Article Details
Article Added On: July 02, 2004 - over 3 years ago
Title: God in the Marketplace 7
Author: Douglas Todd
Publication: Vancouver Sun
Publication Date: January 01, 2003 - over 5 years ago
Faith Groups: Other
Themes: Religion and society
Abstract: Can TV, the movies and music -- popular, commercial entertainment (as opposed to often more challenging high art) -- give the spiritually hungry masses a sense of purpose? I think there may be ways to find light amid its darkness.
Description: The last in a series by Douglas Todd for the Vancouver Sun.
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I surf TV channels, as millions are wont to do, to try to relax. For a few minutes my body stops moving and my mind stops planning. But I'm not sure I'm finding calm in any real way. Mostly, TV sampling is a time of distraction, of passively allowing myself to be swept along by a stream of unrelated stimuli.
It often brings to mind the time I interviewed Robert Bly, the award-winning American poet and men's movement leader. The "greatest disease" of contemporary times, Bly said, is the inability to find meaning. "You can feel it after you watch TV for an hour. Your body feels extremely upset because it has spent a whole hour and it hasn't taken in any meaning."
Bly pegged it right. There are many moments of clever humour, drama and special effects in North American mass entertainment. But something to hold on to -- a lasting horizon of significance, a sense of sacredness -- is exceedingly hard to come by. Most TV programs and movies are escapist. As well, I fear hypnotic TV undermines the need for discipline and compassion. And TV ads and programs promote envy, mindlessly relying on sexual titillation, violence and gender stereotypes. Mass entertainment is not entirely a wasteland, but it's close.
In his new book, Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Us, noted cultural analyst Todd Gitlin says that living with the mass media is one of the main things North Americans do with their lives.
"We aim, through media, to indulge and serve our hungers by inviting images and sounds into our lives, making them come and go with ease in a never-ending quest for stimulus and sensation ... [It is] a quest for feeling."
Can TV, the movies and music -- popular, commercial entertainment (as opposed to often more challenging high art) -- give the spiritually hungry masses a sense of purpose? I think there may be ways to find light amid its darkness.
How does the entertainment world deal with organized religion? Be careful where you ask that sensitive question.
Regent College Professor John Stackhouse,
He says movies often use religion simply as a negative plot device: to show how free-spirited people need to overcome religion's repressive approach to sex, free conscience and artistic expression. Or they depict religious nuts who are serial killers or child-abusing parents.
In Stackhouse's mind, all is not completely lost, however. He can point to some jewels in mass entertainment that have taken organized religion seriously. From the 1980s, he cites the sensitive and complex portrayal of Christian faith in Chariots of Fire.
On TV, institutional religion rarely receives intelligent treatment. But Stackhouse has been impressed by how The West Wing and Law and Order have quietly and effectively provided textured presentations of Jews, Muslims and evangelical Christians.
In the final analysis, Stackhouse expects movie and TV producers to reflect more accurately the multi-faith makeup of the continent. "The cultural elite don't know what they're doing," he says. "They're going to have to get out more."
The
Bowler, a professor of popular culture and history, has discovered his students have only three cultural touchstones in common -- intense concern about beer brands, the cartoon show The Simpsons, and blockbuster movies such as Terminator 3 and Charlie's Angels.
In centuries past, Bowler says, people in the West drank from a much deeper pool of meaning. Most people shared a familiarity with ancient Greek culture, Shakespeare and the Bible.
And although Bowler appreciates the wit of a show such as The Simpsons, he's still concerned young people now talk about Homer and Marge Simpson instead of Hamlet and Ophelia, James Bond instead of Ulysses, the Energizer Bunny instead of the gospel of John.
"The things that shaped Western culture are falling apart," he says.
Although he is a Christian, Bowler doesn't think explicit religious programming is the answer. "Christian TV has been an absolute disaster in terms of winning friends or drawing converts," he says.
For starters, the televangelistic scandals have been devastating. At a less obvious level, Bowler maintains Christian evangelists' attempts to recreate the church worship experience on TV have fallen short. Canadian Christian programmers such as Bernice Gerard, he says, appear to have no idea how different TV is from a communal spiritual gathering.
TV is basically good at only two things, Bowler says: advertising and telling stories. That's where he thinks Christians (and I would add spiritual people of all sorts) should put their emphasis.
I like his idea of spiritual groups taking more advantage of advertising spots. Bowler rightly says the Mormons have been able to produce provocative TV ads that highlight common virtues such as spending time with family, forgiveness and honesty.
When it comes to movies, Bowler was struck by Magnolia, which on the surface was a harsh tale of despair. On a deeper level, however, Bowler thinks it was a moving sermon about grace and redemption, complete with a plague of frogs (an ancient biblical punishment).
Before publication of the best-selling book, The Gospel According to the Simpsons and its follow-up group study guide, Bowler taught how the satiric Simpsons is a moral show because God and heaven are treated as real, the good guys never lose and the nicest character, Ned Flanders, is a Christian, albeit an over-conscientious one.
Three books have appeared in the past year about spiritual messages in The Sopranos, the TV show that tells the tale of Tony Soprano, a
There are also new books out on Christian themes in Peanuts and the spiritual content of Bob Dylan's music. Several books recently released suggest Lord of the Rings is a tacitly Christian epic about resisting the worldly powers symbolized by the ring.
