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Biblicism can’t get you where you want to go
A friendly debate with Matthew Lee Anderson about sexual ethics, biblicism, and magisterial authority.
Update (29 Feb 2024): I’m not going to revise what I’ve written below, but Matt rightly brought to my attention an ambiguity in the post; namely, that while I don’t accuse Matt of himself being biblicist, I strongly imply it. For the record, he’s not a biblicist! The running argument between us—a friendly one, I should add—is more about what one can reasonably expect to persuade evangelical Protestants of, given their prior commitments about Scripture, tradition, reason, and ecclesial authority. Nor, I might add, am I necessarily endorsing either the bundle of sexual ethics I lay out or the Roman procedure for affirming them. I’m intending, instead, to note a fundamental difficulty in evangelical and biblicist treatment of issues, particularly neuralgic issues related to sexual ethics, that are not addressed directly and explicitly in the Bible. I hope that still comes through. Apologies for the confusion.
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I have a running argument with my friend Matt Anderson. My side in the argument is simple: You can’t get to Matt’s moral-theological positions via biblicism. You need more. In particular, you need three additional components.
But let me back up. Consider Catholic doctrine on sexual and procreative ethics. What Rome teaches is quite clear:
No abortion.
No cloning.
No IVF.
No artificial contraception of any kind.
No sterilization.
No self-abuse.
No sexual activity whatsoever besides intercourse between one man and one woman who are married to each other, an action that (by definition, given the above) is intrinsically and necessarily open to new life.
Unless I’m mistaken, Matt affirms each of these seven components of Catholic teaching, albeit on different grounds (partially shared with Rome, partially not). Further, he believes this teaching as a whole is simply and clearly biblical. It’s biblical teaching, not “Roman” or “magisterial” teaching.
I’m not going to argue with Matt about whether that’s true. What I’d like to share instead is an anecdote. Here it is:
I have never once, in my entire life, met a single person who believes (much less practices) the foregoing seven propositions except (a) Roman Catholic Christians, (b) Christians with a theological graduate degree, and/or (c) Christian writers who cover sexual ethics and public policy.
In the case of (b) and (c), it’s worth adding that such persons, who are occasionally Protestant or Orthodox, have always and without exception been exposed in a direct and sustained manner to historic Roman magisterial teaching on sexual ethics.
What this tells me is that arriving at Catholic doctrine on these matters via “the Bible alone” may not be literally impossible (I suppose someone, somewhere, may have done it) but that it is, at the lived level of biblicist evangelical Christianity, so unlikely as to be impossible in practice.
What, then, is missing in biblicist attempts to arrive at these teachings? Three things.
First, a high view of the potential and power of natural human reason, however fallen, to draw accurate moral conclusions from the nature of created human existence regarding the essential character and divinely willed purposes of sexual activity.
Second, a living and authoritative sacred tradition developed and maintained in and by the church for the sake of instructing the faithful on new and pressing challenges to following Christ, including challenges unaddressed directly by the letter of Holy Scripture.
Third, a living and authoritative teaching office, or magisterium, governed and guided by the Holy Spirit and vested by him with the power to address, in real time, pressing challenges faced by the faithful in their daily commitment to following Christ.
It seems to me that all three are necessary and that together they are sufficient, alongside and in service to the supreme divine authority of Scripture, to do what needs doing in the moral life of the church. To do, that is, what Matt and other Protestant ethicists want to be done and see needs doing.
I should add why I believe the first two elements—which, one might argue, are found in certain Protestant communions, whether Anglican or Reformed or Wesleyan—are inadequate without the third. The reason is this. Biblicist Christians will never agree, for example, that the Bible forbids contraception, for the simple reason that there is no chapter or verse that clearly and explicitly does so. But even if some Christians were to argue that both tradition and reason likewise prohibit contraception, it remains the case that, in the absence of an ecclesial office with the authority to teach the faithful, other Christians would argue in turn (and in good faith) that their reading of Scripture, tradition, and reason differs in this respect, and that no church law, however venerable, has the power to bind their conscience on a disputed matter such as this one.
In short, Roman teaching requires Roman polity; catholic doctrine depends on and is inseparable from catholic tradition. It’s a feature, not a bug. You can’t get there otherwise, at least not in a definitive way, and not in a way that could ever command assent from other Protestants, evangelicals, or biblicists.
