Articles – Page 246 – Religion Online

Analyzing the Military-News Complex

Those who study television have identified three basic approaches to analyzing its cultural influence. Television can be analyzed for the meanings its transmits; for the way its programming is driven by economic considerations; and for the way it gratifies audience needs. Applying these three analyses to the TV images of the Gulf War offers some important insight into television's biases and its cultural power.

Television as signifier. Viewers have learned a complex visual code: a close-up means intimacy or emotion, a shot from below means authority, a fade-out means the end of an episode. We have been taught the "meaning" of certain characters and objects: doctors represent authority; jet planes mean wealth and power; popular actors and athletes are trustworthy. Commercials rely heavily on signification: soft drinks are associated with youth and beauty, automobiles with power, control and escape. Signification is the key to all effective selling.

What did the Gulf War sell? We were inundated with images of technology: powerful and exotic airplanes taking to the sky night after night: tanks speeding across the desert, stopping only to shoot at (and always hit) a distant target. In case we missed the point, narrators assured us the bombs were "smart" and the strikes "surgical." The signification was clear: technology not only bestows power and superiority but enables us to be humane, even in the conduct of war.

We also saw a great deal of interpretation as opposed to documentation. If Vietnam was the first TV war, the Gulf was the first anti-TV war. With the exception of a few exciting moments when a Scud missile was expected in Israel or Dhahran, correspondents were restricted to talking to us by radio or telephone while the camera focused on a map of the Middle East. Otherwise, various experts, mostly former military men, explained a particular weapon or tactic from a studio thousands of miles from the battlefield. Never was so much stock footage used to convey so little. When narrators described tank training, we saw familiar shots of tanks racing across the desert; if there was a report of new air sorties, we saw, for the dozenth time, the same old pictures of planes leaving their airfields; and when Patriot missiles were being discussed, we were treated to endlessly repeated footage of Patriots being uncrated (all cleared by the censors).

In sharp contrast to Vietnam, no cameras went with the soldiers into ground combat. We never saw for ourselves. The meaning? That this war was quite separate from our daily lives. For all the rhetoric, the war was not a truly serious event for most people--which may have been why some people tried so hard to sell the war to others, through yellow ribbons, bumper stickers, and even outdoor advertising.

We saw two other kinds of images, but they were far less visible and much less compelling. One was the image of warriors, the soldiers visited by TV in order to provide us "human interest." GIs, somewhat ill at ease, told how they were eager to "get the job done" and go home, while officers assured us that their troops were fully prepared for attack. These images signified that there were real people over there on our side, that is images of victims were even less in evidence. We saw family hardship back home in America, especially among newsworthy families (a father taking off from work to care for baby while mother was at war, or families encountering economic loss while the breadwinner was away). But the real victims--the more than 50,000 Iraqi soldiers who were fried and pulverized by hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs, or the 4 million civilians in Baghdad experiencing nightly bombing raids and days with no water, food, electricity or sanitation--were virtually invisible.

Television as economics. Almost 25 years ago the German media critic Hans Magnus Enzenberger pointed out that all media are manipulated in some way: "There is no such thing as unmanipulated writing, filming or broadcasting. The question is therefore not whether the media are manipulated, but who manipulates them."

Who controls TV? The web is complex, but three groups exercise most of the control: the owners who run it, the advertisers who pay for it, and the government which licenses it.

When we analyze television from an economic perspective, we ask one simple question: who benefits? Who benefits when each year the nightly news contains less and less information and more and more entertainment? Who benefits when the amount of documentaries on the networks decreases each year for 20 years? Who benefits when a single company can own television and radio stations, cable systems and local newspapers--and thus control much of the information in a community?

Who benefits when every candidate for Congress must pay thousands of dollars to the owners of TV stations in order to run for office?

The celebration of technology in the Gulf War took place on stations increasingly owned and operated by multinationals deeply involved in the production of armaments. General Electric, the tenth largest corporation in the U.S. and one of the largest weapons producers, owns the NBC network and its stations. Westinghouse, another major defense contractor, owns one of the largest broadcast groups.

Control is not limited to owners. Sponsors also greatly influence the way news is presented. Dupont, IBM, AT&T and ITT are all major sponsors on TV, and all have major stakes in the public support for high-tech armaments. Who. benefits from coverage which celebrates smart bombs and surgical strikes? In addition to this impressive control exercised by owners and sponsors, the military effectively shut off the press from the war. Malcolm W. Browne, a reporter for the New York Times, complained that for "most of the news people most of the time, the Gulf War has been played out in the Dhahran International Hotel." The press corps of more than a thousand had to rely on a pool system which allowed a handful of persons (picked by the U.S. Armed Forces Joint Information Bureau) to develop the "product" (as the JIB called all forms of news) which would then be used by all other reporters. "In effect,", said Browne, "each pool member is an unpaid employee of the Department of Defense, on whose behalf he or she prepares the news of the war for the outer world." As a result, "even in Khafji, this war seemed to smell more of greasepaint than of death."

Television as gratifier. Coverage of the war met a number of deep-rooted psychological needs: to feel powerful and in control, to experience extreme emotions in a guilt-free, nonthreatening environment, to share emotionally-charged experiences with others, to gain a sense of identity, to gain information, to satisfy a belief in justice, to see others make mistakes, to participate in the drama of history (vicariously and without risk) and to affirm moral values.

This aspect of television viewing is perhaps the hardest lesson to accept. It reminds us that television would have no power if it did not have viewers eager to consume its messages. While it is true that television seeks out our psychological needs and meets them in ways that serve particular people's desires for money, power and control, it is also true that every person who views uncritically is asking to be controlled.

What does this analysis tell us about television's messages about the war? That war can be relatively safe, sanitary (surgical), and not terribly costly either in personnel or materiel. That the key to conducting a safe war -- and indeed, to keeping us safe in general--is high technology. That our efforts are pure and in the interest of justice, of righting wrongs, of maintaining our way of life and standard of living. And that we are still Number One, a superpower among lesser powers, and consequently have the moral responsibility to police other nations in the interest of peace and justice.

It was no accident that the military changed the word "giddy" to "proud" in a reporter's description of a U.S. pilot after a bombing run. It was no accident that in July when Saddam Hussein threatened to use fuel air bombs the press characterized it as another example of his desperation and barbarism, but in February when the U.S. began using the same weapons against Iraqis in their trenches the bombs had become just another "tool" in the U.S. "tool box." It was no accident that TV never told us that "smart bombs" constituted less than 10 percent of those dropped in Iraq, or that it never showed us the "smart bombs" that missed a target or hit a civilian target. It was no accident that our planes constantly "killed" tanks -- not men. It was no accident that though our president assured us repeatedly that "we have respect for the people of Iraq," we never really saw them or what we did to them. It was no accident that from the day U.S. troops were deployed to the Gulf until January 3, 1991, TV provided 2,855 minutes of coverage on the Gulf crisis but only 29 minutes (about 1 percent) on opposition to the military buildup (according to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting).

The biases and distortion of television are not simply a conspiracy on the part of a few media moguls; the responsibility is far too diverse and complex for that. But the system itself, which both reflects and amplifies our culture, makes them inevitable.

The Unknown History of Televangelism

A great deal is being written these days about the increasing role of religion in American life, and in particular, its political life. A recent book by best selling author Kevin Phillips, entitled American Theocracy (Penguin Books, Viking Group, 2006) details the central role religion now plays in America. Many writers -- sociologists, historians, cultural analysists -- have described the phenomenon and tried to explain its origins and power. They point to the sect-driven dynamic of American religion, the populist innovations in worship developed by laypersons, the large number of denominations, the pervasive influence of the Bible and its literal interpretation. But with few exceptions, almost none of them has dealt with one of the most important factors in the equation -- the use of the mass media by televangelists.

In this article I will give a brief summary of the history of televangelism in the United States, how it began, then grew, and finally dominated the media. Then I will suggest some implications of this history, and indicate why the subject deserves a good deal more careful analysis than it has received thus far. Along the way I will describe some events that are virtually unknown about the televangelists gained power over the Federal Communication Commission -- a power that has provided a unique opportunity for fundamentalist religion to effect cultural change during the past forty years.

I. A Brief History of Religious Broadcasting

In 1934 the U.S. Congress passed the Communications Act which authorized the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) to grant broadcast licenses. The Congress asserted that the electromagnetic spectrum is a national resource that cannot be owned by any one person or corporation, but that it can only be licensed for a specific period of time. The license, in effect, is a monopoly to use a scarce commodity. In exchange for this monopoly, the station is obligated to broadcast "in the public interest." From the beginning, religious broadcasting was considered one of the ways of fulfilling a station's "public interest" obligation.

