The Holy & the Profane
The Content We Consume (Part 1)
Quick Recap
We are currently in our series on the Sanctified Imagination. As a reminder, our imagination is that place in our minds in which all thoughts, images, and senses dwell (whether from ourselves or elsewhere).
Our imagination is built up of a number of “Building Blocks”, or the things we give our minds so that we can imagine the future and live into that future. A Sanctified Imagination is one that is being fed building blocks of the Kingdom and can imagine (and live into) a Kingdom future.
This article dives into the first of those building blocks: the content we consume.
A (probably too long) Introduction
Years ago, I walked into a small hospital room to say goodbye to one of the most saintly women I have ever known. My grandmother had already passed away, her body cold on the hospital bed beneath harsh, fluorescent, lights.
But despite the morbidity of the scene, this is perhaps one of the holiest moments of my life.
My grandmother lived with a radical love for Jesus, and so her death has served as a beautifully sobering blessing, reminding me of the frailty of my own life and awakening in me a longing for that coming Kingdom in which I will walk alongside my Lord, my grandmother, and a million other saints like her. Because of her life, the image of her death is redeemed for my (and others) sanctification.
It is holy. Set apart.
But that is not the only death I’ve seen.
Through movies and video games, I’ve seen death imitated tens of thousands of times in varying degrees of accuracy and gore. Usually, those pretend deaths happen for an audience/consumer’s enjoyment. It’s done in a way to be “cool” or “interesting” or “fun”, often to highlight the protagonist’s or — in the case of video games — the player’s skill and heroism. Little communicated in these scenes would have me long for a coming Kingdom. Instead, they tempt me to enjoy the worst parts of the human experience today.
It is the opposite of holy, it is profane.
Images of death, in and of themselves, are not bad. But what the image intends to communicate about reality can influence and (over an extended period of time) shape us.
Though I only saw the movie once when I was in high school, I can still remember a particular scene in Hardball in which a child, named G-Baby, was the victim of gang violence. A little kid growing up in a gang-ridden neighborhood of Chicago, a stray bullet took his life in an act of senseless violence. It was a fictitious scene, but made believable by the realities of our fallen world. Moreover, it was filmed in such a way as to draw us to grief and mourning, and a reflection on the injustices of this world. It’s been years since I’ve seen it, and yet that scene still sticks with me.
But watch John Wick or Gladiator — or any other of a thousand action movies today — and death is treated very differently. It is turned into a source of entertainment, choreographed to excite the mind and make us desire that same Nietzsche-like power of our protagonist, made superior by their ability to take life. Victory comes from dominance over the “other”, justified (usually) by ensuring we’ve seen the “bad guys” do even more horrendous things.
These portrayals of death are not intended to have the audience desire for a new world, but to revel in the possibilities of this world. Instead of longing for a Kingdom and Resurrection, we long to be the “heroes”1 with the gun, blazing our way through waves of bad guys. We aren’t compelled to give to organizations trying to end violence worldwide, but instead we feel compelled to get concealed weapons permits.
Continuing On
This reflection on death could easily be repeated for other things as well: sex, friendship, money. Even God. It is not the topic of the media, but what that media wants us to believe about reality, that makes it holy or profane,
For example, not all art centered around sex is pornographic2. Some art deepens my desire for my wife, and stirs a longing in me for an Eden-like vulnerability in my marriage. I remember one short story about a man sucking the air from an inflated sex doll. Slowly, it’s revealed that this had been a gag present from his wife who’d recently died. He was trying to breathe in the air that weeks before she’d breathed out, a vivid image of grief and loss that leads me to wanting to hold my wife closer.
But read an erotica novel — even a popularized one like Fourth Wing marketed under the guise of “romantasy” — and you will find a different story of reality. Relationships in these novels border on obsessions, distilling humans down to objects of sex and desire, and painting unrealistic expectations of sexual fulfilment. Consume things like this long enough and passion for our spouse will dwindle or (perhaps worse) become tied to mental fantasies beyond our marriage.
The difference between what is holy and what is profane is the difference between whether or not it makes our hearts yearn for the things of the Kingdom of Heaven.