Six months without podcasts
Last September I wrote a half-serious, half-tongue-in-cheek post called “Quit Podcasts.” There I followed my friend Matt Anderson’s recommendation to “Quit Netflix” with the even more unpopular suggestion to quit listening to podcasts. As I say in the post, the suggestion was two-thirds troll, one-third sincere. That is, I was doing some public teasing, poking the bear of everyone’s absolutely earnest obsession with listening to The Best Podcasts all day every day.
Last September I wrote a half-serious, half-tongue-in-cheek post called “Quit Podcasts.” There I followed my friend Matt Anderson’s recommendation to “Quit Netflix” with the even more unpopular suggestion to quit listening to podcasts. As I say in the post, the suggestion was two-thirds troll, one-third sincere. That is, I was doing some public teasing, poking the bear of everyone’s absolutely earnest obsession with listening to The Best Podcasts all day every day. Ten years ago, in a group of twentysomethings, the conversation would eventually turn to what everyone was watching. These days, in a group of thirtysomethings, the conversation inexorably turns to podcasts. So yes, I was having a bit of fun.
But not only fun. After 14 years of listening to podcasts on a more or less daily basis, I was ready for something new. Earlier in the year I’d begun listening to audiobooks in earnest, and in September I decided to give up podcasts for audiobooks for good—or at least, for a while, to see how I liked it. Going back and forth between audiobooks and podcasts had been fine, but when the decision is between a healthy meal and a candy bar, you’re usually going to opt for the candy bar. So I cut out the treats and opted for some real food.
That was six months ago. How’s the experiment gone? As well as I could have hoped for. Better, in fact. I haven’t missed podcasts once, and it’s been nothing but a pleasure making time for more books in my life.
Now, before I say why, I suppose the disclaimer is necessary: Am I pronouncing from on high that no one should listen to podcasts, or that all podcasts are merely candy bars, or some such thing? No. But: If you relate to my experience with podcasts, and you’re wondering whether you might like a change, then I do commend giving them up. To paraphrase Don Draper, it will shock you how much you won’t miss them, almost like you never listened to them in the first place.
So why has it been so lovely, life sans pods? Let me count the ways.
1. More books. In the last 12 months I listened to two dozen works of fiction and nonfiction by C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton alone. Apart from the delight of reading such wonderful classics again, what do you think is more enriching for my ears and mind? Literally any podcast produced today? Or Lewis/Chesterton? The question answers itself.
2. Not just “more” books, but books I wouldn’t otherwise have made the time to read. I listened to Fahrenheit 451, for example. I hadn’t read it since middle school. I find that I can’t do lengthy, complex, new fiction on audio, but if it’s a simple story, or on the shorter side, or one whose basic thrust I already understand, it goes down well. I’ve been in a dystopian mood lately, and felt like revisiting Bradbury, Orwell, Huxley, et al. But with a busy semester, sick kids, long evenings, finding snatches of time in which to get a novel in can be difficult. But I always have to clean the house and do the dishes. Hey presto! Done and done. Many birds with one stone.
3. Though I do subscribe to Audible (for a number of reasons), I also use Libby, which is a nice way to read/listen to new books without buying them. That’s what I did with Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks—another book that works well on audio. I’ve never been much of a local library patron, except for using university libraries for academic books. This is one way to patronize my town’s library system while avoiding spending money I don’t have on books I may not read anytime soon.
4. I relate to Tyler Cowen’s self-description as an “infogore.” Ever since I was young I have wanted to be “in the know.” I want to be up to date. I want to have read and seen and heard all the things. I want to be able to remark intelligently on that op-ed or that Twitter thread or that streaming show or that podcast. Or, as it happens, that unprovoked war in eastern Europe. But it turns out that Rolf Dobelli is right. I don’t need to know any of that. I don’t need to be “in the know” at all. Seven-tenths is evanescent. Two-tenths is immaterial to my life. One-tenth I’ll get around to knowing at some point, though even then I will, like everyone else, overestimate its urgency.
That’s what podcasts represent to me: either junk food entertainment or substantive commentary on current events. To the extent that that is what podcasts are, I am a better person—a less anxious, more contemplative, more thoughtful, less showy—for having given them up.
Now, does this description apply to every podcast? No. And yet: Do even the “serious” podcasts function in this way more often than we might want to admit? Yes.
In any case, becoming “news-resilient,” to use Burkeman’s phrase, has been one of the best decisions I’ve made in a long time. My daily life is not determined by headlines—print, digital, or aural. Nor do I know what the editors at The Ringer thought of The Batman, or what Ezra Klein thinks of Ukraine, or what the editors at National Review think of Ukraine. The truth is, I don’t need to know. Justin E. H. Smith and Paul Kingsnorth are right: the number of people who couldn’t locate Ukraine on a map six weeks ago who are now Ukraine-ophiles with strong opinions about no-fly zones and oil sanctions would be funny, if the phenomenon of which they are a part weren’t so dangerous.
