7. The Hidden Destroyers
The Hidden Destroyers
Why are many of the people we minister to suffering from starved imaginations? Our anemic skeletal preaching might contribute to their plight, but it certainly doesn’t cause it. Most of these people had starved imaginations before they joined our congregations. But, what is the cause of the malady?
North American sociologist Robert H. Bellah gives one answer, based on his interpretation of American history. He believes that the American society early abandoned the poetic and embraced the pragmatic; and this has “dried up” the American imagination.
According to Bellah, Jonathan Edwards was “the last Protestant theologian before the twentieth century to have in his control the entire imaginative resources of the Christian tradition. Edwards’ use of imagery was unparalleled and he stood at the beginning of the American tradition of revivalist preaching.” But after Edwards, says Bellah, “such a union of persuasion and thought tends to fall apart.” Bellah calls this decline the “gradual drying up of the Protestant imagination in America.”[1]
What made the American Protestant religious imagination “dry up”? Bellah suggests as the major cause, the American emphasis on science and reason, leading to the loss of the “vision long nurtured in the religious and poetic traditions of the West.”[2] Instead of having the “double vision” that sees both the facts and the truths behind the facts (what Sallie McFague calls “concept” and “image”), the American people focused on whatever was scientific, technical, industrial, practical, and financially profitable. They gradually abandoned the inner vision and fell prey to what William Blake called “the single vision and Newton’s sleep.”[3] Unfortunately, this pragmatic approach to life infected the churches, and many of them replaced the Bible’s sacramental view of creation with the more “scientific” outlook.
From the theological point of view, it was a replication of the sin of God’s ancient people Israel when they turned from the true God and worshiped idols. Israel lost the sacramental view of creation and centered their attention and affection on the gifts rather than the Giver. They began to live on substitutes and to see the world as a place filled with treasures to exploit, with no sincere consideration of the God who gave these treasures to them. They ceased to be stewards and became consumers. This was the ancient version of the “consumer mentality” that has affected all of us today.
Oswald Chambers had this to say about idolatry and starved imaginations:
The people of God in Isaiah’s day had starved their imagination by looking on the face of idols, and Isaiah made them look up at the heavens, that is, he made them begin to use their imagination aright. Nature to a saint is sacramental. If we are children of God, we have a tremendous treasure in nature.[4]
In short, we and the people we preach to live in the kind of society that quietly defiles and destroys the imagination of the unsuspecting victim. In today’s world, if you want to have a healthy imagination, you have to work at it. Your inner person is constantly being assaulted by artificial images that dim your view of God’s creation and erode your imaginative faculty. People with starved imaginations usually don’t know what’s wrong with them; and sometimes in their attempt to solve the problem, they only plunge deeper into difficulty.
The emphasis on technology and consumerism in Western society has created some powerful industries to protect and promote what the announcer on the old “Superman” television program called “the American way of life.” These industries have created for us an artificial environment of imaginary needs that keep us from enjoying the real world that God gave us. Enjoyment without God is impoverishment; enjoyment with God is enrichment.
The technological world is a world of manufactured experiences that leave both the wallet and the imagination empty. If you have enough money, you can buy almost any kind of experience today, from a day in a medieval castle to a simulated space flight. Products and services are rarely presented on the basis of their merits; they’re promoted by advertising images: the cigarette-smoking macho cowboy riding his horse, the whiskey-drinking banker lounging by the fireside, the sexy woman leaning against the new automobile. According to former advertising executive Jerry Mander, “The role of advertising . . . is to create a world of mirrors in which people can obtain new images of themselves that fit the purposes of the overall system.”[5]
“Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we can’t experience it,” said Swiss novelist and playwright Max Frisch.[6] He might have added, “And having so arranged the world, the technocrats can now market artificial experiences to us, experiences we wouldn’t need if we’d just get back to experiencing the world God created for us.” A fantasy world replaces a real world and starves the imagination. Chesterton was right: “The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder.”
Pornography and “Realism”
One of the symptoms of the starved imagination malady may be the success of pornography in our country—both the hardcore kind and the more sophisticated varieties—as well as the emphasis on so-called “realism” in the arts. Sometimes the two are united in a joint assault on the picture gallery of the mind.
