The Impact of TV
“If all other variables are equal, your capacity to know God deeply will probably diminish in direct proportion to how much television you watch. There are several reasons for this. One is that television reflects American culture at its most trivial. And a steady diet of triviality shrinks the soul. You get used to it. It starts to seem normal. Silly becomes funny. And funny becomes pleasing. And pleasing becomes soul-satisfaction. And in the end, the soul that is made for God has shrunk to fit snugly around triteness. This may be unnoticed, because if all you’ve known is American culture, you can’t tell there is anything wrong. If you have only read comic books, it won’t be strange that there are no novels in your house. If you live where there are no seasons, you won’t miss the colors of fall. If you watch fifty TV ads each night, you may forget there is such a thing as wisdom. TV is mostly trivial. It seldom inspires great thoughts or great feelings with glimpses of great Truth. God is the great absolute, all-shaping Reality. If He gets any airtime, He is treated as an opinion. There is no reverence. No trembling. God and all that He thinks about the world is missing. Cut loose from God and everything goes down.”
~John Piper, Pierced by the Word, 77
Am I advocating the abolition of all TV watching? Not hardly, it can be a way of taking the temperature and getting a glimpse of the overall world-view of our culture. Am I asserting that refraining from watching TV automatically makes us know God better? Certainly not, abstaining from one thing does not necessarily lead to another without proactively moving in that direction. I do think that this Piper quote should serve to get all of us Christians thinking though. I am as prone to TV absorption as any other Joe; this serves as a reminder that I have a faith to feed and if I feed it on American culture…well…it’s like living on a steady diet of fast food. It’ll make you sick eventually…
As Christians, I would think we all should want to move toward a stance that is first entrenched in a desire to know God and therefore pursue activities to this end. It’s all too easy to get caught up in the culture though. We are increasingly swimming against the current of modern American living and it gets harder and harder to resist. I’m not rushing to throw out my TV mind you, but I certainly am going to advocate watching it with a very controlled, thoughtful, and purposeful demeanor, and only as a supplement to feeding our Christian faith via reading, prayer, family interaction, and engaging one another to the glory of God.
Soli Deo Gloria