I don’t have an opinion about Ukraine, except that Putin was wrong to invade, is unjust for having done so, and should stop immediately. Besides praying for the victims and refugees and for an immediate cessation to hostilities, there is nothing else I can do—and I shouldn’t pretend otherwise. That isn’t a catchall prohibition, as though others should not take the time, slowly, to learn about the people of Ukraine, Soviet and Russian history, etc., etc. Anyone who does that is spending their time wisely.
But podcasts ain’t gonna cut it. Even the most sober ones amount to little more than propaganda. And we should all avoid that like the plague, doubly so in wartime.
The same goes for Twitter. But then, I quit that last week, too. Are you sensing a theme? Podcasts aren’t social media, but they aren’t not social media, either. And the best thing to do with all of it is simple.
Sign off.
Quit podcasts
“Quit Netflix.” Matt Anderson has made that phrase something of a personal slogan. Among the many controversial things he’s written—he’s a controversialist, after all—it may be the most controversial. We like our shows in the age of Peak TV. And what he wants to do is take them away.
Matt Anderson has made that phrase something of a personal slogan. Among the many controversial things he’s written—he’s a controversialist, after all—it may be the most controversial. We like our shows in the age of Peak TV. And what he wants to do is take them away.
Okay, not exactly. But he thinks you—all of us—would be better off if we canceled our Netflix subscriptions. For the obvious reasons: Netflix is a candy bar, a sedative, a numbing device by which we pass the time by doing nothing especially worthwhile at all. It turns out that’s true not only of Netflix but of the so-called Golden Age of TV as a whole. It’s not that there are no good TV shows. It’s that, in almost every circumstance, there are dozens of better things you could be doing with your time. (You might be inclined to resist this claim, but in your heart you know it’s inarguable.) Add to that the fact that watching Prestige TV has become, in the last dozen years, a vaguely moralized social obligation for a certain subset of upper-middle class white-collar professionals, and perhaps Matt is right that Christians not only may but should quit Netflix.
Point taken. Now allow me to swap out a different activity for your quitting consideration.
Podcasts.
Podcasts, as you well know, are the new Prestige TV. They’re ubiquitous. Not only does everyone have a favorite podcast. Everyone has a podcast, i.e., hosts one of their own. Or is starting one. Or is planning to. Or has an idea for one. They just need to get the equipment and line up some guests . . .
I live and work right next to a college campus. If you see someone walking on campus and that person is under 40 and alone, almost certainly she has air pods in her ears, and chances are those air pods are playing a podcast. (Maybe music. Maybe.) What is the podcast? Who knows? There are literally millions today, on every topic under the sun. “Have you listened to [X] podcast?” is the new “Have you seen the latest episode of [X]?” Just last month our pediatrician asked me, in the middle of a check-up for one of our kids, given my job, whether I was listening to the Mars Hill podcast. Alas, I had to say no.
Now, this post is two-thirds troll, one-third sincere. I’ve been listening to podcasts for nearly 15 years. My first was Bill Simmons’ old pod for ESPN, whose first episode dropped while I was living in an apartment in Tomsk, Russia, early in the summer of 2007. I’ve been listening to Simmons off and on ever since. My podroll has increased as I’ve aged, and some of my typical listens are among the usual suspects: Ezra Klein, The Argument, Zach Lowe, The Watch, The Rewatchables, Know Your Enemy, LR&C, Tyler Cowen, Mere Fidelity, The Editors, a few others here and there. Washing the dishes or cleaning the house, it’s a pleasure to listen to these folks talk about sports and entertainment and news and politics and theology. It’s background noise, their voices become like those of friends, and occasionally you even learn things.
So unlike the scourge of Prestige TV—which is little more than a Trojan horse for reinforcing the single greatest collective habitual addiction besetting our society for nearly a century—podcasts aren’t All Bad, nor are their benefits mainly a function of rationalization and self-justification. I’m not worried about them in the same way.
Having said that. Let me suggest a few reasons why you ought to be a little more skeptical of them. So as to decrease your podcasting, and maybe even to quit it.
First, podcasts are filler. They’re aural wallpaper. They’re something to have on in the background while you do something else, something that requires your actual focus and attention. If that’s true, can they really be that substantial? Aren’t they, as often as not, little more than snack food for the ears?
