggling, and many are becoming retailers of Christian products, music CDs, and so on.
Yet, despite these trends, Christian hardbacks do still sell. For example, The Banner of Truth’s current top three are Evangelicalism Divided by Iain Murray, Systematic Theology by Louis Berkhof, and Christian Conduct - an Exposition of Romans 12 by D Martyn Lloyd-Jones.
Perhaps the fault is ours - we are often guilty of undervaluing good Christian literature. When we hear of the ways in which books have led to conversions and transformed individuals and churches alike, why is £20 (the cost of a Chinese takeaway) considered too much to pay for a good book?
Christians and fiction
Christians are by definition non-fiction enthusiasts. We are primarily interested in truth. But our God-given minds and creativity allow us to invent and dream. Fiction is therefore legitimate, but many of us have little time for make-believe stories. Nevertheless, earlier this year, I did something I’ve not done for about twenty years. I bought a fiction book.
I had two reasons. First, I needed one in order to write this piece. But second, having written two non-fiction books within the last couple of years, I fancied having a bash at writing fiction. No facts to worry about, no concerns about truth, and these days, no grammar to bother with (see, it’s easy to slip into the sloppy fictional mode - I’ve already ended a sentence with a preposition). Why, it must be a doddle to rattle off 100,000 words of free-flowing narrative. Besides, it’s where the big money is, especially if you can get the film rights!
So, with this in mind I went into my local branch of Ottakars and checked out their Top Ten and picked number 8, my lucky number (no, not really!). To be honest, I selected the thinnest of the Top Ten - some of them are real door stoppers, 600 plus pages. My choice was, The Best A Man Can Get by John O’Farrell (2001, Black Swan, 301 pp, £6.99. ISBN 0-552-99844-3).
The week I bought it, it had sold about 2,000 copies nationally. At a royalty rate of 10%, that’s a cool £1,400 for Mr O’Farrell. Mind you, this is peanuts compared with JK Rowling’s income. In the same week, her books occupied the top five slots of the paperback fiction list and she sold a colossal 306,237 copies of her Harry Potter stuff. And to think that years ago, one publisher turned down her manuscripts.
The Best A Man Can Get
Anyway, back to The Best A Man Can Get. I wanted to see what sort of book Joe Public reads, or at least, buys, by the thousand. And I wanted to understand what makes for a supposedly ‘good read’. Inter alia, I thought I might also pick up some hints and tips for my future debut novel.
The Best A Man Can Get is undoubtedly an absorbing book - it is well-crafted and well-written and therefore an easy read. Unaccustomed as I am to reading fiction, I zipped through this in just a few sittings. It is also a funny novel - on many occasions it had me chuckling to myself.
First, the plot
The ‘hero’ is Michael Adams. He is married to Catherine and they have two children, Millie and Alfie, and they all live comfortably in north London. It’s all so very cosy and middle-class. But Michael is leading a double life. While his wife is exhaustedly looking after babies, he is escaping to south London, supposedly working, to live in a flat with three other student-types, doing what most men with small children (apparently) dream about doing, namely, listening to loud music and engaging in trivial, smart-aleck conversation. This, ‘ the love of a family and the liberty of a single man’ is, according to O’Farrell, The Best A Man Can Get. Michael’s wife and children have no idea about his double life, until… But I won’t spoil it.
Second, the style
It is a cunning plot, convincingly rolled out. O’Farrell’s observation of everyday incidents is sharp, and he writes with a twist and a smile. Who could fail to identify with the silliness of, for instance Michael’s thought, ‘I resolved to make economies. I’d try to put less toothpaste on my brush and I’d start buying peanuts instead of cashew nuts.’? Or, ‘In babyland she [Catherine] was queen; I was Prince Philip, hovering awkwardly in the background making stupid comments.’ Or the more profound, ‘I had spent my childhood doing what my parents wanted me to do and now my adulthood seemed doomed to be spent doing what my children wanted me to do. I was back in the jug again; my home had turned into a prison. This baby that had arrived was part warder and part prison bully. Any prisoner dreams of escape.’ Which, of course, is exactly what Michael does. This sort of writing seems to be so simple and effortless, until you have a go yourself.