But which religious speakers should broadcasters put on the air? Literally hundreds of ministers and evangelists asked for time. At first the radio networks sold time to religious speakers, but some of the more outspoken clergy were much too narrow and controversial for their liking. Perhaps the worst example was Father Charles Coughlin who broadcast on radio in the early 1930s, regularly preaching hatred of Jews and blacks. Very soon the radio networks decided not to sell time but to give time to the largest representative bodies which would speak on behalf of all religions. These groups were the national Council of Catholic Bishops, the Federal Council of Churches (Protestant), and a coalition of three national Jewish organizations.

This system worked reasonably well throughout the late 1930s and 1940s. When television came in about 1950, each of these "faith groups" was given time each Sunday for their TV programs -- programs which were broadly representative of the religious and cultural diversity of the country as a whole. The FCC gave "public interest credit" to the networks and their stations for providing free time. In fact, the networks themselves actually paid for the program production. However, the evangelical and fundamentalist groups were more or less excluded from this agreement, although the Southern Baptists, Mormons and others were given a modest amount of air time, and some televangelists were able to buy time, mostly on radio and non-network TV stations.

In 1960 all this changed. Under growing pressure from conservative groups, the FCC ruled that local stations could sell airtime for religious programs and still get "public interest" credit. Suddenly evangelical groups lined up to buy commercial time on radio and TV, and local stations that had previously agreed with the network policy not to sell airtime for religious broadcasting, began to cash in on the new demand and to sell time to the highest bidder.

The new FCC policy was devastating to programs that had been carried free for the major (main line) groups. Just before the FCC ruling took effect, only 53 percent of all religious broadcasting was paid-time. But by 1977, paid-time religious broadcasting had risen to 92 percent. Thus, since the mid-1970s, religious broadcasting has been firmly in the hands of the televangelists.

Deregulation

However, the changes in religious broadcasting were only the beginning of a more fundamental change in broadcasting itself. When Ronald Reagan became President in 1980, he brought about an almost complete deregulation of radio and TV. He did this by weakening the FCC to the point where it had very little real control. He cut the number of FCC Commissioners from seven to five. He drastically reduced its budget. And he installed a Chairman who publicly proclaimed that "television is no different from a toaster." That is, in his view the TV set was just another appliance. The cultural impact of broadcasting was irrelevant. The marketplace, not public policy, determined who controls TV and radio.

The result was the rapid buying up of stations by large networks, which made possible the centralization of power in the hands of only a few multinational corporations who now own every part of the broadcasting system -- radio, TV, cable, and satellite. Programming -- including sports, news, investigative reporting, even the weather -- rapidly became commercialized. Profits ruled over the public interest.

Businesses profited greatly from this change -- and so did the Electronic Church. Televangelists used money sent by listeners and viewers (much of it pledged for mission work overseas) to buy up hundreds of radio and TV station licenses, and to create satellite-fed networks. Some of the largest televangelist organizations became multi-million dollar giants. Aggressive and legal fund-raising on the air made possible the creation of huge distribution systems for the televangelists -- all with the bonus of being tax free as religious organizations..

Political Power of the Electronic Church

In addition, since 1960 the religious broadcasters have steadily increased their political power in America. Consider the famous "Madelyn Murray O'Hare Affair." In the 1960s and 70s, Madelyn Murray O'Hare was a famous American atheist. Among other things, she attacked the electronic church through marches and protests. But in 1975 an anonymous letter began to circulate, charging that Mrs. O'Hare was trying to get the FCC to remove all Christian programs from radio and television. To quote from the letter: "(Her) petition, Number 2493, would ultimately pave the way to stop the reading of the gospel (of) our Lord and Savior, on the airwaves of America. They got 287,000 signatures to back their stand! Please stand up for your religious freedom and let your voice be heard."

The only problem with this letter, which was passed on to thousands of conservative Christians in church meetings, newsletters, and through private mailings, is that none of it was true. Mrs. O'Hare had not filed a petition with the FCC. There were no 287,000 signatures. The whole thing was false. It was soon revealed to be untrue in the press and on the air. The FCC issued a public statement saying the petition never existed and that it had no intention of forbidding Bible reading on the air. But this did not deter the religious faithful. They began to send letters and postcards to the FCC by the thousands, and finally by the millions -- for months and months -- and then for years and years! The Commission received so much protest mail (more than 30 million!) that they had to stop opening them, and merely piled stacks of mail bags in their closets.

And from this experience the FCC got the message, loud and clear -- don't challenge the Electronic Church. Ever since that time, the Commission has refused to exert any significant regulation over so-called religious stations. Today there are some 1,600 "Christian" radio stations on the air, and 250 "Christian" TV stations. They blanket the nation. Their licenses require them to broadcast "in the public convenience, interest and necessity," and the courts have ruled that this means a broadcaster must provide diverse programming that meets the needs of its entire listening-viewing audience. But these 1,600 radio stations do not do that. Instead, they broadcast, hour after hour, the brand of religion that suits them, and nothing more. The FCC should have long ago denied them their licenses to broadcast, but they will not. They cannot, because the religious right has become so strong in the Congress and the Administration that it would be political suicide for any politician to challenge these stations.

If you turn on one of these stations, you will hear an amazing gospel. The outline of the message is rather simple -- and bizarre. For most of them it goes something like this: The Old Testament is literally true, and it promises the Jews that they are the People of God. Once Israel has occupied all of the "biblical lands," legions of the anti-Christ will attack it, triggering a battle in the valley of Armageddon, at which time the Messiah will return for the "rapture." During the "rapture," true believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven, where, seated on the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts, and frogs during the seven years of "tribulation" that will follow. Then there is increasing struggle and the final battle on the plains of Armageddon. Christ is victorious, and those who are saved look forward to a glorious reign of a thousand years -- a new Heaven and a new Earth. (Incidentally, this is one of the main reasons for America's support of Israel, since Israel's control of the "biblical lands" is a first step toward the "Rapture" and the end of the world which is so much desired by these Christians!)

If you find it difficult to accept that many ordinary people would really believe this sort of thing, consider that in a 2004 Gallup Poll, 55 per cent of Americans said they believe the Bible is literally true, including the story of Noah's Arc and God's creation of the earth in six days. Even more disturbing, 71 per cent of evangelical Christians said they believe the world will end in an Armegaddon battle between Jesus Christ and the Antichrist. Thus, millions of people in America hold this amazing (and very disturbing) view But of course, millions do not. The result is that America is a nation deeply divided between people who are concerned about real-life issues – war and peace, social justice, the health and welfare of people – on one hand, and other people who are concerned, instead, about "values," by which they mean adherence to ancient taboos, dependence on a magical God, enforcing acceptance of ancient creeds, requiring everyone to believe as they do, and finding safety in raw (though often hidden) social and economic power.

Implications

What are the implications of such a message, broadcast everywhere in America, everyday of the year, on radio and television? First, consider the theological implications. In the last half-century a whole new understanding of the Bible has emerged from Biblical scholars. The result in Europe has been a mass exodus from the traditional churches which cling to the orthodox views, while in America there has arisen a much stronger fundamentalism. Why has there been such different religious development on the two sides of the Atlantic? A major difference is that in America there were scores of television evangelists and hundreds of radio preachers on the air, day and night, preaching a bogus religion whose story is a wild tale of the end of the world, and whose values closely resemble the values and worldview of secular America -- the values of winning, of wealth, of power, and of being Number One. On the other side of the Atlantic, European audiences were never subjected to this kind of message.

Second, consider the political implications. Today there is a significant group within the fundamentalist community who want to bring about a complete change in the American form of government. Pat Robertson is a key leader in the group called Dominionists, or sometimes Reconstructionists. Robertson and his followers consistently and openly argue that America must become a theocracy under the control of Christian fundamentalists. He is on record saying that democracy is a terrible form of government, unless it is run by his kind of Christians.

Dr. Gary North, a major figure among the Dominionists, clarifies their goal and tactics: "We must use the doctrine of religious liberty ... until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God." To give you an idea of what the new Bible-based order would be like, Dr. North advocates public execution of women who undergo abortions, and a similar fate for those who advise them to do so.

This situation could easily be dismissed as the ravings of a few neurotic sociopaths, except for the chilling fact that our President and many of his advisors talk in much the same way. While Mr. Bush does not agree wholly with the Dominionists, he is supported by many of them, and they have much in common. In Mr. Bush's world, there exist only two groups -- the enemies of freedom and the lovers of freedom -- the evil and the good. Thus to waver, to change policy, would be to tempt God's disfavor. Indeed, the very act of holding to his resolve -- what his critics identify as his stubbornness and arrogance -- becomes a way of reassuring himself of his special place in God's plan.

