Biblical Thinking: Secular Mindlessness

We're listening to a seminar by James Montgomery Boice on Biblical Thinking. The following is a summary of key points found in the study guide:

In our culture, very little Christian thinking is going on. In fact, very little thinking of any kind is going on in the Western world, Boice says. We are becoming a "mindless society." As Christians, we are called to think. We are called to mind renewal, as stated in Romans 12:1-2: "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is -- His good, pleasing and perfect will."

Our present mindlessness has many causes, but Boice points to television as the chief source as well as the best point at which to analyze modern mindlessness. Even if you never watch television, the medium ends up affecting you because it has shaped aspects of our culture that then affect you. (This seminar was recorded in 1994, and one ends up wondering what Boice would have to say about the similar effects of the internet.)

In his analysis of television, Boice cites Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, written in 1984.

The first half of the book is a study of the difference between what Postman calls "the age of typography" and our present television age or "the age of show business." Typography is print, and it concerns the communication of ideas by newspapers, pamphlets and books. It is rational, analytic, because that is the way written words work. Television does not operate by rational forms of communication but by images.

News on television moves quickly form one unrelated story to another with a simple, "Now... this." Postman says that television gives us "news without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness, that is to say, news as pure entertainment." In other words, it is not only mindless, it is teaching us to be mindless, to the point at which we even suppose our vast ignorance to be knowledge.

Politics on television has become show business. The object is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty, but to appear as if you are. In The Selling of the President, Joe McGinniss quotes Bill Gavin as saying, "Break away from linear logic, present a barrage of impressions, of attitudes... Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, witout making an intellectual demand..."

Religion also appears on television, but most commonly in an entertainment format. The chief loss is a sense of the transcendent. God is missing. Postman says, "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 second banana. ... If I'm not mistaken, the word for this is blasphemy."

Postman is a secular guy and yet he sees the blasphemy. This reminds me of a recent blog post by theologian Doug Wilson, in which he says wryly, "No one can blaspheme like an evangelical."