Third, the author
But no Christian can ever read a book without Christian eyes. We are always on the lookout for the spiritual dimension, and to my surprise, it was here in this book. My surprise was somewhat subdued when I later learned that John O’Farrell writes for the National Secular Society, so he would never miss the chance for a pointed dig at Christians, would he? In the book, Michael’s mother-in-law is a Christian. ‘Catherine’s mother was a Church of England fundamentalist, fighting her own holy jihad against anyone who would not take Jesus into their life.’ She is a minor character in the novel and her main task is to try to stop Michael swearing and blaspheming. Is that really what the world thinks we are about? How do we as evangelicals appear to the world? Often it can be an uncomfortable answer. We can learn something from the expressed views of the non-Christian author.
It became clear to me that John O’Farrell must have sometime had a bad brush with evangelicals. At first, he makes the childless Michael think that, ‘These new parents reminded me of born-again Christians. They had a smugness and a superior air that suggested my life was somehow incomplete because I hadn’t heard the Good News about babies.’ Then, when Michael’s third child is born, he says, ‘He was so perfect and miniature, with every detail lovingly handcrafted, that it made me want to believe in God.’ Perhaps it is just smug and sentimental guff, I’m not sure - I’d like to have a cup of coffee and a chat with the author!
Fourth, the insights
Yet the book does contain some fascinating insights into the hedonist’s head. There is the self-justification of the modern man, ‘I didn’t generally lie. I just deceive by omission.’ And when the chips are down, Michael admits, ‘It wasn’t Catherine or the children that were the problem. It was me.’ And as his family life begins to disintegrate, he asks realistically, ‘Why was it that so many men really cared about how good they were at their jobs but gave less consideration to being better fathers?’ And finally, he is forced to admit that, ‘The man who had tried to have it all had ended up with nothing.’ We will all recognise that what Michael needed was an encounter with the living God, but it does not happen.
As already stated, Christians can never reads books without Christian eyes, nor can they without Christian ears. At times the language of this book is appalling. There are oodles of examples of gratuitous swearing and blasphemy - but then if you work in the world, that is the background noise of most offices and shop floors.
The Best A Man Can Get is not a great book - it will never be a classic. But then it is not drivel either. It is like a window on our sad world. It is a view of human life through the eyes of pagan man. And that perhaps is one of our great weaknesses - we think we understand popular culture - at least we condemn most of it, but can we communicate effectively with modern men and women? Do we know how they think? Or, have we forgotten? Ah, these are the big questions, and the prickly lessons I learned from reading this book.
By the way, I will now probably not be writing that novel. The competition appears to be far too hot!
JOHN R. LING
THE CHRISTIAN AND TELEVISION
It surely is a technological wonder, this TV. In my sixty years I have seen it develop from a 12-inch blurred, monochrome image to the digitised, colour wonder that now comes with surround-sound into my living room. Nowadays I can watch live satellite broadcasts from the field of battle, or the field of play, broadcast anywhere from the Australian outback to the wastes of Siberia. Amazing!
But is it doing us any good? Is it doing us any harm?
Consider some of the facts. It is now widely accepted that the American child (and the UK child is probably not very different) watches weekly an average of 25 to 30 hours of television. By the time the said child is eighteen he will have watched 15,000 hours of television compared with the 11,000 hours he will have spent in the classroom. By the time he is 70, he will have spent between 7 and 10 years in front of the screen. It is salutary to compare this with the estimated 25 minutes a week he spends in social interaction with his Dad!
All this TV is obviously having some effect upon its viewers. There are at least four areas that should concern us.