Summary

What we have in the American Electronic Church today is a phenomenon that has gained immense power, almost entirely through the use of radio and television. The televangelists have used this power to join forces with the political right in order to bring about a nation more in conformity with what its adherents believe to be the will of God, or at least the demands of Christianity. This power came about because the FCC, which is charged with making certain the airwaves are used to meet the needs of the entire community and that all issues of importance to citizens are thoroughly aired, has failed in its task. The FCC has allowed licenses to go to religious groups who have no intention of ever broadcasting in ways that speaks to the diversity within their community, but only to use their monopoly as a tool to further their own narrow ideology. And if they are able to continue to gain power, some day they may even attempt to deny religious liberty to all the "enemies of God." This is what the current "culture clash" in America is all about.

O course, this situation was not created in a political and social vacuum. Many other forces were at work, including the powerful commercial broadcasters who wanted to be free from regulation at least as much as the religious broadcasters. But without the development of large and powerful conservative religious broadcasting, with its strong political component, much of what has occurred in the past six years in the United Sates simply would not have happened. Mr. Bush would not have been elected President. The nation would not have been plunged into a war that is understood by many to be a religious war and not acknowledged to be about oil. And millions of Americans would not have been misinformed and misled into accepting a war based upon both false information and a superficial misunderstanding of the Bible and its teachings.

Television is not a toaster. It is the world's most important source of news and information, and its most powerful propaganda agent. Unless it is regulated by governments so as to insure that all people have access to all sides of issues, democracy as we know it becomes impossible.

A New World Order in Communication

In October 1980, the 21st General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), meeting in Belgrade, received a report and issued a declaration on communication that has caused a furor in the Western press.

The New York Times featured an editorial titled “UNESCO as Censor.” Time magazine issued a full-page editorial statement on “The Global First Amendment War.” Hundreds of newspapers carried stories similar to Editor and Publisher’s “Press Groups Denounce UNESCO Plan on Media.” During the past year and a half there has flowed a small but steady stream of reports full of anger, fear and righteous indignation. For, in these actions the press sees mortal threats to its freedom -- while many Third World leaders see a chance for simple justice.

At stake is a fundamental ingredient that makes democracy possible: the flow of information -- without which people cannot possibly govern themselves. But also at stake are power and profits on a grand scale. The rich mixture of principle and self-interest in this debate amply demonstrates the complexity of moral decision-making that the new communications technology is forcing upon us.

UNESCO’s new look at worldwide communications has its roots in the formation of the Third World concept itself. In 1956 the leaders of most of the former colonies met in Bandung and organized a “nonaligned” movement. They understood their group as a third force to act as a buffer between proponents of capitalism (First World) and those of communism (Second World). This Third World group pressed immediately for a new economic independence from both First and Second Worlds. The United Nations was their forum.

In May 1974 the UN General Assembly adopted a Declaration of the Establishment of a New International Information Order. At the same time, Third World leaders began pressing for similar action in the areas of news and information. Mustapha Masmoudi, Tunisian secretary of state for in-formation, issued a call for the development of a New International Information Order (NIIO), asserting that the Western concept of a “free flow” of information, like freedom of the seas, free markets and free trade, in fact conceals the real nature of neoimperial control.

In 1976 UNESCO’s Director General Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow was authorized to appoint an International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems. The commission, under the leadership of Sean MacBride (former foreign minister of Ireland and recipient of both the Nobel and Lenin Peace Prizes), completed its work in time for the General Conference in Belgrade, October 1980. The report, Many Voices, One World (Unipub, 1980), supported the principles of free reporting of news, but it also encouraged state regulation of the media and suggested that UNESCO give priority to “the elaboration of international norms” in its communication program.

The Belgrade Assembly merely referred the MacBride Commission report to its member governments, without endorsing any of its conclusions. However, the assembly went on to produce its own shocks to the West. The Group of 77, a bloc of more than 100 developing countries, had come with a detailed description of a “New World Information Order.” After strenuous negotiations, the sections that were most offensive to the West were removed. These included “the right of peoples . . . to comprehensive and true information,” “the right of each nation” to inform the world about its affairs, and “the right of each nation to protect its cultural and social identity against the false or distorted information which may cause harm.”

In the end, however, all of the participating nations for the first time accepted a document saying that it is possible to define a new information order. Only the United Kingdom stated that it would have opposed the resolution had it come to a vote (instead, it was adopted by consensus). The U.K. objected to the very idea of defining the new order; its position got no votes from other Western nations.

Belgrade affirmed that UNESCO should lay “a major role in the examination and solution of problems in this domain.” The assembly also agreed on a number of guidelines for the new information order:

1. elimination of the imbalances and inequalities which characterize the present solution;

2. elimination of the negative effects of certain monopolies, public or private, and excessive concentrations;

3. removal of the internal and external obstacles to a free flow and wider and better balanced dissemination of information and ideas;

4. plurality of sources and channels of information;

5. freedom of the press and information;

6. the freedom of journalists . . . a freedom inseparable from responsibility;

7. the capacity of developing countries to achieve improvement of their own situations, notably by providing their own equipment, by training their personnel, by improving their infrastructures and by making their information and communication means suitable to their needs and aspirations;

8. the sincere will of developed countries to help them attain these objectives;

9. respect for each people’s cultural identity and the right of each nation to inform the world public about its interests, its aspirations and its social and cultural values.

The U.S. delegation response was ambivalent. According to “The U.S. View on Belgrade,” a report of the State Department prepared under the supervision of Sarah G. Power, “The resolution on the MacBride Report is largely what we had sought. . . . It calls for widespread dissemination of the Report, for study and reflection, but little concrete action as far as implementation is concerned.” The U.S. also realized a major objective, the establishment of an International Program for Development of Communication (IPDC), a UNESCO-based information clearinghouse aimed at assisting the Third World in the development of communication.

But the U.S. delegation said that the 1981-83 UNESCO communication program and budget ranged “from unhelpful to totally unacceptable.” Some of the programs most objectionable to the U.S. were “studies and conferences on protection of journalists, journalistic standards, freedom and responsibility in communication, international right of reply and rectification, advertising content and management of media.”

And while the State Department reacted with caution, the U.S. press reacted with rage, panic and considerable bias. Joseph A. Mehan of UNESCO charges that “with amazing uniformity, U S. newspapers have accused UNESCO of encouraging censorship, state control of the press, licensing of journalists by the state, and, in general, of being the archenemy of freedom of the press.”

A. H. Raskin, former assistant editor of the editorial page of the New York Times and currently associate director of the National News Council in New York, conducted a study of some 448 news clippings and 206 editorials dealing with Belgrade, from newspapers in all parts of the United States. He discovered that by far the most news stories, 39 per cent, dealt with the debate over communications policy, and that 88 per cent of the editorials were on this topic. Of these editorials, 87 per cent were strongly hostile -- so much so that 27 newspapers suggested U.S. withdrawal from UNESCO if it persisted in moves seen as threatening press freedom.

Comments Raskin: “Not one story emanating from the six-week conference dealt with any of the reports, speeches, or resolutions on UNESCO’s basic activities in combating illiteracy, developing alternate energy sources, protecting historic monuments, broadening educational programs for scientists and engineers, or sponsoring basic research in food production, ocean sciences and scores of other fields.” One might well ask whether the press’s shoddy treatment of the Belgrade conference exemplifies the very problemsthat prompted the New Information Order debate.

And the heat is still on. In May 1981, some 100 representatives of print and broadcast organizations from the U.S. and 20 other nations met in the French Alps, where they adopted the “Declaration of Talloires,” calling on UNESCO to “abandon attempts to regulate news content and formulate rules for the press.” In June, Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, charged that UNESCO had “lent itself to a massive assault on the free flow of information” and challenged General Secretary M’Bow that if he did not remain “neutral” and avoid confrontation on the issue, he faced a battle with the U.S. “This is a war UNESCO cannot win,” Abrams declared.

What are the issues involved that would cause such a strong reaction from the communication industry? They are freedom, justice and money -- as viewed from the different perspectives of the First and Third Worlds.

First Amendment guarantees of free press and speech are among the most cherished U.S. rights, and for good reason. One has only to live a few months in a country whose press is dominated by government edict to recognize how stultifying it can be and how indispensable the Western tradition of press freedom is to individual well-being and to the democratic political process.

In recent years, however, there has arisen a kind of mystical attraction to the principle of free speech, an awe and obeisance which society reserves for its objects of worship. It is as though free speech were a kind of first principle -- self-evident, self-validating, deserving unquestioning loyalty. But surely it is dangerous to deify any ethical principle, even one so important as the idea that an individual has a right to be heard.

There are at least three reasons why it is dangerous to absolutize the idea of free speech. One is that free speech is in reality instrumental to a higher political good. Even James Madison insisted that the right of people to speak and to listen is not an end in itself, but a means of achieving “popular government”; that is, a democratic process in which people have the opportunity to take part in the decisions which affect their lives. In some cases, the absolute right to speak could actually subvert that process, as illustrated by the “right” to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, or the “right” of advertisers to misinform the public. We have laws that proscribe these “rights.”