But there's more to finding spirituality in the marketplace that pinpointing Christian themes in popular culture.
Simon Fraser University ethicist Mark Wexler defines spirituality as the attempt to understand our relationship to something that is larger than ourselves -- "our connection to a great chain of being, to having a sense of awe or wonder, to be questing for meaning and exploring the bigger questions of philosophy, such as 'Why am I here?' and 'What is the good life?' "
Wexler suggests the main purpose of mass entertainment, and especially advertising, is to foster desire -- for more money, sex, power, fame, good looks or relationships.
Wexler suggests a TV show with a spiritual bent would tell the story of someone who's not a winner, who hasn't necessarily got the most money.
A spiritual program would be one that in some ways finds a way to deal with the ambiguity of ethical dilemmas, like the way Law and Order often has its prosecutors questioning the meaning of obtaining a conviction in a complex case.
A spiritual program might also wrestle with notions of goodness, of divided loyalties or of characters trying to find grace.
If we have the eyes to see it, there can be a lot of such higher themes in lower-brow entertainment.
The incredibly popular Harry Potter book and movie series, about a young male sorcerer, may be a case in point. It managed to rile some hard-line evangelicals who claimed Potter promoted witchcraft and subliminally fostered Satanism.
But Carolyn Whitney-Brown, who taught a course on the teen witch at
Although Harry is not an explicit Christian, Whitney-Brown says the books teach that kids who make brave choices can make a real difference.
And, as the kindly eccentric headmaster of Hogwarts school for Wizards says, "It's our choices, Harry, that show who we really are -- far more than our abilities."
I tend to agree with those who suggest music is the most spiritual form of art. It touches almost all the senses. It combines emotion, thought and imagination.
But there are a lot of Britney Spears and aggressive rappers out there singing mindless songs about romantic love or easy sex (which wears a bit thin for anyone over 35). A jaunt through the radio dial or MuchMusic TV leaves one feeling grimy, polluted and starved. But at the same time there are many singer-songwriters who are articulate and spiritually insightful. It can be surprisingly inspiring to sift through entertainment culture, especially music, for spiritual nuggets.
Cockburn doesn't often go to church any more, but dozens of his songs are devoted to explicit spiritual themes. There's Big Circumstance, which is basically his metaphor for God's purpose.
And for public spirituality you can't top the lyrics to Lord of the Starfields, where he sings, "Oh love that fires the sun keep me burning." Pure mysticism.
There is also the late Jamaican reggae star Bob Marley. To hundreds of millions around the world he remains an icon of hope and resistance to the powers of conformity, singing songs such as Exodus and War, always giving thanks to his Rastafarian God, Jah.
American working-class hero Bruce Springsteen, as well, often injects power and integrity and a kind of transcendent hope into his songs of everyday struggling people. Springsteen has said he wants his concerts to be both a "political" and "spiritual" experience.
Carlos Santana also expresses a deep spirituality and Joan Osborne is a breath of fresh air on the pop charts, performing songs such as What if God Was One of Us? which wryly asks if God might be a stranger on a bus trying to find his way home, a poetic echo of the Christian plea to see the face of Jesus in every person.
It's probably not pure coincidence that perhaps the world's two biggest spiritual rock stars, Van Morrison and U2's Bono, are both Irish. With a kind of fierce courage, they've defied the empty-headed pop stars in
In Give Me My Rapture, Morrison sings: Let me contemplate the presence so divine/Let me sing all day and never get tired/Fill me up from your loving cup/Give me my rapture. In another song, he says: You've got to dance and sing/And be alive in the mystery/And be joyous and give thanks/ And let yourself go.
Finally, there's Bono, lead singer for the mega-rock group, U2. Arguably, no artist of our time has more successfully blended mass art with bringing social, political and spiritual leadership to the cultural square.
The pinnacle of Bono's activist career may have occurred in 2001, when he championed the biblically based Jubilee movement, which is pressing the world's richest countries to forgive the crushing debt of the poorest.
This is the way Bono explained his vision: "The Jews had this idea that you had the Sabbath day, the day not to work. And every seven years you let the land lie fallow, a year of Jubilee, and seven times seven -- every 49 years -- you had a year of Jubilee, when you had to let go of the debts of the people who are indebted. Captives, slaves, had to be set free. It was a time of grace. Beautiful idea, really."
In hugely popular albums such as All That You Can't Leave Behind, U2 and Bono affirm the spiritual and moral realm by probing love in its non-romantic forms: love of truth, love of justice, love of the divine. The last song of the album is titled Grace, and it's ostensibly about a female of that name. But the tender song makes it clear it's also the word Christians use for redeeming love:
Grace, it's the name of a girl/ It's also a thought that changed the world/ And when she walks on the street/ You can hear the strings/Grace finds goodness in everything.
Public spirituality at its best.
God in the heart of the cacophanous marketplace.
dtodd@png.canwest.com
Illustration:
" Color Photo: FOX / The Simpsons as Adam and Eve: A moral show because God and heaven are treated as real, the good guys never lose and the nicest character, Ned Flanders, is a Christian.
" Color Photo: Agence France-Presse / "Grace, it's the name of a girl/ It's also a thought that changed the world/ And when she walks on the street/ You can hear the strings/Grace finds goodness in everything." Bono Color Photo: National Post / "Oh love that fires the sun keep me burning." Bruce Cockburn
