culture

An interesting comment I overheard recently between Christian brothers: “I prefer to watch TV shows; sports just glorify money and feed the ego of arrogant athletes.”

What’s interesting to me is the guy who said that understood that sports programming can put some bad ideas in people’s heads, but didn’t seem to see that TV shows do too. The truth is, the most dangerous part of pop culture isn’t sex or violence, it’s the ideas that are presented so sympathetically that I want to agree.

In Numbers 33 I read God’s instructions for making sure everyone in Israel had a part of the promised land. Then, in verse 55, I read this: “But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land, those you allow to remain will become barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides. They will give you trouble in the land where you will live.”

We can’t and shouldn’t drive unbelievers out of our towns. But I have to recognize that those ideas they feed me are like cactus spines in my eyes and soul. 

For the Israelites, the struggle was against pagan religions with their offers of free sex and lots of spectacle. For me, it’s the idols of self and humanism.

Suggestions that marriage is an outdated institution, that my happiness is most important, that might makes right, that truth equals intolerance, all of those messages that bombard me every time I turn on the TV or radio or read a book or even a newspaper . . . they bleed me a little bit, each one of them, until my strength and zeal for God oozes away one little drop at a time.

I can’t and shouldn’t drive out unbelievers, but I can and should banish their bad messages from my mind, and my house, and my car radio, and anyplace where I get to decide. And if I don’t consciously do that, then I will slowly begin to accept. Because these are the things that those people I find more interesting than God tell me to accept if I want to be accepted by them.

In the end, it’s another choice of who to serve.