Second, the right of free speech should not be absolutized because it thus becomes sell-contradictory. Constitutional lawyer Ronald Dworkin recently pointed out in the New York Review of Books (“Is the Press Losing the First ‘Amendment?,” December 4, 1980) that

every extension of the First Amendment is, from the standpoint of democracy, a double-edged sword. It enhances democracy because public information increases the general power of the public. But it also contracts democracy because any constitutional right disables the popularly elected legislature from enacting some legislation it might otherwise wish to enact, and this decreases the general power of the public.

Dworkin argues that the support of free speech as a requirement for democracy demands, by its own logic, “some threshold line to be drawn between interpretations of the First Amendment that would protect and those that would invade democracy.”

This, he believes, is what the Supreme Court does when it describes, in general terms, “what manner of invasion of the powers of the press would so constrict the flow of information to the public as to leave the public unable intelligently to decide whether to overturn (any particular) limitation of the press by further legislation.”

And finally, free speech ought not be absolutized because the First Amendment basically protects not the right of the press to speak, but the right of every citizen to listen. The courts have made this distinction clear. For example, Warren E. Burger, in his opinion in the landmark Red Lion case, stated that “it is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount?’

Thus it can be argued that if a “free” press were to become so economically or politically powerful that it could actually withhold news and information to such an extent that citizens no longer could participate as equals in the process of governing themselves, then we should expect government, through the courts or the legislature, to take steps to create new sources of news and information and to curb the monopoly power of that “free” press. Clearly, even journalists and political liberals must be careful not to invoke free speech as a sacrosanct and inviolable principle in the creation of an international information order.

This issue has been analyzed by Howard C. Anawalt, a constitutional law professor, at the University of Santa Clara, in an article titled “Is the Macbride Commission’s Approach Compatible with the United States Constitution?” (Journal of Communication, Autumn 1981). He concludes that it is.

The Commission approach offers both a physical foundation and a set of protective principles for development of a worldwide communication freedom. It passes the basic test of compatibility with United States constitutional norms. Informed United States criticism should therefore take the tack of seeking to improve the proposed new order, rather than rejecting it altogether.

A second issue has to do with justice for Third World nations: how is it possible to get genuine communication flowing where there is very little of it to start with? If there is no press in a nation, who is responsible to create one? This is the dilemma facing Third World countries, many of which have no indigenous press of their own, but only a remnant of colonial sources -- perhaps a small news and information outlet for the urban elite, and shortwave broadcasts beamed in from the superpowers.

Frank Campbell, information minister of Guyana, has responded to Western charges that the new information order would give UNESCO jurisdiction over news media:

The issue is not UNESCO controlling the media. The question is [how] to have a basis of communication other than a purely commercial one and communication ethics based on something other than ethnocentricity and historical arrogance. We are not saying UNESCO should issue a license saying you must have so many stories coming out of Guyana, Tanzania or India, and what these stories must say.

American First Amendment advocates must face the fact that imposition of our highly industrialized model of big press as a check against the excesses of big government has limited relevance to many places in the Third World where there is little literacy and practically no economic market for news.

The insistence on absolute freedom or a “free flow” of information is seen by the developing nations as the freedom of the fox in the chicken coop. Campbell speaks eloquently for the Third World:

By a free press, in the West, you mean a press owned by a few people who have a commercial monopoly, really a monopoly of the conscience of mankind. They are “the good people” and they “know what is right.” A free press means, for you, that the owner of the press is free to prevent whom he wants from being heard. You don’t have a free press at all. You have a press imprisoned by commercial interests.

Our own late A. J. Liebling also said it: “Freedom of the press is reserved for those who own one.”

It is difficult for people in the U.S. to understand that government can have a legitimate role in communication. In Europe, however, almost every nation has a long tradition of government-related news and information agencies, some of which are, highly respected. The BBC is established by Parliament and depends on its levy of a set tax. Severiges Radio in Sweden has a similar government tie. Broadcasting in Germany is the creature of the individual Länder (states). And Japan has a mix of commercial and noncommercial broadcasting: NHK, one of the most respected news organizations in the world, was created and is sustained by government edict.

Of course, governmental dominance of news and information too often has been the handmaiden of dictatorships, oligopolies and generally repressive regimes. There is a great deal of hypocrisy among many leaders of the Third World and the U.S.S.R. in calling for a free and balanced flow of information at a time when there is a nonexistent flow of news and information between the power elite and the masses in their own nations. Certainly UNESCO must be as critical of political constraints as it is of economic and cultural constraints on news flow, and the MacBride Report makes these dangers abundantly clear. But to insist on rigidly applying our own historically derived concept of press freedom to the Third World, and to reject out of hand any possible role of government in ensuring the free flow of news and information, is in fact unfaithful to the principle of democracy underlying our own First Amendment.

Third, profit is a major issue in the debate. The role of commercial enterprise in news and information is being seriously questioned.

Many Third World leaders have a strong bias against free enterprise as the basis for maintaining the communication process that undergirds their national destiny. This anticommercialism causes the U.S. media to see red: they are certain that behind the bias lurks the long arm of Soviet control or, at the very least, a tilt toward communism. And it is true that for many years the U.S.S.R. has been using the communication issue to alienate the Third World from the First.

The nonaligned nations have seen what commercial media have done to the flow of news and information both within the United States and, to some degree, in their own nations. In the U.S. the broadcast and print media have increasingly turned viewers and readers into a product to be delivered to the real audience -- the sponsors. As a result, the mass media’s primary objective has changed: its goal no longer is to inform or enlighten or even to entertain, but rather to reach and hold the largest possible audience, regardless of the damage done to other journalistic objectives.

In America the use of the sensational, the shocking, the titillating, the celebrity cult and the stereotype have become routine because news has become merely one more audience attention-getter rather than a function justifiable on its own merits. And since attention-getting is paramount, there is little information about marginal people -- the poor, the elderly, the Third World.

All of this comes naturally to a system which deals with news and information as a means to a commercial end. But this is also the reason that Third World nations have pressed hard for a document stating a preference for “noncommercial forms of mass communication.” And although the Belgrade statement makes no mention of anticommercialism, the MacBride Report proposes in recommendation number 58 that “effective legal measures should be designed to: limit the process of concentration and monopolization; [and] . . . reduce the influence of advertising upon editorial policy and broadcast programming.” The strong reaction of the U.S. delegation to such proposals makes it abundantly clear what the real priorities of our government are -- with regard to scope, balance, depth and fairness in news and information on the one hand and profits for business on the other.

In dealing with a subject so complex, and played for such large stakes, what guiding principles might help us move toward just and equitable worldwide communication?

First, the basic objective of public communication should be to enable people to participate fully in their own development and that of their nation. A structure or process which hinders that objective -- whether it be political, economic, ideological or social -- should be reformed or rejected. Every individual has the right to know; that is, every just society must create and maintain those conditions in which each citizen is able to take part in politics intelligently and as the equal of any other. People must have the technical means both to speak and to listen if they are to participate in the process of governing themselves.

Second, government has a role in maintaining the rights of citizenship. The question of private versus state ownership and control must be secondary to the creation and maintenance of communication structures that facilitate genuine democratization. All forms of authoritarianism should be rejected, including domination of the media by economic power groups and elites.

Third, the Third World nations should be allowed to develop their own collective self-reliance in news, information and entertainment, progressing at a rate and in a manner appropriate to their needs rather than in conformity to the marketplace needs of the industrialized nations.

In achieving these objectives we ought consciously to reject the temptation to take communication models of the developed nations and try to make them “fit” the Third World. Rather, whole new forms of communication, appropriate for developing nations, need to be devised. We must ask: What are the existing communication processes in the nation, and how can they be improved and developed? Simple, inexpensive media, such as radio, local telephones and newspapers, may suit the needs of a developing nation far better than television, satellites and big-city newspapers. The objective should be maximum participation and maximum sources and diversity of information, not maximum profits for large communication conglomerates or maximum political control for a tiny power elite.

Just as there must come a new world economic order, there must come a new world communication order. Its goal must be to enable people everywhere to guide their own future. It will take time, but it must come. We are living in a world in which, each moment, we become increasingly interdependent, and in which exploitation becomes increasingly self-destructive.

Today there is no place we can run from the consequences of our actions. If this new communication order is truly coming, then we in the United States should be in the forefront, making it happen. And even if it is not imminent, we should work toward making the goal a reality.

Religion and Television: Report on the Research

For almost a decade the debate has been inconclusive: Does the electronic church lure members away from the local church or does it encourage them to attend more regularly? Does it take money away from local churches, or does it further overall giving? Is it an evangelistic tool or does it merely reach the already committed?