Feminist leader and author Midge Decter calls pornography “a vision of anonymous, faceless sex, sex without personality and without consequences.”[7] Because pornography is that kind of an experience, it leaves people excited but empty, their inner hunger not satisfied. Because their inner hunger persists, they must find ways to generate greater sexual excitement; and thus the appetite feeds on itself but doesn’t feed the imagination. It eventually defiles and destroys that which it hoped to satisfy.
So-called “realism” in the arts is sometimes only a more socially accepted form of pornography. Indeed, some social critics see “artistic realism” as a sign of decay rather than of progress. North American novelist and biographer Mark Schorer wrote: “When we feel that we are no longer in a position to say what life means, we must content ourselves with telling how it looks.”[8] “Realism” may give fantasy sufficient food to build a titillating alternate world, but it can only starve the imagination and keep it from understanding and enjoying the real world. It takes imagination to penetrate reality and discover the truths behind it.
This explains why the biblical writers handled with delicacy, and often with symbolism, matters relating to sex. The Bible deals with these matters in a “slanted way,” as Emily Dickinson expresses it in her poem #1129.
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise.
As lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind.
I’ll have more to say about this perceptive poem in later chapters. Just keep in mind that the “realism” in today’s society isn’t feeding the imagination, but destroying it.
People don’t have to get involved in pornography or technological traps to starve their imaginations. All they have to do is attend school and the educational system may do the job for them. Children are born with healthy imaginations; but by the time they’ve been in the school system for a few years, they start thinking and speaking very conventionally. According to Ellen Y. Siegelman, a child’s ability for making metaphors “seems to wane when the child enters school and throughout the elementary school years.” When children enter school, their drawings become “less imaginative and more literal.”[9]
This reminds me of a story told about the artist Picasso. Late in life, he visited an exhibition of drawings made by children; and he said: “When I was their age, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.”[10]
Too many public schools are only outmoded factories for turning out citizens who are conformists. Fortunate are those students who have at least one teacher who can help them discover and develop their creative gifts. When I was in the sixth grade, I had such a teacher; and I will always be grateful for her. She encouraged me to read and write, and she took time to criticize my little essays and stories. By the time I entered junior high school, I was hooked on books, and I knew I wanted to be a writer.
Educator Kieran Egan reminds us that “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.”[11] If all that education does is encourage us to swallow an approved meal and later regurgitate it, without offering us the opportunity to question either the recipe or the menu, then it’s no surprise that we’re destroying imaginations while dispensing information. Why do we make “concept” and “image” competitors, even enemies, when God made them to be friends and coworkers?
Television
When it comes to starving the imagination, many social critics think that the greatest single culprit is television.[12] “Though television passes for experience,” says Jerry Mander, “it is more like ‘time out.’ ”[13] He cites evidence from researchers proving that watching television is “antiexperience” rather than experience. “Television information seems to be received more in the unconscious than the conscious regions of the mind where it would be possible to think about it.”[14]
One of our leading North American experts on television is Dr. Neil Postman, professor of communication arts and sciences at New York University, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death and Conscientious Objections. Postman’s emphasis is that television is an entertainment medium; therefore, everything we watch on television comes across as entertainment even if it’s serious. Whether we’re watching the bombing of a Vietnam village or the funeral of an assassinated president, we’re “amusing ourselves” rather than educating ourselves. Postman claims that “the form in which ideas are expressed affects what those ideas will be.”[15]
Postman and other critics are especially concerned about the way television presents the news—in forty-five second “bites” that together resemble propaganda more than they do reporting. As activist Jerry Rubin said, “On the television screen news is not so much reported as created.”[16] When we watch presidential candidates campaign or debate, the important thing isn’t how they address national and international issues but what kind of image is coming across to the viewing public. There was a time in American politics when the speech writer was the most important member of the presidential team. Now, it’s the media expert, the man or woman who can “sell” the image of the candidate the way advertisers sell beer or mouthwash. Whether the viewers realize it or not, says Postman, “television has achieved the power to define the form in which news must come, and it has also defined how we shall respond to it.”[17]
The British television political commentator Robin Day has also expressed concern about the way the medium handles the news. “Though the main facts are covered,” he writes in his book Day by Day, “their news value is liable to be affected by an overemphasis on what is available by way of direct visual coverage of events. This tends to be edited so as to select the most visibly emotive or violent part for transmission.”[18]
Along with Mander, Postman, and Day, British media pioneer Malcolm Muggeridge expressed concern over the influence of television on human life. His insightful book Christ and the Media contains three lectures he gave at All Souls Church, London, in 1976, along with reports of the discussion periods and the responses of the men who chaired the lectures. His thesis is simply that “this medium [television], by its nature, doesn’t lend itself to constructive purposes.”[19]
Television, of course, is a means of transmitting images; but, says Muggeridge, “The Christian faith has come to us in words, not images. . . . If it had come to us in images instead of words, it would not have lived as it has.”[20] When asked if he thought Jesus Christ would have consented to be interviewed on television, he replied in the negative. “The wonder, you see, of the Word which became flesh, and dwells among us, cannot get on to film, cannot get on to video, cannot get into a camera, Mother Teresa notwithstanding. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word became flesh, not celluloid.”[21]
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. An interviewer asked a little girl if she preferred listening to the radio or watching television, and she replied, “Listening to the radio.” When asked why she preferred radio, she said, “Because the pictures are clearer.” That says it all.