1. The mind and thinking. Of course, it is not simply a matter of the length of viewing time involved, but the content being absorbed. Most children will view thousands of acts of media violence and there is a growing body of evidence indicating that desensitisation to real violence occurs in the process. Then, of course, the ethics embodied in most situational dramas are based on relativism. Ethical and spiritual values are universally secular, but skilfully portrayed as perfectly acceptable and normal. Our children are being encouraged through long exposure to this medium to ‘walk in the counsel of the ungodly’ (Psalm 1). This means that the idols of secularism, sensualism and materialism are lifted up before them for worship.
2. Consumerism. This is another matter of concern. The television world is dedicated for the most part to a consumer-centred lifestyle. The whole raison d’tre of the market is persuasion. A vast amount of clever research is linked to the deployment of insightful psychological tools to draw us to the conclusion that life can only be full if we make this or that product a part of our experience. The advertising budgets of the mighty corporations suggest that this is money well spent - it does work.
If the true and only route to ‘blessedness’ is to avoid thinking and then acting according to the counsels of the wicked, and, instead, having a heart saturated by the Law of the Lord (Psalm 1), does it not follow that Christians should have a concern for the impact on us of long exposure to the television?
3. Imagination. In Warren Wiersbe’s masterful book on the imagination he quotes educator Kieran Egan, ‘The imagination is not simply a capacity to form images, but is a capacity to think in a particular way. It is a way that crucially involves our capacity to think of the possible rather than just the actual.’ Wiersbe’s burden is to encourage preachers to communicate with imagination, using vivid and powerful metaphors as vehicles for the truth of God. His concern for this generation is that our capacity for imagination is in decline. And one of the culprits is television. Wiersbe says, ‘The imagination is fed primarily by words and concepts, not by visual images. When we watch images, the messages they convey tend to bypass our thinking and influence us subjectively in ways we may not comprehend. But when we hear words, we can create our own images in our imagination; and these images are more meaningful to us than the ones manufactured by the media experts.’
AND, as we all know, the pictures are much clearer on the radio, or when created by the pages of a good book. It would be more than sad if we presided over the development of a generation of young people whose imaginative capacities were impoverished by a lack of good reading and over-exposure to ready-made images.
4. The use of time. We have the opportunity to earn more money but not to earn more time. Each hour is a gift from God, each day an opportunity to serve Him. Three hours of TV per day is almost a full day’s worth of time out of the week. Indeed, it is more than a day if you subtract your seven hours of sleep from each 24-hour period. And how often we complain that we do not have time to read, little time to pray, limited time to work in the church. If the Lord will require from us an account of our use of money, will He not also require an account of our use of time?
Hours spent with the TV can be time well spent, or time wasted. So, care must be exercised. But it is not simply the issue of the loss of a good thing, but of the impact on us of this way of organising life.
How important it is that WE take ownership of the development of our minds and not leave it to the television entertainment schedules.‘The couch potato is the role model for the empty self, and, without question, modern Americans are becoming increasingly passive in their approach to life. We let other people do our living and thinking for us from watching television to listening to sermons, our primary agenda is to be amused and entertained.’
How can we ensure that watching TV is a good experience, or at least, not a bad one? Four suggestions follow.
1. Take principled ownership. Paul’s principle still stands, ‘Everything is permissible for me, but not everything is beneficial. Everything is permissible for me, but I will not be mastered by anything’ (1 Corinthians 6:12). Admittedly, there are images on TV that no Christian should allow through ‘eye-gate’, beyond that there is a vast range of material from the wonderfully edifying, through the banal, to the downright stupid. We have a God-given freedom to use this material as ‘permissible’, BUT we must not be mastered by it. We must seek to have it under the control of the rules of edification and purity rather than be ourselves under the control of the material.
2. Through new eyes. There is no substitute for Godly discernment. Whether we are trying to understand the news, or watch a drama, we must respond to the images with a mind that is increasingly under the influence of Scripture. It is good to enjoy our culture and the gifts of talented programme makers, but we must also evaluate and criticise our culture through the grid of a biblically-informed mindset. This need not take the form of a running commentary, which ruins every programme for other viewers!
