George Orwell was not a Christian.
His biographers describe him
as agnostic or even an atheist. His dystopian classic 1984 contains the occasional anti-Catholic comment and a plethora
of
Bizarrely, 1984 is also (in some mysterious way I was unable to ascertain) “unacceptable by today’s standards”.
Sinners and Their Stories
These days, I can share without embarrassment that I have read and continue to read books written by sinners that contain stories about sin. Sins big and small, sins of thought, word and deed, sins that my Savior will one day judge. It’s impossible to avoid unless you plan on becoming a monk. Some of these stories are part of holy scripture.
Even if you don’t expose yourself to the influences of our fallen world through literature, I guarantee you do it with one or more of music, TV, movies, YouTube, video games, social media, higher education, corporate culture or simply in the process of making your living. Every Christian does, at least in my experience. Those who don’t have cut themselves entirely off from any source of intellectual stimulation other than the scriptures.
From a purity angle, that may work for them. From a testimony angle, maybe not. It’s hard to connect with people about whose lives, interests and loves you understand nothing at all.
Those Problematic Greek Luminaries
Even the apostle Paul knew enough about Greek philosophy to quote its luminaries regularly to Gentiles in his theological arguments, notwithstanding the fact that Greek culture was a jumble of erroneous and even brazenly wicked ideas side-by-side with the occasional insight that aptly illustrated or harmonized with the teaching of God’s word. Paul was sufficiently familiar with the intellectual climate and concepts of his age to be able to make use of the ideas that served his purposes while discarding those that didn’t.
Further, whether quoting Epimenides, Aratus or Menander, we understand Paul was not endorsing everything else those philosophers said or believed when he cited them as authorities. For example, Epimenides is famously associated with the blood sacrifice of two homosexual lovers. (I was going to provide a source for that, but … nah, you can Google it yourself if you must.) Yet Paul quoted the creepy fellow twice without feeling the need to add 48-point neon disclaimers each time. He was simply using the small-t truths Epimenides articulated to point to big-T truth statements he wanted to get across.
Stumbling Blocks and Opportunities
Every Christian eventually has to work out for himself how he is going to relate to popular culture and the various expressions of the spirit of the age. Will he use his knowledge of them for the Lord, or willfully exclude them from his array of spiritual weapons in hope of remaining untainted by the world?
Technology has increased the available means by which we may expose ourselves to the influence of the world and its ethos, giving us more options and greater variety of potential stumbling blocks, but the problem of how Christians are to relate to the world has not changed in its essence since the first century. The believers in Corinth struggled with it then too, surely along with Christians everywhere else. On the plus side, technology has given us a plethora of new ways to get the truth of God out into the world where people can find it, even if (like this blog, for example) it sits on platforms alongside all kinds of other expressions of opinion far less edifying. For every potential risk factor inherent in the use of any new media form, spiritual opportunities also present themselves.
When I was growing up, many Christians drew hard lines in the sand: they permitted their children to watch this TV show but not that one, to read this book but not that one. I must confess the standards by which parents made these decisions were largely opaque to me. The Christians I knew in my teens had a tendency to call things they were predisposed to dislike “satanic”, while excusing as “art” any particular expression of popular culture they personally enjoyed. We are more permissive today, perhaps, but rarely more consistent.
An Increasingly Censorious World
Interestingly, while Christians across the board have been relaxing their restrictive inclinations, perhaps adopting a more realistic approach to living in a pagan society, the world around us has become increasingly censorious. Yesterday, a friend sent me a link to a video reacting to a recent social media tempest in a teapot. The poor woman at the center of the firestorm was trying to figure out which older authors it was permissible to read while still being perceived as politically correct.
I understand the problem well. All publishers that recycle public domain material these days feel the compulsion to either disclaim certain things written back in the day or censor them outright. The disclaimer on the inside front cover of my copy of 1984 reads:
“Throughout the text, readers may find that some of the language used in dialogue, descriptions or the expressions of opinion is unacceptable by today’s standards. These reflect the attitudes and usage common at the time the book was written. In no way do they reflect the attitude of the publishers.”
The epithet “Cowards!” is about to fall trippingly off my tongue.
“Unacceptable by today’s standards” is an interesting concept, especially because no two censors agree on what today’s standards are. Nevertheless, for the would-be literary expurgator, the online term du jour is the aforementioned “problematic”. To the increasingly censorious left, almost all history is problematic in one respect or another, and thus to be shunned, avoided and disclaimed at every opportunity. Mind you, many things the world delights to suppress and destroy are attitudes and ideas Christians would and should applaud. We are living in a world increasingly morally backwards.
Dusty Roads and Dirty Feet
For Christians, I firmly believe the spiritual effects of daily living in an unbelieving culture are much like the physical effects of living in a first century environment in which hard work was normal, changes of clothes limited, and walking dusty roads an everyday necessity. Hygiene standards were different too. You didn’t get a shower in every morning before work. The biblical practice of foot washing thus becomes a good analogy for how believers must process the random influences of the day. Life makes you dirty, no getting around it, and a regular cleansing is good practice.
As in all areas of life, motive is huge. Obviously, no Christian should be reading or watching material in deliberate pursuit of prurient thrills. We ought to reckon ourselves dead to that. Certain kinds of literature and media have so little redeeming value that nothing on earth can justify spending time in them. Once identified, we need to avoid those experiences. There are things one cannot un-see or un-read. I’d have no objection in principle to government censorship of such “works of art”, but I think we can safely say we’re not likely to get much help there.
Censorship or Discernment?
Still, I do not believe that the answer is greater censorship or establishing shared standards of acceptability for media. (Like we Christians are any good at agreeing about anything.) Christian parents have an obligation to ensure to the best of their ability that their children are not exposed too early to wicked and disturbing ideas. But we also have an obligation to equip them to process the world once they are of age to really engage with it. Most importantly, as they near adulthood, believing children need to be able to hear the biblically-informed voice of the Holy Spirit in their own heads rather than the hectoring voices of their well-intentioned parents.
The key to staying in fellowship with the Lord while living in a fallen world is not so much what we are exposed to, which in many cases is outside our control, but how we respond to it. There are ideas and concepts it is expedient to explore in order to be able to catalog their good and bad points for those who cannot do it themselves: flawed-but-useful books and media with spiritual value that is at very least worth discussing. Christian teachers must do this to fortify their students against whatever the latest lunacy may be. In such cases, older secular literature often contains many useful truths and insights.
Equally, you may flip a page and find yourself in a moral mud bath. I opened a novel loaned to me last week to see in the epigraph a verse quoted from the gospels. The author attributed it to “Some sandal-wearing bleeding-heart who got what was coming to him.” In doing so, he identified himself as an enemy of Christ, and I laid his book aside. I didn’t need to go one page further to find out if it was profitable or not. That’s where the washing of the Word comes in, confirming things that are worthwhile and exposing that which is not.
Our already-censorious Western world may not benefit from more censorship, even if we were able to enforce it. What’s truly beneficial is increasing Christian discernment.
No comments :
Post a Comment