Mainline church leaders, and many evangelical leaders as well, have tended to he critical of the electronic church, while its supporters have been almost euphoric about its value. But because neither side has been able to buttress its arguments with solid facts, the controversy has been clouded by charges and countercharges made all the more strident by the lack of real information.

In July 1980 the National Council of Churches’ Communication Commission, and the National Religious Broadcasters jointly issued an invitation to the groups on both sides of the debate to join a major research project to get at the facts. The result was the Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Television Research -- one of the most broadly based religious coalitions currently in American life. Eventually some 39 groups participated in funding the $175,000 project -- ranging from the Old Time Gospel Hour (Jerry Farwell) and the Christian Broadcasting Network (Pat Robertson), to the U.S. Catholic Conference, the Episcopal Church and the United Church of Christ, with representation from virtually every part of the religious spectrum in between. The controlling idea was that since both sides wanted solid information, they could at least agree on what questions should be asked, and then jointly hire the best researchers to find the answers.

The coalition wisely diversified its political base. It chose the Catholic representative as its chairperson. It lodged coordination with the National Council of Churches, and it banked its money with the National Religious Broadcasters.

After receiving more than a dozen proposals from major research organizations across the country, the group settled on the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania to he the primary contractor, conducting Phase One (the content analysis) and Phase Three (the regional survey). It asked the Gallup Organization of Princeton, New Jersey to conduct Phase Two (the national survey). After two years of planning and fund -- raising, and two more of field research and analysis, the results were announced on April 16, 1984, at a meeting of the participants and the press at the Graduate Center of City University, in New York City.

It had bee n hoped that the study could compare and contrast the electronic church, the mainline denominations’ offerings and local-church programs. Unfortunately, the sheer number of electronic church broadcasts overwhelmed the other two categories in the sample: out of 101 program titles recorded for the content analysis, only eight were local-church programs and seven were mainline nationally syndicated or network programs. Because the study combined the data on these local and national mainline offerings, in is impossible to get specific information about the national network programs. Thus, except where specifically noted, when the study talks about “religious television” it is essentially referring to the electronic church, rather than to all religious broadcasting.

Most research tends to confirm conventional wisdom, and that on “Religion and Television” is no exception. But the results did settle a few issues and raise some interesting questions. The following are the highlights of the findings of the 140-page report and its inch-thick appendices.

1. The viewing audience for religious programs is far smaller than has been claimed. In a fit of hyperbole in 1980 Jerry Falwell claimed an audience of 25 million for his program alone. A Gallup survey conducted in 1982 found that 43 per cent of the total population said that they had watched religious programming in the past 30 days. Another in 1981 showed that 32 per cent said that they had watched during the past week. This would be some 71 million viewers.

But what people claim to do and what they actually do are very different. To get around this problem, the Annenberg researchers went to the Arbitron archives of television viewer’s diaries, and thus were able to identify “confirmed viewing” as recorded by hour, day and channel. This information told a far different story. According to the diary data, there is an aggregated duplicated national religious television audience of 24.7 million. Taking into account viewing duplication and correcting for the fact that the diaries may underreport by as much as 15 per cent, the study says that the number of people who have watched at least one-quarter hour of religious television per week is about 13.3 million, or 6.2 per cent of the national television audience.

Unfortunately, the study bases this key finding on a questionable assumption. What Arbitron really provides is only the number of households viewing, which then must be multiplied by the number of people per household who are assumed to be watching. Annenberg assumed 2.4 persons -- the national average number of people per household. But almost all religious programming is scheduled during fringe or even deep-fringe time, when a figure of 1.4 is more likely. And the households of religious television viewers are often made up of older or single persons. Therefore, even when religious programs are on semiprime time, the number of viewers per set is probably no more than about 1.8 -- the viewers-per-household figure widely used by the rating firms themselves. If the 1.4 and 1.8 figures are used, the number of people watching a quarter of an hour or more per week is 7.2 and 9.2 million, respectively. When the Annenberg researchers were asked about this at the press conference, they agreed that the 13.3-million figure was “most certainly a high estimate.”

Furthermore, this is the number of people watching one-quarter hour per week -- not very much when the average viewer spends more than 30 hours per week watching TV. If we look at the number who tune in one hour of religious programming per week -- a more realistic definition of the “regular” viewer -- the figures are considerably smaller. Using the 1.8 person-per-viewing household figure (which may be high), there are about 4.84 million persons, or approximately 2.17 per cent of the total population, who watch an hour or more of religious television per week.

Interestingly, the study shows that the development of cable TV has not had a major effect on total religious television viewing. The national survey found that cable penetration is nearly identical in households that view religious television and those that do not. In other words, there is no more viewing of religious programs in areas that have cable than in areas that do not.

2. The electronic church is not effective at evangelism, but it is an effective reinforcer of the existing religious beliefs of viewers. “The audience for religious programs on television is not an essentially new, or young, or varied audience. Viewers of religious programs are by and large also the believers, the churchgoers, the contributors. Their viewing appears to be an expression, a confirmation of a set of religious beliefs and not a substitute for them” (pp. 2-3).

Viewers of the electronic church are somewhat older, lower in education and income, more conservative, more “fundamentalist” and more likely to live in rural areas of the South and Midwest than are nonviewers. Of these, 48 per cent attend church once a week; 75 per cent attend once a month. Confirmed frequent viewers are largely Southern Baptists (19 per cent) and other Baptists (21 per cent), followed by charismatic Christians (10.5 per cent), Catholics (10 per cent), Methodists (7.1 per cent). Mainline Presbyterians, Lutherans, Disciples, United Church of Christ members and Episcopalians each make up less than 2 per cent of the viewing audience.

Heavy viewers are much more likely than nonviewers to read the Bible, pray frequently, take the Bible literally, believe “that Jesus Christ will return to earth someday,” report having been “born again,” believe in miracles and favor “speaking in tongues.” They thus scored high on the “literalist/charismatic” scale.

When this rather homogeneous group of viewers was asked whether watching religious television had changed their involvement in the local church, 7 per cent said that it had increased their involvement, and 3 per cent said that it had decreased theirs. But one in six (18 per cent) said that religious TV contributes more than the church does to his or her spiritual life, and one in three (34 per cent) felt that it contributes more than church to his or her information about moral and social issues.

As to community involvement, the percentage of persons who had done local church volunteer work during the past year was only slightly higher among viewers than among nonviewers, while both groups had donated time equally to helping people in their communities during the year or to doing volunteer work.

On the other hand, 14 per cent claimed that their viewing of religious programs was a “substitute for going to church,” and about 20 per cent said that they watched religious programs on Sundays during church hours. Undoubtedly, this includes a number of the ill, the elderly and those who could not readily get to church.

The Gallup report summarizes the situation:

When the level of religiosity and other factors are held constant, religious television viewing does not seem to be associated with lower levels of church attendance, volunteer work, or church contribution in the sample as a whole. Within small subgroups of the population, however, religious viewing does seem to be associated with lower religious involvement. . . . These subgroups include persons requiring assistance in going places, persons past the age of fifty, divorced persons, those with low levels of education, and those who have become dissatisfied with their local church.

Thus, while the electronic church may not be the cause of decreases in mainline church attendance, it does provide an attractive alternative for a relatively small group of people who find watching television an acceptable substitute for attending church.

Financial support is a major part of the reinforcing process. The most prominent electronic church ministries were the most likely to request money, and their requests were numerous -- four out of ten programs included three or more requests during the course of each telecast. Their average minimum request was $31; their average maximum was about $600. (No mainline church program in the survey asked for a specific amount of money.)

The correlation between making contributions to a local church and to the electronic church was fairly strong and positive: “People who contribute to one contribute to the other.” But only 6 per cent of all viewers of religious programs were regular contributors, though 13 per cent contributed “once in a while” and 5 per cent gave to “special appeals only.” Of the regular contributors, 40 per cent gave to three or more programs. Regular contributors averaged $35.17 per contribution. The national survey indicated that the mean contribution was $95.24 per year.

When the national survey asked viewers about their contact with these programs, one-third said that they had been contacted by mail during the past year, 20 per cent said that they had received five or more letters, and 11 per cent said that they had written to or called the programs they watch. On the other hand, only 3 per cent said that they had received a telephone call from any of the programs. When viewers were asked with whom they often discuss the programs, the replies were family (23 per cent), friends (13 per cent) and others at church (6 per cent). Only 5 per cent mentioned their pastors.

Finally, the study showed that people watch broadcasts affirming what they already believe. The national survey used an index of evangelical belief (as opposed to membership in an evangelical denomination), which showed that holding these beliefs was more strongly associated with the viewing of religious programs than any other single factor, including contributing to or attending church, participation in community activities, income, age or sex. The regional survey’s similar “literalist/charismatic’’ scale also showed a strong correlation between holding such beliefs and viewing religious programs. Belief was the most important single factor in determining whether a person watched religious television.