3. Promote the printed page. Studies have shown that when the TV set is removed from a home a revival in reading breaks out. A varied reading programme is an active learning experience. Blessed are those kids whose joy is in the printed page as much, if not more, as in the moving image.
Charles Walker, (http://www.aacs.org/publications/jce/F-94/JCE-Television-F-94.asp).‘The television viewer is controlled by the pace of the pictures flashed upon the television screen; the reader controls his own pace or speed of reading. Television forces the programme producer’s images of people and events upon the viewer. The reader forms his own images of people and events. The weak, concentrative skills required of television viewers retard the development of reading, writing, and study skills; whereas, avid reading will enhance these skills.’
4. Keep perspective. According to Dr. Michael Suman, co-ordinator of The Centre for Communications Policy at the University of California at Los Angeles,
‘The media in Japan is more violent than it is in the United States. But notice the factor such as the structure of the family. In the United States, 30% of children are born out of wedlock. Among African Americans the figure is up to 70%. Compare that with Japan where the figure is about 1%. Teenage pregnancy rates are directly related to that. In the United States, the teenage pregnancy rates are 16 times what they are in Japan. And if you look at Japanese society, the rates of violent crime are much lower than they are in the United States. Murder rates and rates of rape are 1/10th to 1/20th of what they are in the United States. Just blaming film and television for all these problems is much too simplistic if we look at other cultures.’
THE formative power in a child’s life is not the absence of TV, but the presence of holy, Godly love in the home. TV is not the devil’s box in the corner, it is an expression of our popular culture, which needs to be controlled by principles of Godly consistency and in an environment where Biblical wisdom is taught and modelled. This is the home where ‘delight in the law of the Lord’ is THE controlling power.
JOHN TINDALL
THE CHRISTIAN AND POP MUSIC
Every parent with teenage children knows, from time to time, the loud beat of pop music coming from their children’s bedroom. There is no question that music is important to young people, and it is estimated that about eighty per cent of teens listen to several hours of pop music each day.
Music undoubtedly plays a central role in modern youth culture. And this is not surprising, for music has been a part of the human condition from the beginning of time. The Scripture (1 Samuel 16:15-17; 2 Kings 3:15) teaches that music can have a powerful influence on a person’s emotions, mood, or state of being. Music has always been an important part of worship, and Christianity in particular, has a rich musical heritage. The sublime music of Bach’s cantatas, Haydn’s Creation, and Handel’s Messiah have all expressed the highest aspirations of the human spirit. Great hymns, such as ‘Amazing grace’ and ‘O for a thousand tongues to sing’, have been sung by millions as they have worshipped Christ.
On the other hand, the musical forms used to worship other gods are quite different. For example, voodoo worship, according to The Encyclopaedia Britannica, uses ‘sacred drums beating in intricate rhythms to work its worshippers into the right state of mind, the frenzy, to communicate with the gods of voodoo.’ David Tame maintains, in The Secret Power of Music (1984, p. 198), that, ‘The rhythmic accompaniment to satanic rituals and orgies, the essential characteristic of voodoo music, is the quintessence of tonal evil.’
How then should we react when our children listen to pop music? What should the church teach regarding such music? Some people feel that it is unwise to criticise the type of music that young people enjoy. After all, it is just a generation thing, and they will grow out of it. Others are not so sure, and feel that pop music is a bad influence. And some churches encourage Christian pop music in the belief that it is better than secular pop, and that this music is likely to attract young people.
The characteristics of rock music
This article focuses mainly on one particular aspect of pop music, rock. While it is difficult to give a clear definition of rock music, it has three common characteristics. The first is constant repetition within a narrow range of chord patterns and rhythmic figures. And this repetition gives the music its hypnotic effect. It is the constant repetition of the voodoo drums that induce the frenzy in its dancing adherents. A second characteristic of rock music is the driving beat. Bob Larson in The Day Music Died (1986) explains, ‘Whatever harmonic or melodic or verbal sophistication rock may contain, it would never appeal as it does without the undergirding of its simple, repetitive, pounding beat.’ The beat submerges the melody, and has an effect on the human psychic, which is primarily physical and sexual. In rock music, melody is downplayed, and sometimes altogether absent. A third characteristic is the high volume - rock music is invariably amplified at extremely high decibels. The lyrics are frequently drowned out. Indeed, the music played at raves and rock concerts is often so loud that it can pose a threat to the hearing of those who are exposed - a number of rock artists have had their hearing damaged by their own amplified music.