Second, if you really want to listen to something (say, on a road trip or a long walk or while working out), why not listen to an audiobook? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the book will be worth your time—a four-course meal—in a way the Cheetos-posing-as-Michelin-starred-podcast will not. You could buy audiobooks or sign up for Audible, as a way to patronize authors, or you could use Overdrive or Libby. You have more or less every great work of literature and prose in the English language available to listen to for free; sometimes the work was composed with the express purpose of hearing it read aloud, rather than reading words on a page. Why not give it a try?
Third, those first two points suppose it’s not a problem, us walking around incessantly filling our ears with the voices of others, thus blocking out the noises—and silences—of the real world. Isn’t it a problem, though, this anxious need to fill even the smallest of snatches of time with meaningful noise, lest we be oppressed by the stillness and quietness (or, if you’re in a big city, the parading loudness) of life? Or perhaps we feel anxious to Do Something Productive with our time: If our attention can manage it, surely we Ought To Be Learning/Listening/Thinking? Nonsense. If to cook is to pray, so is every other daily “mindless” habitual activity that doesn’t demand the totality of our attention. Such activity may, in fact, permit our attention to be at ease, or to meditate on other matters, or to examine our days, or to wander as it pleases. Or, as the case may be, to choke on emotions we’d rather not address, indeed would rather numb and sedate and repress through unremitting distraction. Perhaps podcasts are a kind of noise pollution but on an individual level, self-chosen rather than imposed from without. We just have to refuse the urge to put the pods in and press play.
Fourth, podcasts almost invariably trade on the new, the latest, the exclusive-breaking-this-just-in-ness of our forgetful presentist age. In this they’re analogous to Twitter: an infinite scroll, not for the eyes, but for the ears. Doubtless some people listen to podcasts while scrolling Twitter. (The horror!) The podcasts play on, world without end, one blending into another, until you forget where one begins and one ends. Of all the podcasts you’ve ever listened to—and I’ve surely listened to thousands—how many discrete episodes can you point to, from memory, and say, “That one, right there, was significant, a meaningful and substantive and life-giving episode”? I’m not saying you couldn’t pick out a few. I’m suggesting the batting average will be very low. Again, like remembering individual tweets. That’s why podcasts are so disposable. The moment they lose their immediate relevance, they are cast aside into the dustbin of history. It’s what makes writers who become podcasters so sad. Books and essays and columns stand the test of time. Pods do not. Bill Simmons, whom I referenced earlier, stopped writing five or six years ago. He likes to say his fingers stopped working. The truth is, a combination of market inefficiency plus the convenience of podcasting meant taking the time to draft and revise and draft and revise, under an editor’s watchful eye, was less convenient and more time-demanding than hopping onto a podcast seconds after a game ended—plus advertisers are willing to pay for that in a way they don’t for individual columns. So a writer who came onto the scene and made a name for himself because of his writing simply ceased to practice his craft. That’s something to lament. Beyond that individual case, though, it’s a parable for our time. And Simmons is someone with an audience in the millions. Yet his thousands upon thousands of podcasts from the last decade will never be listened to a second time, now or in the future. They might as well be lit on fire ten days after going online. The same goes for politics podcasts. They’re talk radio, only rarefied and highbrow. But they have the same shelf life. And they partake of the selfsame contemporary obsession with The New that all people of good will, but certainly Christians (and Jews and Muslims), should repudiate in all its forms. Go read Rolf Dobelli’s Stop Reading the News and you’ll realize just how unimportant—in general and to your own daily life—“keeping up with the news” is. That goes for politics and sports and entertainment (but I repeat myself) as much as for anything else. Stop reading the news translates to stop listening to the news, which I will gloss here as stop listening to podcasts devoted to The New.
Fifth, podcasts have increasingly become niche and personalized, as so much in our digital economy has. You, the individual consumer-listener, pay the individual content-maker/podcaster, perhaps become a Patreon supporter, and thereby receive Exclusive Access and Personal Benefits and other just-for-you paid-for goods and services. Am I the only one who finds all of this ever so slightly weird, even gross? I don’t begrudge anyone hustling to do their thing or to find an audience, precisely outside of the decaying and desiccated institutions that act as gatekeepers today. But there’s something icky about it nonetheless. In the same way that news-watchers can exist in entirely different moral and epistemic universes—one presided over and mediated by Fox News, the other by MSNBC—so podcast-listeners curate their own little private aural worlds with nary a glance at or interruption from another. It doesn’t help that this ecosystem (or ecosphere?) overlaps substantially with the gig-cum-influencer economy, where fame and fortune are always one viral moment away, for anyone and everyone. We’re all always already potentially (in)famous and affluent, if only the digital stars will align. We try to nudge those stars by flooding the market with our content, a sort of astrology or spell-conjuring with ones and zeroes, or in this case, “Thanks for following; while you’re here, check out my SoundCloud.”