In sum, electronic church broadcasters rarely speak to audiences outside their natural constituency, people already highly “religious” in terms of literalistic and charismatic beliefs. Electronic church programs “serve primarily to express and cultivate, rather than extend or broaden, existing religious beliefs in the lives of viewers who turn to them.”

3. The roles of people are essentially the same on both religious and general television programs. In both, men outnumber women three to one, they are dominant, and the women tend to be young. In both, the professions are vastly overrepresented, though the clergy are prominent in religious television, while they hardly appear in general commercial programs. As the study puts it, “in both prime-time drama and religious programs, blue-collar workers, the unemployed, the retired and housewives are practically invisible” (p. 52).

Children and adolescents, who comprise about a third of the U.S. population, account for only 4 per cent of the people on religious, and 6 per cent of those on general, television. The elderly, 12 per cent of the population, make up little more than 3 per cent of those appearing in either religious or general programs. Nonwhites are also somewhat under-represented in relation to their numbers in the actual population.

And religious television contains special distortions all its own. Five per cent of the participants in religious programs claim to have been healed either during or after the telecasts, and the healers of these programs play major roles. Most recipients of healing are women. On the other hand, men constitute the clergy, quote the bible, and do not suffer from as many ailments and/or personal problems as do women.

Three-quarters of the programs mention personal problems and ailments, particularly family, financial and health problems, unemployment, and physical handicaps. Among the most prominent electronic church ministries, 60 per cent mention three or more ailments or problems per program. The solutions are “usually spiritual in nature.” In fact, the researchers were able clearly to identify only one specific cure proposed for all ailments: “making a financial contribution to the program” (suggested on one-fourth of the prominent electronic church ministries, but never on mainline programs). These broadcasts also give a great deal of attention to sexually related topics. Abortion, sexual deviancy, the new morality, pornography and homosexuality are mentioned (always negatively) on 10 to 20 per cent of the programs.

4. For most heavy viewers of religious television, watching is both an expression of belief and an act of protest against the world of general television. General television has a “mainstream” effect. That is, it cultivates a commonality of outlook that tends to be shared by its heavy viewers. The Annenberg researchers have traced the mainstream in general television for many years. For almost two decades we have known, as the study puts it, that “general television is, in many ways, the common mass ritual of American civil religion.” Therefore it should not be surprising to find that general television relates to and cultivates religiosity in its own way” (p. 93). The study boldly suggests that “commercial television viewing may supply or supplant (or both) some religious satisfactions and thus lessen the importance of religion for its heavy viewers” (p. 10).

But what is new is the study’s discovery that there are two television mainstreams, and the two differ greatly from each other. Religious TV’s mainstream tends to be conservative and restrictive rather than permissive. General TV’s mainstream tends to be politically moderate, more restrictive than permissive, and populist but not puritanical. Thus heavy viewers of religious programs are more likely than light viewers to describe themselves as conservative, to oppose a nuclear freeze, to favor tougher laws against pornography, and to have voted in the last election. (This identifies one of the strengths of the electronic church: its ability to mobilize political clout.) On the other hand, heavy viewers of general TV tend to describe themselves as politically moderate, are more likely than light viewers to favor a nuclear freeze, are not as concerned with pornography, and are far less likely to have voted in the last election.

While heavy viewing of religious TV is positively associated with church attendance, heavy viewing of general TV is negatively associated with it. The same holds true for making contributions to the local church, for participating in nonworship activities at church, for upholding the traditional role of women, for being dissatisfied with today’s moral climate, and for expressing traditional and more restrictive sexual values. Because religious conservatives sense this conflict between general television and their own values and beliefs, their viewing of religious programs is both an act of protest against general television and an expression of support for the beliefs associated with religious programs.

These differences between the “mainstreams” cultivated by religious and general television are significant because for many years general television has been functioning as a powerful, and perhaps even the major, cultivator of our society’s values, attitudes and behavior. It may well be, as the study puts it, that “for matters of religious importance, experience, participation and dollars, the churches’ principal competition is not the television ministry but general television” (p. 12).

The mainline denominations can learn much from the Annenberg/Gallup study about how to deal with television in general and the electronic church in particular. First, the churches should understand that, while the electronic church does not represent a serious institutional threat to them, it does pose a threat to mainline theology, especially in the areas of mission, evangelism and education. The electronic church is not an institutional threat because its audience is relatively small and static. Two-thirds of its viewers are not affiliated with mainline churches, and those who are by and large are giving to their local churches, in addition to watching and supporting television ministries.

However, the research also shows that the electronic church consolidates and reinforces a restrictive and narrow view of religion and of the world. Mission is focused on nurturing those who already strongly hold literalist/charismatic beliefs. Evangelism, in the sense of reaching out, is ineffective. Education is essentially one way, emphasizing the obligation to make financial contributions to keep the programs going. And most of the blatant distortions of general television are also found in the electronic church. At almost every point, its underlying theology is at odds with the theologies of the mainline churches.

Second, mainline churches should continue to use television, while rejecting the way that the electronic church uses it. One of the participants at the research conference, an electronic church broadcaster, summed up all of the data by stating, “It looks like the research is saying that all that religious TV is doing is to make people feel good and to get them to keep on doing what they’re doing!” The electronic church finds itself in this Situation because it must employ some of the worst elements of commercialism in order to maintain its financial support. By making a Faustian compact with commercial television, these Christians attempting to “reach out” through the media have merely gained a small, highly motivated group of followers who will pay the bills, while they have lost the gospel that they originally set out to proclaim.

The challenge to mainline churches is to find ways of using television’s considerable potential while recognizing its considerable limitations. Television can reach some peopIe not otherwise reached by the church, but only with messages that are close to what they already believe. It can reinforce existing beliefs but not radically change them. It cannot evangelize in the sense of-bringing people to a major conversion, but it can pre-evangelize by planting the right questions: Who am I? What is life all about? What is right and wrong? What should I be doing with my life? And it can suggest that people may find their answers among the community of the faithful in the local church.

The mainline churches have chosen to stay in the general television mainstream, attempting to be a leaven within it. The electronic church has chosen to go another way -- to separate out a small but highly supportive segment of the audience and deal with it. Reinforcement of the faithful has its value, so long as it does not degenerate into pandering or manipulation, but it is different from working within the mass media, dealing with the values and world view of the whole society.

It is not easy to be within the media world but not of it. The increasing commercialization of communications, and especially the creeping deregulation of broadcasting, make it difficult for the church to stay in the mass media mainstream. Mainline programs are being pushed off the air because they cannot pay their way in competition with commercialized religion and because they do not make profits for the stations. These stations should be supplying access to religious views, without charge if necessary, as a part of their public service accountability in exchange for receiving a government-protected license monopoly.

But to give up the opportunity to be a part of the principal cultivator of society’s values and attitudes, choosing instead to live on society’s fringe, is a failure of nerve, a failure to be relevant. And to be satisfied with merely working among the already converted is to fail in our evangelical and missional task -- even when doing so confers ample rewards of fame, prestige and power.

Third, the mainline churches must take the effects of general television itself much more seriously. The research shows that it is general, not religious, television that really challenges people’s belief systems and their church attendance and funding. It is the heavy viewers of general television who attend the least, give the least and believe the least. And general television is 100 times more pervasive than religious television.

During the past 30 years general television has gradually taken over many of the functions historically belonging to the church. Television, not the church, now communicates what is going on outside the parish, telling us how to behave, what to wear, who has power and who is powerless, what to believe about the world and what is of ultimate value. In this sense, general television, far more than religious TV, is the church’s real competitor.

For this reason, teaching about television becomes a high priority for the church -- teaching pastors how to function in an informational rather than an industrial society, teaching denominational leaders how to deal with the new kinds of ethical situations that have resulted from the dominance of this new institution, with its new kind of power, and, above all, teaching parishioners how to cope with the enormous wave of exciting. soporific, entertaining, debasing, informative, misleading phenomena that enters their homes on an average of seven hours a day, every day.

It is clear from the “Religion and Television’’ study that a major task now confronting religious institutions must be learning about and dealing with television, so that people can control rather than he controlled by it. The electronic church is, unfortunately. part of the problem rather than of the solution, but both it and the mainline churches are dwarfed by the immensity of the challenge of television itself.

The Church and Communication in the Technological Era

For years church leaders concerned about the communication revolution have been asking how to get the churches to take the changes seriously. What will it take to coax churches to become really involved in radio, television, satellites and computers -- to join the communication revolution?

This seems like a fairly straightforward challenge to churches to become more relevant to the times in which we live.

But such a question contains many dubious assumptions that could lead religious communication dangerously astray -- as it already has in some cases. Though the church certainly needs to consider more seriously the implications of the sweeping changes in the world, it must not simply acquiesce to those changes but seek to transform them in the light of the gospel.

