The Dangerous Seduction
The Dangerous Seduction
In early March 2011, Japan was rocked by a deadly combination of an earthquake followed by a tsunami. Through the wonderful gift of communication, it was immediately brought to the world’s attention. Many of every age bracket responded to what had happened, and the human spirit came to the fore with help and rescue. That was the positive side of the visual medium of television. We didn’t just read or hear about the devastation, we saw it and were able to feel the tragedy to a certain degree. Just today, when I met a Japanese man in the elevator, I placed my heart on my chest and said, “I am so sorry for what your country is going through.” He bowed in response and said, “Thank you.” The breadth of the calamity brought every human being into a compassionate posture.
There was, therefore, something very strange in the response to the tragedy of one television personality, Gilbert Gottfried, the former voice of the duck in the Aflac Insurance Company commercials. He is a highly paid and skilled comic actor. But a few days after the tsunami hit, he tweeted ten jokes about the Japanese tragedy, one being that in Japan people don’t go to the beaches, the beaches come to them; another, not to worry if you lost your Japanese girlfriend, another one would soon wash up on shore. It absolutely strains credulity that anyone could find anything humorous in one of the greatest tragedies of modern times, the full extent of which has still not been fully realized. The outrage against him was immediate, the vast majority focusing their incredulity on the fact that he would say such things in the face of the instant dissemination of any communication in our day.
But my thoughts were different. What, I ask, was this man even thinking to write such things, regardless of who would have picked it up? Is such tragedy a subject for humor? Is this his ready wit? Is this his way of trying to bring some lightness into a heavy situation? I don’t think so. I really think the camera does things to a person and seduces him into believing that it’s all about him; that somehow his is a persona that transcends the usual boundaries for ordinary people. It is precisely the same pitfall that needs to be avoided by professional athletes on the screen for whom life has been reduced to a game and the game has been elevated to life. That is the power of the camera. I feel sorry for Mr. Gottfried. He lost his lucrative contract over a pathetic blunder. He can no longer be taken seriously because he failed to see the seriousness of life and death. The reason he gave for his comments was that he is a humorist and that making jokes is his calling. But he didn’t know boundaries.
How much more serious is the impact of the visual media for those who are dealing with issues that concern the souls of people! No one ought to be more mindful of this seduction than those who deal with spiritual matters. Though the mass media began its onslaught upon the Christian faith and the academy gave it sophistication, it would not have been that easy to discredit the faith of millions in this country except for the fact that American Christianity itself bought into the gimmickry of television. And that is what gave the attackers their legitimacy. The message became nothing more than glitz and glamour. Being seen through the lens of a camera became the mission.
Study the lives of those in Christian ministry who fell into this trap. Two in particular come to mind, Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker, who, according to Google, is “best known as the disgraced PTL TV host.” Look at what happened to them personally, and it becomes evident that the medium massaged them into a false sense of their own preeminence and status until they collapsed under the weight of their own fame. Both became victims, seduced and hoisted ultimately on their own petard. They were the Heath Ledgers of American evangelicalism.
No, there is no reason to celebrate, nor is there reason to mock any of these personalities. We all are vulnerable to the seduction of fame. It could have happened to any one of us in the same situation, standing before the cameras and lights, recognized by millions around the world, with millions of dollars in our bank accounts by virtue of self-seduction. It was Inception in real life. The pain was real, and when they awoke from the dream it was to realize that the real person who was there at the beginning had died.
I recall that I was on my way to do my early morning workout routine when the story broke, years ago, of what had happened to the PTL television network. I remember at the time thinking that this piece of news was going to permanently change the way the gospel would be seen and then ridiculed. Common sense could have told us this was going to happen sooner or later. I couldn’t help but think of how Jesus was pressured by his followers to become a king, to change stones into bread, to use God for his own ends. Jesus resisted the temptation of self-aggrandizement—and for him who was God of the very God, it would have been legitimate—but some of his followers haven’t.
The cost was in more than the loss of the message. The economics of it demanded that the better part of the PTL Club program be spent in generating money to pay for the airtime, rather than in any real ministry. The scene at the temple when Jesus walked in and overturned the tables of the money changers comes to mind again and again. This is America in the age of television. Everything is made for sales.
Prayer was no longer sufficient in this portrayal of Christianity; tears had to flow to make it real, while in the background, telephone volunteers were viewed taking calls and pledges. The simple truisms of the gospel were so often repeated and used for impure reasons that they became lines for derision even though they are true: Jesus died for your sins; Jesus is coming again; you must be born again; come to Jesus; give your heart to Jesus. Bumper stickers like “Honk If You Love Jesus” abounded. Just like John Lennon and “Imagine,” you can hear the lines in your mind, and even the way some of them pronounced and stressed the syllables. It was not just “God”; it was “Gaw-dah.” I know people who even now can do a perfect imitation of the way these one-liners were thundered by TV preachers.
The gullible swallowed this distortion of the gospel unquestioningly. The skeptic was given fodder for his ridicule. Christianity was denuded and the walls of traditional belief came crashing down. The message of Christ was sold out to the medium of television, and in the ensuing vacuum, politics were mocked, conservatism became suspect, fundamentalism became a bad word, and long-held and sacred values were overthrown. Liberty, equality, and fraternity were redefined to mean “autonomy,” “relativism,” and “fragmentation.” The gospel of Jesus Christ was made synonymous with the methods that had devalued the truth, and people began to search elsewhere for answers. The miracle is that in spite of everything, some were touched and some lives were actually changed. But by and large, the medium seduced the user. The programming and simplistic message that was promoted with sophisticated techniques made the whole message of Christ appear as a lie, taken seriously by very few “thinking” people.
The same television screen that had a hand in the ridicule of the truth became the means of promoting a different belief and a different hero. And the same mix of mindless belief and razzmatazz that appeal in the promotion of the New Spirituality will meet with the same result, some day. Believe me, I see it and can see through it. The same shenanigans are at work.
At first blush, the New Spirituality provided a welcomed escape and was hailed as a needed relief from the dogmatism and clichés that branded Christianity as “Western” and invasive to our private lives. As the generation gap widened, the young wanted something they could call spiritual, as their forefathers had had, but that provided a new way of sacred thought that would allow them to escape the restrictions of the past. It had to be an egalitarian, all-inclusive, nonjudgmental, non-Western way of looking at things. There should no longer be a dominant faith in the West. Culture and Christianity were both examined and found wanting. The old way of belief was expelled and the New Spirituality made its entrance.