In any case, those are at least some of the reasons for increasing your skepticism quotient in this matter. More than a slightly more skeptical eye, though, consider whether you ought to go all the way. For there’s a solution lying close to hand.
Quit podcasts.
Pop culture, for and against
1. The piece is meant to be provocative, as both the title and tone suggest, so part of this is doubtless my own fault; but the overall point I'm trying to make is not that pop culture as such, or Netflix, is Bad, or that Christians should not ever "engage" it. The primary argument, instead, is that Christians (with an audience) who believe or write that Christians (in general) ought to "engage" popular culture as an imperative are wrong. That is, even if pop culture is neutral (which it is not), there is no good argument that Christians (again, in the aggregate) should, as a prescriptive norm, make it a priority to watch more Hulu, see more Netflix originals, listen to more Spotify, spend more time on YouTube, etc. My argument, then, is wholly negative, countering the opposing (positive) argument regarding Christians' behavior and posture toward pop culture. Though I gesture in this direction, I do not in fact make the mirror-image (positive) argument that Christians, normatively, should not, ever, under any circumstances, "engage" pop culture. What I do suggest is that there are worthwhile alternatives to such activity—an observation I would assume we can all agree on, though perhaps I am wrong.
2. I am therefore not "against" pop culture in the strong sense. This is true in multiple ways. Personally, I am—albeit ambivalently—an avid consumer of and participant in popular culture. Peruse my blog or CV and you'll see evidence aplenty. I have published academic work on, e.g., the Coen brothers. I write regularly about film and TV: on A Clockwork Orange; on Ex Machina; on The Leftovers; on the supposed monoculture; on ParaNorman; on Phantom Thread; on Godless, Three Billboards, and The Last Jedi; on Rachel Getting Married; and much more. My reading online is probably evenly split between political commentary and movie/TV criticism. I could name my top 10 favorite film critics off the top of my head. I teach a class called "Christianity and Culture" that includes a film critique assignment; moreover, when I teach it as a one-week intensive, we spend an hour every afternoon viewing "cultural artifacts" together via YouTube. I was that kid in high school thumbing through my (subscription) Entertainment Weekly while methodically crossing off entries on AFI's Top 100 Movies list. I still have individual Word documents for each year going back two decades that include my own personal "Best Of" lists for both film and TV. I can neither confirm nor deny that I continue to update them.
3. So I've got pop culture bona fides (Lord forgive me). And I do not think Christians must flee to the hills and keep their children safe from the mark of the beast, i.e., Hollywood. (This isn't a "keep Christian culture pure" take.) I'm not even arguing, as Matt Anderson does, that Christians should delete their Netflix accounts. I have Netflix, and I'll be enjoying season 3 of Stranger Things later this week. There is indeed plenty of good in various artifacts and products of our artistic culture today, and that includes popular culture—this isn't, to address another criticism, a high versus low argument. Though I am constantly trying to expand my cultural and aesthetic palate, I am a very poor reader of, say, 19th century novels. One day I'll be able to offer thoughtful reflections on Austen and Melville and Trollope, but this is not that day. So, no, I'm not pitting two options against each other—Schitt's Creek versus Crime and Punishment—stacking the deck in favor of one, and judging the poor plebs who opt against Great And High Culture.
4. So what am I doing? Well, to repeat, I'm rejecting the case made by far too many Christian writers, academics, and pastors that their fellow Christians should be engaging pop culture. As I wrote, that is silly, and its silliness should be dazzlingly apparent to all of us. It's a way of rationalizing our habits or elevating what is usually quite shallow entertainment—an undemanding way to pass the time, alone or with others—to the venerable status of Meaningful. In a way, I'd rather folks admit the truth, that sometimes, perhaps more often than they'd like to admit, Netflix (et al) is a way to shut off their brains and veg out at the end of a long day. I still think (as I'll say below) that there are reasons to resist that route, but most of us have done it, it's not the worst thing in the world, and it's far more honest than high-minded justifications as to why House of Cards is deep art. (Which it is not: absent a few directorial flourishes from Fincher in the opening episodes, that wretched show is a self-serious daytime soap about evil people doing wicked things with absolutely nothing interesting to say about human nature, politics, or power. It's as bad for your soul as it was for mine when I watched it.)