There is little doubt that the world is in the midst of fundamental change. "This world of ours is a new world," wrote Robert Oppenheimer in 1963, "in which the unity of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed and will not return to what they have been in the past" (Saturday Review of Literature, June 29, 1963, p. 11).

Thus, it is not enough to call what we are experiencing "rapid social change" or even "revolution," since these phrases connote only social or political upheaval. The change is more basic in that it modifies everything we have known. As a result, the religions of the world are facing not just a communication revolution but a new Technological Era that brings with it its own world view -- one that challenges the world views of all historical religions.

Dutch philosopher Arend van Leewen suggests that there have been only two basic eras in all of history. The first is the ontocratic era in which we have lived until now, in which human society has apprehended life as a cosmic totality, where belief in a God or gods held together the contradictory and confusing elements of the human community. But relatively suddenly --within the past 300 years -- we have moved away from this unifying concept into a multiform system of relationships with no single integrating element to give meaning to all other things. We have moved into the technological era, Van Leewen says, and this is the great new fact of our time (Christianity in a World History [Edinburgh Press, 1964]). The communication revolution, the Age of Information and the Information Society are surface manifestations of the more profound change that is under way in every aspect of life.

The technological era is functional and pragmatic, characterized by utilitarianism and relativism. It is thoroughly secular, demanding rationality and personal autonomy, and asserting that this space-time world is the proper home for humankind. It rejects metaphysical claims and demands that religion deal with the here and now.

This secular understanding is not necessarily inconsistent with the Christian faith. The proclamation of the gospel is precisely that the eternal order is revealed in the historical order. The clash with biblical religion comes only when the technological world view’s emphasis upon the pragmatic and the instrumental results in people’s being treated as means rather than as ends.

Unfortunately, thus far the new technological era has created a world of means in which the meaning of human existence is lost. Jacques Ellul calls the force at work The Technique -- a pervasive method of problem-solving that asks, "How can we best solve this problem now?" rather than, "What is the ultimate objective, and how can we reach it?’ The means is identified with the end, and whatever gets something "done" is good (The Technological Society [Knopf, 1967]).

The communication manifestations of The Technique are literally Orwellian. The Technique does not use fear or threats, nor does it concentrate on undermining its opponent. Rather it characteristically woos people, using their genuine needs (to be safe, to be liked, to be comfortable) to create other needs that make them not only willing but quite eager to buy what is being sold (deodorant, beer, antacid). A glaring example of the problem this method creates is the present state of TV news: most people prefer its simplistic presentation over a more complex and demanding one.

This alternative world view is taught -- perhaps unintentionally, but nevertheless with great persuasiveness and power -- through the media. Alternatives to traditional religious values are made tremendously appealing as religious vocabulary is supplanted by a vocabulary composed of a curious mix of economics, science, high technology and fantasy. Good examples of this new vocabulary are found in films like Star Wars, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E. T. At the same time, activities of genuinely religious people are secularized, glamorized and finally robbed of their religious rootage. Even Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mother Teresa have not completely escaped this secularization.

Although we have lived within the new media environment for only a few decades, some of its characteristics are becoming clear. First, our society has become increasingly dependent on mediated communication: more time spent with electronics, and less spent with people. Second, the exploding number of communication delivery systems and the diversification of programming allow individuals to pick and choose only those messages that reinforce already held attitudes and beliefs, thus fragmenting the culture because people literally cannot hear or see others.

Third, we are moving from seeing communication as a service function for the whole society to treating it as a commodity to be purchased and sold. As laws of economics increasingly control media structures, they inevitably become larger and owned by fewer people. Moreover, society is also being divided into a new class structure as more sophisticated communication facilities are available only to a small elite for their personal growth, education and enrichment. Though advertised as progress for all, computer programs, data bases, specialized videocassettes and a wide assortment of information services are, in fact, separating society into the information-rich and the information-poor.

Finally, all news, information and entertainment are being trivialized for the vast majority of people. Emphasis is given to information rather than meaning, surface events rather than depth and reflection.

Some people would contend that the church has been blind to these changes. However, I believe that church leadership has in fact been aware of and has responded to both the fundamental shift to the technological era and the new information techniques that communicate its world view. The problem is that their responses have been largely inadequate. They recognize that there has been a major shift in values and assumptions, and they have responded in ways reflecting religion’s past responses to the challenges from opposing world views.

H. Richard Niebuhr’s classic categories in Christ and Culture (Harper, 1951) are useful here. Biblical fundamentalists have adopted what Niebuhr would classify as Christ Against Culture, rejecting the appeals of the mass media and, to a certain degree, the media themselves. These fundamentalists detect an anti-Christian value system in the media, and counsel a return to religious fundamentals, which often include proscriptions against dancing, movies, plays and rock concerts, attempts at censorship of media -- especially films, television and books -- and encouraging participation in church social events as a substitute for secular culture offerings. This position recognizes the seriousness of The Technique’s appeal and its ability to lure people -- especially young people -- away from fundamentalism’s Puritan values. Ironically, however, the fundamentalists’ strong reaction tends to increase the attractiveness of that which is banished. Also, the rejection of many cultural experiences tends to leave people psychologically involuted, intellectually isolated and spiritually subject to the pride and authoritarianism that are generated by a dogmatic and closed system.

Curiously, other so-called fundamentalists have taken exactly the opposite course: Christ of Culture. Having no doubt about the answers to every religious question, they conclude that the most important communication task is to reach others with these answers and to convince them of their validity. They see The Technique’s success in converting people to its value system, so they apprehend the techniques -- especially television, radio and books -- and use them to convert people to their own religious views.

This Christ of Culture response is the impetus behind the electronic church -- which, in the guise of rejecting culture’s values, actually embraces many of them. It also explains why fundamentalist religion has been quick to grasp every new communication technique -- from radio to motion pictures to television and satellite TV and videocassettes. For them, the only question is how to build a bigger and better pipe to deliver the simple gospel message to the recipient.

Another Christ of Culture manifestation is evident in the "Be Happy" radio and TV programs that appeal to many members of the mainline churches -- people who go to church regularly, yet give little evidence of being uneasy about their deep involvement in secular culture and values. In Habits of the Heart (University of California Press, 1985), Robert Bellah and co-authors show that most Americans today express a vague religious belief in God, but are utterly incapable of relating their faith to any kind of morally coherent life. "Feeling good" for them has replaced "being good." The question "Is this right or wrong?" is replaced by "Is it going to work for me, now?"

Both secular media and most religious media encourage this cultural religion. In fact, its expressions are perhaps the most pervasive of all the religious responses to The Technique. To be sure, there may be media excesses that are too gross for even thoroughly acculturated Christians to ignore: too much sex and violence in films, too many commercials. But these are seen as problems to adjust, reduce and rework, not expressions of a fundamental dislocation from the center of their faith. For these Christians, the underlying values of commercial television are in fact their values.

A third Christian response to the challenges of The Technique rejects both the Christ Against Culture and Christ of Culture views. It is hesitant, problematic and ambiguous, but it tries to relate the requirements of historical Christian faith to the current cultural and media reality. It takes very seriously the demonic power within the media but nevertheless refuses to abandon culture altogether.

On one level Christians who adopt this position develop program material that -- in contrast to the media’s expressions -- tries to illumine the human condition, to ask meaningful religious questions, to rediscover religious truths, and even to create a new religious vocabulary that has meaning and power for the multitudes. At the second level, these Christians work within the media and political institutions themselves to bring about conditions that allow the media to achieve their considerable potential for good.

This dual approach tends to fit into the Niebuhrian categories of Christ and Culture in Paradox and Christ Transforming Culture. It recognizes the ambiguities and paradoxical nature of the church at work within a system full of powers that could corrupt everything they touch -- including the church. Yet these Christians act in the belief that testifying to the Good News is a requirement that cannot be avoided, and that, potentially, faith and action based on this liberating gospel can indeed transform structures built upon human sin and pride.

In light of this analysis, the church is faced with three challenges: first, to provide an alternative environment to the media environment, namely, face-to-face community; second, to penetrate the media with images and messages that challenge the media’s own values and instead communicate fundamental human values; and third, to teach parishioners (and the public) how to understand the ways in which the media are being manipulative.

One of the greatest strengths of the churches today, particularly in the United States, is its large and effective infrastructure: the local churches. There is no other institution in American life in which so many people meet regularly in a face-to-face relationship for anything other than work. This face-to-face environment offers tremendous possibilities for building community in the midst of the pressures to substitute a mediated community -- indeed, mediated experience -- in the place of face-to-face relationship. Moreover, at a time of increasing specialization, local churches can be the meeting place for a genuine exchange of views, a marketplace of ideas and values, a place where -- within an environment of Christian love and support -- people can deal with controversy in realistic and productive ways.