The Rolling Stones declared in a New York Times advertisement, ‘Rock and roll is more than just music. It is the energy centre of a new culture and youth revolution.’ Secular rock music has four main themes - rebellion, drugs, sex, and the occult. John Lennon blatantly encouraged rebellion among teenagers. He said that he liked to incite people to break the framework, to be disobedient in school, to stick out their tongues and to insult authority. None can doubt that drugs and rock music have gone hand in hand since the Sixties. And Chris Stein, the guitarist for Blondie, has said, ‘Everybody takes it for granted that rock and roll is synonymous with sex.’ The overt sexual nature of the music was merely the tools by which young minds are seduced away from religion, parents, individual responsibility. Sex may be the prime magnet, but many stars of rock were and are serving another god, to whom sex was just the best possible lure - the occult.
A glance through the CD and vinyl covers of the rock music section of the local music store will prove to be deeply disturbing to any Christian parent. A recent development is the open blasphemy against the Christian religion. One of the most blatant anti-Christian performers in recent years is Marilyn Manson, whose t-shirts declare, ‘Kill your parents’ and ‘I love Satan’. The group Iron Maiden, in the song ‘The Number of the Beast’, invite young people to take the mark of the beast. The group Deicide sing of their devotion to Satan. The group Unleashed sing of their hatred of Christ. The group Black Sabbath openly invite their listeners to, ‘Look into my eyes, you will see who I am, my name is Lucifer, please take my hand.’
Does music have a moral component?
Any discussion of rock music revolves around two issues - the lyrics and the music. While it is easy to demonstrate that the lyrics are immoral, loaded with blasphemy, pornographic and sexually-explicit words, rebellion, drugs, and occult activity, many people believe that the actual music itself is morally neutral. They argue that a musical note, middle C for example, is simply a sound, and so cannot be good or bad and has neither a message nor meaning. True, but music is more than just one note, it is a composition of notes to create a musical form. According to Percy Scholes in The Oxford Companion to Music (1963, p. 217), a composer, ‘has the desire to express himself. If he were a poet he would do so in words, if a painter he would do so in line and colour, and so forth. As a musician he uses sound.’ The composer has a dual aim - to express his emotion and his worldview. So music has a form that expresses a message and shows the composer’s vision of beauty. Many rock artists openly boast that their music is indeed communicating a message, of sensuality and rebellion, and they would be horrified at the suggestion that their music is morally neutral.
Some Christians, who argue that music is morally neutral, claim that all music comes from the Creator God. We are free, they say, to enjoy all types of music according to our taste, including rock music, for no music is intrinsically evil. According to this line of reasoning the only problem with secular rock is the lyrics - change the lyrics and the music can be used for Christian purposes. After all, why should the devil have all the good music? And as rock music appeals to young people, it can be used as a magnet to attract them into church, for it communicates in a language and culture that young people understand.
On the other hand, there are Christians who are entirely clear that music is not morally neutral, but is a powerful means of communicating a moral message. For example, John MacArthur states,
According to Dr Max Schoen, in The Psychology of Music, ‘Music is the most powerful stimulus known among the perceptive senses. The medical, psychiatric and other evidence for the non-neutrality of music is so overwhelming that it frankly amazes me that anyone should seriously say otherwise.’ Therefore, as the lyrics communicate, so too does the music accompanying the lyric. Rock music wants to say something.‘Rock music, with its bombastic atonality and dissonance, is the musical mirror of a hopeless, standardless, purposeless philosophy that rejects God and reason and floats without orientation is a sea of relativity and unrestrained self-expression. The music has no logical progression because it comes from a philosophy that renounces logic. It violates the brain because its philosophy violates reason. It violates the spirit, because its philosophy violates truth and goodness. And it violates God, because its philosophy violates all authority outside itself.’
