A few days ago, Plugged In published a story of mine (“To Worship the Web“) that asked the question, “Is the Internet God?” Now obviously, being a Christian site and all, I don’t imagine too many folks were biting their nails over how we’d answer. The Internet is a great tool … but it falls quite a bit short of deification. That said, it can become, for some, an idol.
Idols, as any pastor’ll tell you, aren’t typically built of wood or gold these days. They’re things that distract us or take our focus away from the real God—which means even some really good stuff can sneak under our saddles and cause us all sorts of trouble.
We, here at Plugged In, are kind of in the idol business: Not making ’em (at least we hope not), but examining them. And maybe if we do our jobs well, debunking them.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that entertainment is inherently evil. Some of what we see there can be quite good. But it is inherently distracting. That’s what much of it was made to do, quite frankly. For me, there’s nothing that helps rinse away a hard day’s work, toiling and slaving over movies and television shows and whatnot, as … er, watching another movie or television show. It sounds silly, but you know it’s true. Most of us sometimes escape our world of spreadsheets and doctor appointments and parent-teacher conferences by watching Dorothy skip down the yellow brick road or Indiana Jones run away from a careening boulder.
But just like when Dorothy strayed from the path in front of her and fell asleep in that big field of poppies, sometimes our media can lead us astray. Movies can influence the way we think. Television can coarsen our tongues. Music can plunge us into unhealthy emotional states. These would-be idols can speak to us in very real ways.
I think that’s one reason why the Christian church has, historically, struggled with what to do with stories and art and such—why some early Protestant strains banned the stuff altogether, and why even as modern-day Evangelicals try to embrace the art of storytelling, we’re sometimes kinda bad at it. We understand the power and influence that entertainment wields, and so we’re never entirely comfortable with it.
Back in the day, it was pretty easy to tell if you were engaging in a form of idolatry and straying from the true faith: Dancing around an Ashtoreth pole was a dead giveaway (sometimes literally). These days, it’s not so easy. We’re not often clear-sighted about the things that come between us and God.
So with that disclaimer in mind, I think most of us probably (hopefully) understand that it’s important how we deal with these potential entertainment idols of ours. The fact that you’re here, reading this longish blog post now when you really should be studying or cooking dinner or something, suggests that you’re a little like me: You value entertainment, but you’re well aware of the dangers of valuing it too much. Oh, I’m sure we all have our own potential idols lurking, threatening to leap out of the fire at any minute (I know I do). But I’m hopeful that, even if we don’t have all our entertainment issues under control, at least maybe we’re on the right track.
Hopefully we’ll continue to plow this road together for a long time to come—exploring the world of entertainment and culture with a bit of awe and loads of discernment, separating the wheat from the chaff and making sure that our media choices honor God without distracting us from Him.
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