5. So why the digression in the original post about how Netflix (serving as a shorthand for all digital and streaming content) is bad for you? And about how there are dozens of other activities that would be better for you? Well, because more than one thing can be true at the same time. It is true both (a) that there are quality films and shows on Netflix that would not be a waste of your time and (b) that, in general, spending time on Netflix is the worst option among a host of otherwise life-giving, body-restoring, mind-expanding, soul-rejuvenating activities available to you on any given evening. And thus, I want to suggest, it is worth considering the time one gives to streaming apps and other screens and social media, compared with how one could be using that time differently. What if, instead of 2+ hours of Netflix per night, you had 3-5 Netflix-free nights per week, and limited yourself to a movie one night and a (single episode of a) show another night? Here is the counter-prescriptive argument for the rah-rah Christian pop culture folks: I am confident that all the activities I listed in my piece—gardening, reading, cooking, serving, crafting, writing, etc.—are superior, 99 times out of 100, to spending time on Netflix. Does that mean, as I said there, that one therefore ought never to watch Netflix? No! We don't always do The Very Best Thing For Ourselves at all times. Otherwise we'd be praying 90-minute Vespers after the kids went to bed every night, or learning a new language every 18 months, or what have you. But the fact that we don't always do The Very Best Thing, and even that we needn't feel like there is a standing imperative Always So To Do, doesn't change the fact that Netflix is on the very bottom of the list of activities that are good and restorative and healthy for us; activities, that is, that are an excellent use of the (very limited) time allotted to us. We don't need to lie about that to make ourselves feel better about it.
6. I had at least two audiences in mind with my original piece. One was the group criticized directly: those who believe, and write, that Christians ought to "engage" pop culture. And the reaction of at least some folks proved, to me at least, the point: there is a kind of nervous insecurity on the part of folks who "love" pop culture and who therefore need it to Be Meaningful. (An insult to it is an insult to us all.) But why? Would the lives of Christians be worse in any way if they decreased the time they give to streaming TV and movies by 80%? Answer: No! Would they be worse neighbors as a result? By no means! If your concept of neighborliness, of Christian neighbor-love, is necessarily wedded to knowledge of pop culture, then it is your concept that needs to change, not the people who fail to live up to it. Now, does the fact that most Christians would be well served by decreasing their Netflix (and Hulu, and Spotify, and HBO, and Instagram, and Facebook, and Twitter, and...) usage mean, as a consequence, that a minority of Christians who are lovers and critics, professional or amateur, of visual art forms must—like St. Anthony hearing the Gospel read in church and Jesus's words spoken directly to him—give up their streaming services, abandon cinema, and forever devote themselves to Faust and Beethoven instead? What an exaggerated and convoluted question you've asked. You know my answer by now.
7. My other audience was, basically, my students. Or, more broadly, my own generation (I'm technically a Millennial) and the generation coming up behind us (Gen Z). It is impossible to overstate how bad their technological habits are. From sunrise to sundown (through many hours of sundown) they fill their minutes and hours with brain-stunting screen-candy, whether social media, music, streaming video, or all of the above. They wake up to it and, quite literally, fall asleep to it. They can't imagine going without it for even brief stretches, and they can't imagine sitting in a room, without a device, without artificial noise of some kind, and reading a book for 25 minutes straight. (They can't imagine it because they've never done it or, all too often, seen it done.) This is another, larger conversation, granted, but it is related to the present topic, because the principal thing for Christian teachers, pastors, professors, and writers to say to these kids is not Thou Shalt Engage Pop Culture EVEN MOAR. The thing to do is to model, instruct, and shape them so as (a) to unlearn their screen-addled habits and (b) to present an alternative. True, this generation isn't going to go Full Butlerian Jihad—though I wish to God they, and we, would—and so it is indeed a wise and worthwhile thing to train them in healthy, thoughtful, critical habits of engagement with culture of every kind. And inasmuch as that is what the pro–pop culture folks are in actuality up to, I have no beef with them. But in order to motivate that project, we don't have to shore up the depth or quality or worthiness of pop culture as such; we don't have to pretend. We just have to accept it as a part of our common life, bad as much of it is, then think through how Christians ought to relate to it (in a complex balance of resistance, ascesis, discipline, engagement, celebration, and critique).