Both children and adults are being deeply affected by what they watch on television; and they don’t realize the damage that’s being done. By the time the average child in the United States finishes elementary school, he or she has watched 8,000 murders on television.[22] From first grade to graduation, she will spend 13,000 hours in school but will watch television more than 15,000 hours; and she will watch over 1,000 commercials a week. By the time she is twenty, she will have seen over 1 million commercials.[23]
Radio—a Better Choice
Three recent developments in radio have caught my attention. The first is the success of Garrison Keillor, the man who invented the little Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon and the people who populate it. Keillor made these people so real that millions of listeners would sit by their radios weekly to hear the latest “news from Lake Wobegon.” One Saturday evening, I sat in the World Theater in St. Paul and listened to Keillor give the “news,” and all the while I was wishing I could make my sermons and books as captivating as he makes his mythical town. Keillor may well be the most gifted and imaginative communicator in radio today. At least he’s proving that people will forsake television and listen to a radio storyteller as he feeds their imagination.[24]
The second development is the popularity of the old radio programs such as “Amos and Andy,” “The Shadow,” “Burns and Allen,” “Jack Benny,” “Bob and Ray,” “The Lux Radio Theater,” and a host of others. Local radio stations are airing these programs to appreciative and growing audiences; and in Chicago, Chuck Shaden has turned old-time radio (and other forms of nostalgia) into a profitable industry. I note that many gift catalogs now list cassettes of the old radio shows. Nostalgia as such isn’t one of my special interests, but I must confess that my imagination thrives on listening to these voices from the past.
When our family lived in Chicago, one of my daily tasks was to transport our children to school each morning as I made my way to the Moody Church where I was serving as senior pastor. I sometimes tuned in to a local station that played old-time radio programs; and at first the children laughed at the old-fashioned music and commercials, and some of the humor. But gradually they became interested and started to enjoy the programs. I was one happy father when one morning our younger daughter said, “You know, I like this better than television!”
The third development is the new emphasis in radio on drama and readings. National Public Radio has given us excellent versions of The Hobbit, Winnie the Pooh, Charlotte’s Web, and numerous short stories either read or dramatized, including my favorite Sherlock Holmes mysteries. If our children would devote thirty minutes a day to listening to radio drama, it might feed their imagination and cure them of television addiction.
To be fair all around, I must admit that I have pastor friends who tell me they couldn’t preach effectively if they didn’t watch television. Apparently the experience helps them better understand the mind-set of the congregation, and it even gives them material for illustrations.
So be it. “Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind” (Rom. 14:5). I just hope that they compensate for whatever damage occurs in their inner person, because you can’t devote time to watching television without being affected by it. Robert Murray M’Cheyne’s warning about the Greek and Roman classics is applicable here: “True, we ought to know them; but only as chemists handle poisons—to discover their qualities, not to infect their blood with them.”[25]
You may disagree with me about some of these matters, but one thing I’m sure we agree on: the imagination of the average church attender is starved, and if people are to mature spiritually, we must feed the imagination as we expound the Word of God.
“Ears that hear and eyes that see—the Lord has made them both” (Prov. 20:12).
“But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear” (Matt. 13:16).[26]
“The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor.”
“Whole works of scientific research, even entire schools, are hardly more than the patient repetition, in all its ramifications, of a fertile metaphor.”
“A philosophical treatise has never been written which did not depend upon the use of metaphor.”
“All thinking is metaphorical.”