| -Caveat Lector-
Who’s Editing the World?
By John Fischer April 19, 2002
Navigating a Worldly Christian Subculture
A new Utah-based video company edits popular Hollywood films for concerned
viewers. CleanFlicks sells already edited versions of many best-selling videos,
but it will also clean up any movie you send for $12. That’s $12 to eliminate
nudity, violence, and bad language from your video monitor. Highly violent
movies like Gladiator and The Patriot cost even more, up to $17 an edit. And
now, according to a Christianity Today report, another studio will soon release
movies with scenes digitally doctored instead of cut. Kate Winslet is no longer
topless in Titanic, bullet wounds disappear in The Matrix, and swords,
reminiscent of biblical ploughshares, have been beat into Star Warsian light
beams in The Princess Bride. While the success of such a company points out that
a significant amount of people are troubled by Hollywood’s frequent emphasizing
of gratuitous sex, violence, and language, the simple solution of editing these
things out poses problems of another kind.
In some ways, the whole industry of contemporary Christian products and
services could be seen as a way of editing the world—creating a cleaner, safer
version of popular culture for Christians to enjoy. We may not be editing the
actual products as this company does, but in creating our own safer products to
substitute for the world’s, we are coming up with much the same thing, and
largely for the same reason. We want to have our cake and eat it too, which in
this case translates into rejecting the world while getting to have it after
all.
What seems to go unexplored in all of these pursuits is the intrinsic
legitimacy or illegitimacy of these things we are copying and editing. It’s as
if we’ve created a decaffeinated world without ever bothering to consider the
value of drinking coffee to begin with. And herein lies the greatest danger: By
marketing a culture as edited for Christians, we are tacitly approving
everything that survived the cutting floor.
For instance, Christian music now has its own Christian stars glorified by
their smashing good looks, their professional entourage, and their glitzy ad
campaigns. What’s been changed? The lyrics, primarily. They are mostly about God
and living the Christian life. We hope the lifestyles of the singers are
commendable (this is not always the case) so that they are positive role models
as well. But their music, and the package it is delivered in, shows little
difference from the world’s.
Whenever we talk about a contemporary Christian editing of culture in any
way, the largely overlooked question is not what to edit; it is what doesn’t get
edited—what gets left behind (no pun intended). What are we swallowing whole in
our culture, thinking all along that we have the safe version of it? Maybe the
bad language has been removed, but what about the materialism, the
self-indulgence, the personal autonomy, the glorification of money and position
and power, or the relativistic messages that permeate Hollywood, such as "Do
what your heart tells you to do"? I worry that the ideals the Christian
community is carelessly buying from the world are far more dangerous and
insidious than the scenes and the language we are editing out.
C.S. Lewis once wrote that it is not overt books on materialism that make a
person a materialist; it is the materialistic assumptions in all the other
books. In the same light, what assumptions are we inadvertently adopting from
the world around us in our "safe" Christian subculture? What gets passed through
the sieve of our editing process?
In Jesus’ words to the Pharisees, "You strain at a gnat and swallow a
camel." Take the bad language out of a bad movie and you still have a bad movie.
You can digitalize a corset on a nude Kate Winslet, but you can’t digitalize
certain values into the story that are not there to begin with.
We run into problems when we assume that the culture can be somehow
detached from the world and made wholly safe. From the beginning, the whole
point of Christian music—which has now expanded into every area of cultural
expression—was to present a Christian message and witness to the world relevant
to contemporary culture. If we are going to create and present something
attractive to the world, guess what? It’s going to be worldly. And the shift
that has occurred in contemporary Christianity from being relevant in order to
reach the world to being acceptable in order to entertain Christians, has
complicated the mission, making it virtually impossible to do both these things
at the same time. Larry Norman’s rock and roll was an offense to established
Christianity in 1970. That was a given. But Larry wasn’t singing to Christians.
We have an audience now that did not even exist 30 years ago.
Can pop culture be made safe for Christians? I think it is highly doubtful.
And even if it could be done, it’s a bad idea.
I believe Christian consumers are being picked clean by a Christian
industry that is making big profits off safety while robbing individual
believers of the responsibility and challenge of thinking for themselves and
interacting in the world at large. The more Christians depend on these
pre-edited Christian products, the less tolerant they are of the world and the
less able to function in it as knowledgeable, compassionate representatives of
the gospel.
We have an industry supposedly doing what every Christian needs to be good
at: exercising a God-given mind in the pursuit of God and truth in the world.
Harry Blamires, author of The Christian Mind, wrote, "There is no longer a
Christian mind." He may be right. Or at least if there is a Christian mind, it
is too lazy to take on the world. Our cultural thinking is much too flabby
because a Christian culture excuses us from this task. Truth of the matter is,
the Christian mind is a much better editor than any film critic with a knife.
If we are going to indulge in popular culture, it would be much better to
interact with the real one than to create a supposedly safe alternative to it.
The alternative is neither safe nor important when it comes to why we are
Christians in the world.
In the end, nothing is safe in this world. Christians need to be discerning
of everything they consume. Christian products are perhaps even the most
dangerous because they come with a false assumption of safety. Wouldn’t we be
better off either dealing with, or rejecting entirely, the real world?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For more of John’s views on the Christian subculture and the world, check
out his new book, Fearless Faith: Living Beyond the Walls of Safe Christianity.
You can find Chapter One free on John’s Website, www.fischtank.com.
Articles on the BreakPoint website are the responsibility of the authors
and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Chuck Colson or Prison
Fellowship Ministries.
Prison Fellowship Ministries © 2002 http://www.breakpoint.org/Breakpoint/ChannelRoot/ColumnsGroup/JohnFischer/Whos+Editing+the+World.htm
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