8. A coda on sports, then a postscript on myself. A number of folks asked either why I didn't mention sports or whether sports falls under my critique. Those are good questions. Sports, even more than pop culture (understood as concrete artifacts produced for mass entertainment purposes—and even here I realize sports is becoming less and less distant from such a definition), can become an idol from which Christians should flee. But since what I had in mind was Christians with an audience arguing that fellow Christians have a kind of spiritual or cultural or missional duty to "engage" popular culture, sports seemed a separate issue. I've not encountered that kind of rhetoric regarding sports, partly because basically no one, including Christians, needs to be convinced to play or watch sports; partly because sports has a different kind of importance in our lives—different, that is, than art and its aura of significance. But I have no doubt much of what I wrote and what I've written here applies, mutatis mutandis, to sports and the adoration, even fanaticism, that surrounds it.
9. My original piece had a third audience above all: myself. Outside of the most important aspects of my life (God, family, church, vocation), I probably spend the largest chunk of my time, day to day and week to week, thinking about how to change my relationship to technology. I've written about that a number of times on this blog. My relationship to technology includes my phone (cut down to ~45 min/day!), social media (no Facebook! Minimal Twitter!), my household (no kids have devices! No TV on Sundays!). But it also includes my viewing habits. And those have always been the hardest for me to curb. I grew up watching a lot of TV, and then in my late teens I got into film in a big way. In college and grad school I developed what I take to be quite bad habits—not morally bad, in terms of what I viewed, but psychically bad, in terms of shaping my brain and body's expectations for what it means to fill free time, to rest. If I didn't have school work to do in the evenings, my singular instinct was (and to some extent still remains) to turn on the TV (where "TV" means some film- or show-streaming screen). From 2000 to 2010, film-wise, and from 2006 to 2016, TV-wise, if you've heard of it, I've probably seen it. Having four kids in six years both helped and hurt. Helped, because my movie habits were forced to change whether I liked it or not. Hurt, because while I was staying home part time as a doctoral student, I simply couldn't find the energy to do intellectually demanding work when my kids napped, so I actually increased my TV viewing. In the last 3+ years, I have made it a dominating goal of my life to decrease this time spent in front of a screen, watching a show (however good the show might be—and sometimes they're quite good). And I've succeeded, to an extent. My aim is not—pace Matt Anderson—to rid my life of TV or streaming art. It's to unlearn the itch, that is, the psychological and almost physiological reflex to fill "blank" time with a screen filled with moving images. I treat this itch like a disease, though I am self-aware enough to know that my almost maniacal posture toward the itch is itself a sign of how far I've come. But so far as I can see, it really is a disease, a social disease, present in Kindergartners, freshmen in college, thirtysomething parents, empty-nesters, and retired grandparents. When dinner's done, or the dishes are washed, or the kids are in bed, or the house is clean—when there's a chunk of time to be filled—we all do we what we've always done since the 1950s: turn on the TV. Only now, the name of that all-powerful gravitational pull is no longer TV but Netflix. It's a cultural tick, a habitual default, an emotional itch, a psychological addiction. And speaking only for myself, I want to be free of it.
Against pop culture
Why is that? Why should Christians like, love, or "engage with" pop culture?
I don't think there are very many, or perhaps any, good answers to that question.
Now, sociologically and empirically, we can surely posit some reasons for the lovefest. Christians, especially conservative Christians, especially conservative evangelical Christians, have tended to be socially and culturally disreputable, either isolated or self-exiled from dominant norms, media, and elite artistic production. When that has taken the form of anxious parents "protecting" their children from, say, Disney or Hollywood, it could assume unhealthy forms. Moreover, once such children grow up—or, perhaps, move up in terms of class—they may discover that, as it happens, The Lion King and Return of the Jedi and even some R-rated movies aren't so bad after all.
More broadly, knowledge of pop culture is the lingua franca of upwardly mobile bourgeois-aspirational twenty- and thirty-somethings working white collar jobs in big cities (not to mention college, the gateway to such a destination). I remember a long car ride I once took with three academic colleagues, one of whom had not seen a single "relevant" or popular film or TV show from the previous decade. The result? He basically sat out the conversation for hours at a stretch. What did he have to contribute, after all? And what else was there to talk about?
