Why You Should Celebrate the Hollywood Strike

Given the strike of Hollywood actors and writers, it is an apt time to reflect on our use of media and entertainment. A quote from Neil Postman’s class book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, can guide us.

"Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death."

[Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death (pp. 3-4). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.]

We may want to pull away from entertainment, especially focusing on the moving image, and immerse ourselves in reading unelectrified books in pursuit of a more Christian mind and way of taking in the world. As Paul exhorts us:

"Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. 2 Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will." (Romans 12:1-2).

Consider the biblical warnings about images, as discussed by Postman. 

"In studying the Bible as a young man, I found intimations of the idea that forms of media favor particular kinds of content and therefore are capable of taking command of a culture. I refer specifically to the Decalogue [Exodus 20:1-18], the Second Commandment of which prohibits the Israelites from making concrete images of anything. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth.”

I wondered then, as so many others have, as to why the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture. We may hazard a guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or making statues or depicting their ideas in any concrete, iconographic forms. The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture.

People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic injunction. But even if I am wrong in these conjectures, it is, I believe, a wise and particularly relevant supposition that the media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the culture’s intellectual and social preoccupations."

[Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death (p. 9). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.]

Recommended reading
1.    Douglas Groothuis, “Television: Agent of Truth Decay,” Truth Decay (InterVarsity, 2000).
2.    Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word (Eerdmans, 1985).
3.    Herman Melville, Moby Dick.
4.    Kenneth Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture (Crossway, 1989).
5.    Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (Penguin, 1985)
6.    Francis Schaeffer, The God Who is There (InterVarsity, 1968).

Douglas Groothuis, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at Denver Seminary and the author of nineteen books, including Fire in the Streets (a critique of critical race theory or wokeness) and Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith.

Find more from Dr. Groothuis at www.DouglasGroothuis.com.

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