Perhaps the most convincing argument against rock music is that it does not convey that which is aesthetically beautiful and spiritually uplifting. The Oxford Companion to Music explains, ‘There is good and bad in everything else, so it is reasonable to suppose that there is good and bad in music. Association with the “bad” in any department of life has, to say the least, a “cheapening” effect on the mind, whereas association with the “good” raises it.’ And it is ‘very difficult to argue with those who support the use of bad music to lead men into good ways, since they are incapable of feeling the difference between good and bad in music, and, sometimes, even of realising that “bad” exists.’ In reality, by any reasonable standard of taste, rock is bad, ugly music.
Contemporary Christian Music
For the Christian who is trying to access the effects of popular culture there is a new phenomenon to face - Contemporary Christian Music, or Christian rock. Rock music has been absorbed into Christian worship. There is now Christian Rock, Christian New Wave, Christian Heavy Metal, Christian Punk, Christian Rap and Christian Hip Hop. I was amazed at the amount and variety of rock music in the local Christian bookshop. Reading the lyrics from a sample of CDs showed that many of the songs were replete with New Age references and virtually devoid of biblical truth. Does this type of music have a place in the Christian Church? Should Christian young people listen to this type of music? These are important questions, and there will certainly be different opinions among Christian parents and Church leaders.
John Blanchard, in his 1991 book, Pop Goes the Gospel - Rock in the Church, raises a number of concerns about rock music in the Church. He is concerned that the pop gospel idiom can encourage worldliness and exhibitionism. Another concern is that the gospel is presented as entertainment, which trivialises the message. The object of entertainment is to give pleasure, but the object of evangelism is to warn man of his appalling spiritual condition and point him to the One who came into the world to save sinners. Blanchard believes that reliance on pop music betrays a lack of faith in the gospel, a betrayal that trends to water down the gospel. His final concern (p. 149-150) is that it widens the generation gap.
‘Rock ‘n’ roll was the first music in the history of the world specifically aimed at the teenage market. Its beat appealed to their awakening senses. It spoke of rebellion, revolution, freedom, independence - and the more adults objected to it, the more the young took it to their hearts. It became an international anthem for young people and a major factor in establishing the ‘youth culture’ we have today.’
In How Now Shall We Live? (1999), Charles Colson, argues (p. 466) that while most of us realise the danger of exposing ourselves to immoral content, we often fail to realise that the form of popular culture affects us just as much. That is, it is not only what is said, but also how it is said. He points out (p. 470) that many British rock bands, such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Cream and many others, were deliberately creating music that expressed culture to create a new culture of moral freedom.
‘The sheer energy of rock - the pounding beat, the screams, the spectacle - is intended to bypass the mind and appeal directly to the sensations and feelings. Thus rock music, by its very form, encourages a mentality that is subjective, emotional, and sensual - no matter what the lyrics may say. This is why Christians must learn to analyse not only the content of pop culture, but also the art form itself, the mode of expression. The danger is that Christian popular culture may mimic the mainstream culture in style, while changing only the content. The music market is overflowing with Christian rock and rap, Christian blues and jazz, Christian heavy metal. Are we creating a genuinely Christian culture, or are we simply creating a parallel culture with a Christian veneer? Are we imposing Christian content onto an already existing art form? For the form and style always send a message of their own.’
The bad influence of secular pop and rock is obvious, and parents and youth leaders have an obligation to warn young people of the dangers. Young people need to be persuaded by reasoned arguments as to why they should not be taken in by the seductive messages of the rock culture. The question of so-called Christian rock also needs to be addressed by the Church. The scriptural command is clear, ‘Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind’ (Romans 12:2).
TED WILLIAMS