But such explanations are just that, explanations, not reasons for why Christians (or anyone) ought to be enthusiastic consumers of pop culture, much less evangelists for it. And rather than flail around for half-baked arguments in support of that view, let me just posit the contrary: there are no good reasons. The boring fact is that Christians like pop culture for the same reasons everyone else does—it's convenient, undemanding, diverting, entertaining, and socially rewarded—and Christians with an audience either (1) rationalize that fact with high-minded justifications, (2) invest that activity with meaning it lacks (but "must" have to warrant the time Christians give to it), or (3) instrumentalize it toward other, non-trivial ends.
Options 1 and 2 are dead ends. Option 3 is well-intended but, nine times out of ten, also a dead end.
The truth is that, for every hour that you do not spend watching Netflix, your life will be improved, and you will have the opportunity to do something better with that time. (I'm generalizing: if, instead of watching Netflix, you break one of the 10 commandments, then you will have done something worse with your time.) Reading, cooking, gardening, playing a board game, building something with your hands, chatting with a neighbor, grabbing coffee with a friend, serving in a food pantry, learning a language, cleaning, sleeping, journaling, praying, sitting on your porch, resting, catching up with your spouse or housemate: every one of these things would be a qualitative improvement on streaming a show or movie (much less scrolling infinitely on Instagram or Twitter). There is no argument for spending time online or "engaging" pop culture as a better activity for Christians with time on their hands than these or other activities. Netflix is always worse for your soul—and your mind, and your heart, and your body—than the alternative.
Now, does that mean you should never, ever stream a show? No, although this is usually too quick an escape route for those who would evade the force of the claim. ("Jesus, I know you said turn the other cheek, but could you, quickly though in detail, provide conditions for my justifiably harming or even taking the life of another human being?") My argument here is not against the liceity of ever streaming a show or otherwise engaging pop culture; it is against the ostensibly positive reasons in favor its being a good thing Christians ought to do, indeed, ought to care about doing, with eagerness and energy. Because that is a silly thing to believe, and the silliness should be obvious.
I had been meaning to write something like this the last year or two, but a recent exchange between Matthew Lee Anderson, in his newsletter, and his readers, including Brett McCracken, prompted me to finally get these thoughts down. The short version is that Matt suggests people delete their Netflix accounts, and people think that goes too far. (To be clear: Whenever anyone anywhere at any time suggests that people delete their [anything digital/online/social media], I agree reflexively.) The present post isn't meant as an intervention in that conversation so much as a parallel, complementary reflection. Any and all libertarian (in the sense of a philosophy of the will's freedom) Christian accounts of pop culture, Netflix, social media, etc., fail at just this point, because they view individuals as choosers who operate neutrally with options arrayed before them, one of which in our day happens to be flipping Netflix on (or not) and "deciding" to watch a meaty, substantive Film instead of binging bite-size candy-bar TV. But that is not an accurate depiction of the situation. Netflix—and here again I'm using Netflix as a stand-in for all digital and social media today—is a principality and a power, as is the enormous flat-screen television set, situated like a beloved household god in every living room in every home across the country. It calls for attention. It demands your love. It wants you. And its desire for you elicits desire in you for it. It is, therefore, a power to be resisted, at least for Christians. Such resistance requires ascesis. And ascesis means discipline, denial, and sometimes extreme measures. It might mean you suffer boredom and lethargy on a given evening. It might mean you have to read a book, or use your hands. It might even mean you won't catch the quippy allusions in a shallow conversation at work. So be it.
A final word, or postscript, speaking as a teacher. I have too many colleagues (across the university and in other institutions) who have effectively admitted defeat in the long war between 20-year olds' habits and the habits of the classroom, and who thus not only employ various forms of visual media in class (assuming students cannot learn without them) but actively encourage and solicit students' use of and engagement with social and digital media and streaming entertainment in assignments outside class. Granting that there are appropriate forms of this (for example, in a course on Christianity and culture, one of my assignments is a film critique), I am thinking of more extreme versions of this defeatism. What I mean is the notion that "this generation" simply cannot be expected to read a book cover to cover, or that the book must be pitched at a 9th-grade level, or that assignments "ought" to "engage" other forms of digital media, because "this is the world we live in." Education must be entertaining, lest the students not be educated at all. But as Neil Postman has taught us, when education is made to be entertaining, students do not learn while also happening to be entertained. They learn that learning itself must always be fun. And when it isn't, that must be a failure of some kind.
Our students do not need us to encourage their Netflix and Twitter and other digital habits. They need us to help them unlearn them, so far as is possible within the limits afforded us. Acceptance is not realism, in the classroom any more than in our own lives. Acceptance is acquiescence and retreat. For Christians, at least, that is not an option.