A man who regularly watches war movies, entertained by watching the death of the “other”, cannot expect to truly love his enemies. He will be molded, but his mold will not be the image of Jesus who died for his enemies. Instead he’ll be molded by the imaginary alpha-male who can justify the killing of human “enemies” for a perceived “good”, even if that stands against the teachings of Jesus and the apostles. Oh, how many men have not had the Temple of God built in their hearts because they were “men of war” in their imaginations?3
If a woman desires to watch the drama of others, then she can expect to play such drama out in her own life: scrolling through endless feeds for real life gossip and building walls around her heart preventing true friendship, romance, and vulnerability. And how many women have ruined their relationships because they craved the division from gossip rather than the unity of Christ?
Listening to Taylor Swift and playing Call of Duty may or may not be sinful activities to engage in, but surely they possess the ability to build molds around our hearts that we will unconsciously fit into. And when our clay-like hearts hold their molds long enough, they will dry out into those distorted shapes. From there, the process of recreation must begin again with the smashing of those twisted clay vessels.
Praise the Lord that He is one who is willing to put in the time at the potter’s wheel.
Is Only Christian Media “Good”?
As a child, my parents subscribed to a Christian magazine that aimed to keep them informed of the dangerous secular media in the world. I was told Harry Potter and Pokémon were evil, and instead I read the middle-grade versions of the Left Behind series and watched the same episodes of Bible Man over and over. I ended up convinced I’d get beamed up to Heaven one day and that I could fight all my battles in life by quoting Scripture (often out of context).
During my lifetime, much of the media targeting Christians has been an amalgamation of bad art and bad theology that is called “good” simply because it is “clean”.
Madeleine L’Engle said it best: “If it's bad art, it's bad religion, no matter how pious the subject.”4
Something being secular doesn’t mean it’s contributing to a bad mold for your soul, and something being “Christian” doesn’t mean it’s contributing to a good one. Those middle-grade Left Behind books were bad art (and I also think bad theology) and there may have been more to learn about the Gospel of Jesus in Harry’s fight against Voldemort — if only someone had taken the time to show it to me.
Please don’t misunderstand me, there is amazing art and media in the world that has been created by, and for, Christians. I only mean that something being topically Christian doesn’t mean it need be any less examined than that which comes from the unrepented artist. Whatever the source of the art, whoever the intended audience, we must thoroughly consider its intent and the ways in which it may shape who we become.
But few of us ever do this. The Church is filled to the brim with people who think little about what they consume and they generally fall on one of two sides of the fence: consuming exclusively that which is marketed as “Christian”, or consuming anything and everything (because consumption is not a “sin” after all).
For this first group, it sometimes seems as if they will take in just about anything dished out on Christian radio and TV. As long as it originates from a source that claims to hold to a Christian (or, more accurately, “conservative”) worldview, they will consume it with little thought. Consider, for example, when Angel Studios released a movie poster portraying Dietrich Bonhoeffer holding a gun. For a film about a man whose legacy is (in part) one of radical Christian nonviolence, this should have been a sure sign to moviegoers that this film would be inauthentic to the life of this Christian martyr, and equally inauthentic to the gospel of Jesus. Instead, it almost certainly drove movie sales.
Things are little better on the other side of this metaphorical fence. A growing number of those who identify as Christians see no connection at all between their walk with Jesus and the media they consume. Without apparent shame, they sing along to Kanye, fight the online mob for tickets to Taylor Swift, and play GTA. Always they stand ready to push back on any criticism from the Church as “legalistic” and “judgmental”, confident God is on their side. We can know that the pursuit of holiness is secondary to the pursuit of happiness when the Jesus we claim as our own wouldn’t even participate in the lives we live.
A Quick Wrap Up
Whichever side of this metaphorical fence we tend to fall, we must carefully consider our lives, working out our salvation with fear and trembling5.
Lord, help us, for our foolishness is equally deep on both sides.
Next week we will tackle the deeper questions about how to know the ways that media forming us.
Which is generally code for an “alpha-male-good-at-killing-others”.
I don’t use this term to refer exclusively to “adult entertainment” (a term that should probably be “adult exploitation”), but instead I use “pornographic” as any sexual or sexually-adjacent content that would lead me to view humans as an object to be consumed with my eyes rather than a person to be engaged with via my soul.
See 1 Chronicles 22
L’Engle, Madeleine "Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art"
See Philippians 2:12