People have already begun to sense the need for new forms of community. The growth of special-interest hobby groups, the reassertion of town and city street fairs, dances and shopping malls, the increased involvement in citizen action groups all indicate that people are determined to escape the ersatz world of television and to re-enter the real world. But the churches are already in place with a ready-made environment for rediscovering community. The only question is whether they will respond appropriately. Those who will give direction to the church in the decades immediately ahead need to see this function as a major challenge for institutional religion.

The second task, that of penetrating existing media with religious images and vocabulary, requires considerable organization, time and money, making national efforts more feasible than local ones. National denominational offices and interdenominational organizations need the understanding and support of local churches and their leaders as they attempt to act as leaven within the loaf of social communication. Much more needs to be done in building local and national citizen-action groups to make their presence felt in government in order to secure media that are responsive to the public interest, both locally and nationally.

The final area of action, media education, is growing in importance. Harvey Cox points out that our main ethical problem is not how to make the choices we see, but how to see the choices we have to make. Media education is the process by which individuals are helped to see what the mass media are offering and to understand that we in fact can choose whether to accept or reject that offer.

Media education must become a major part of the preparation of children to become adults. It should begin at the earliest levels of school and continue through the entire education process. And adults need special help to catch up with the ways in which media use and abuse them.

Without citizens who are literate about the media, it is impossible for the church to participate meaningfully in deciding how our lives will be shaped by The Technique. Only by providing alternative environments to the mass media, using the media for messages about human values, and helping viewers overcome their growing dependence upon the media environment and its values can the church hope to liberate people from control by The Technique and to set them free from the potential tyranny of the technological era.

Mass Media’s Mythic World: At Odds with Christian Values

Few tasks are more important for the church today than that of shaping a theology of communication; that is, reflecting on the relation of Christian beliefs to the process which mediates contemporary life and thought. We have failed to examine our religious heritage and our sense of the holy in a systematic way, and to relate them to our lives in a complex social environment. In order to do this we need first to look at the nature of society.

The Need for Commonality

What every society must have if it is to survive is commonality -- common interests, language, traditions, institutions, values, ends. There must be a set of common assumptions about who we are, who has the power, what we can and cannot be, what we can and cannot do.

But these underlying assumptions are hidden. For example, when we teach children “good grammar,” we are really teaching them the social structure --space-time relationships, how to solve problems, sexism, racism and, above all, classism. These hidden assumptions come to light only when we begin to ask such questions as these: What are those things that we never have to ask about? What are those things that are not only true but are simply there? What are those things given to us in the way things “are”? The study of advanced geometry is important because it makes students consider worlds quite different from the world they assume to be “true” -- worlds in which parallel lines meet, in which the shortest distance between two points is a curved line. Science fiction, Mad magazine and the study of foreign languages get at the social world in the same way -- by questioning the given, the assumed reality.

But society resists this probing, this questioning of what is. Society needs stability, and stability depends on commonality, uniformity, conformity. Thus every society propagandizes and censors. Jacques Ellul in his book Propaganda (Knopf, 1965) describes propaganda as an all-pervasive aspect of communication in society -- not an arbitrary creation by the people in power but something that grows out of the need of the whole group and serves to sustain the group. It uses all the media of communication, but it is most effective when it reaches an individual “alone in the mass,” cut off from group participation. It tends to separate a person from outside points of reference, such as, for example, transcendent religious reference.

Society also employ active censorship against communications that threaten common values and assumptions. The censorship may be legal, as with strictures against pornography. It may be political, as with the press silence on American involvement in Cambodia. It is most likely to be economic, as in the case of TV’s exclusion of minority points of view because they would tend to reduce profits.

Propaganda and censorship are not something visited on the people by evil manipulators. They are an inevitable process that gives most people -- that is, the society -- what they want and need very badly: stability, cohesion and common purpose.

A Window on the World

Society creates this commonality primarily through mass media. Every activity (games, work, play, sex, study, eating, resting) and every medium (verbal, nonverbal, signs, symbols, architecture, paintings, books, memos, letters, maps and so on) are mediators of the culture. But only in the past 75 years have there developed the mass media of communication: the telephone, the large-volume newspaper, the wireless telegraph, radio and television -- all of which are primarily social inventions, because they fundamentally changed the speed, the extent and nature of the process whereby a society maintained commonality, and thus changed the nature of society itself.

The mass media select and distort what they mediate, for two reasons. First, because it is their nature; second, because society needs for them to create the common world of which all can be a part. Television is indeed a window on the world. But a window by its very nature selects only a small piece of reality. And though its glass is transparent, it shuts out heat and cold, noise and smells; like the tinted glass in today’s buses and airports, it may totally change the color of everything “out there.” TV acts as a filter, selecting images, extracting unpleasant (and pleasant) elements, coloring others, and making a whole world seem real to us when it is in fact nothing more than bright phosphors dancing on a piece of glass.

Rudolf Arnheim, author of Visual Thinking, says that a child who enters school today faces “a 12 to 20 year apprenticeship in alienation.” He points out that as soon as a child learns to name something, he or she begins to separate the self from it, and before long learns to handle words and concepts, but at the risk of becoming estranged from the object talked about. The child learns to manipulate a world of words and numbers, but he or she does not learn to experience the real world. The child has been conditioned to live in our culture.¹Exposure to television for hours every day simply further separates youngsters from the world of reality, or rather creates a new reality.

Abraham Moles, director of the Social Psychology Institute at Strasbourg, points out that while television has been a cultural life buoy for farmers, lonely people and the impoverished, it has at the same time been a pressure toward the banal and the constricting for those already experiencing a communication-rich life. But in both cases, as the individual is exposed to more and more TV, he or she is a bit less able to differentiate between the fictional universe and the real world. Thus by its very nature television, like all mass media, filters and changes the reality it mediates.²

Myths, Symbols and Images

In providing commonality for the society, the mass media use the tools of myth, symbol, image and fantasy. In essence, myths tell us who we are, what we have done, and what we can do. They deal with power (who has it, who doesn’t), with value (what is of value and what is not), and with morality (what is right and permissible, what is forbidden).

The myths of our society thus constitute a kind of religious framework, providing us with a belief and value system and expressing the things we uncritically assume as given in our lives. The myths express not the rules written down in our laws and our Bibles, but the unwritten rules behind the rules. That is, they express ultimate reality -- another term for religion.

Myths are expressed in symbols and images that reach us less at the cognitive level than at the level of dream and fantasy. Stanley Kubrick, creator of such memorable films as Dr. Strangelove; 2001: A Space Odyssey; and Barry Lyndon, understands what is happening: “I think an audience watching a film or a play is in a state very similar to dreaming, and that the dramatic experience becomes a kind of controlled dream. . . . But the important point here is that the film communicates on a subconscious level, and the audience responds to the basic shape of the story on a subconscious level, as it responds to a dream.”³The image-symbol-fantasy level of communication is more powerful than the cognitive level because we find it more difficult to bring these elements up to a level of consciousness where we can analyze and talk about them in a verbal, linear, relatively nonthreatening way.

Images and myths engulf us from every direction -- from Washington, from the churches, from the schools, and from Mother, to name a few. But mass-media advertising provides the overwhelming input. Leo Bogart in his book Strategy in Advertising says:

Every day 4.2 billion advertising messages pour forth from 1,754 daily newspapers, millions of others from 8,151 weeklies, and 14 billion more each day from 4,147 magazines and periodicals. There are 3,895 AM and 1,136 FM radio stations broadcasting an average of 730,000 commercials a day. And 770 television stations broadcast 100,000 commercials a day. Every day millions of people are confronted with 2,500,000 outdoor billboards, with 2,500,000 car cards and posters in buses, subways and commuter trains and with 51,300,000 direct mail pieces.⁴

Mythic Worlds

Now what are mass media telling us about who we are, what we can do and be, and what is of value? As we examine the media world, we are looking for the symbolic meanings and the underlying myths that are far more important than the story line, message or content. We are looking for environment, functions and context, and, most important of all, for human relationships that define social roles and tell who has power, who is aggressor and who is victim.

For example, consider the population of the television world. For most Americans, this TV world becomes their world at least three hours a day, every day, throughout most of their lives. George Gerbner tells us that about half of all TV-land characters are married, but among TV teachers, only 18 per cent of the women and 20 per cent of the men are married.⁵Furthermore, the women “find themselves, and a man,” by leaving teaching. Failure in love and life is a requisite for teaching success. The problems of TV teachers are solved by their leaving the profession -- not by towns raising taxes, building schools and giving higher salaries. TV journalists, on the other hand, are strong and honest. TV scientists are deceitful, cruel, dangerous; their research leads to murder in fully half the situations.

In the TV world two-thirds to three-fourths of the important characters are male, American, middle class, unmarried and in the prime of life. They are the people who run that world.

Unlike real-life violence, the violence on TV rarely occurs between people who know each other well; most of it does not result from rage, hate, despair or panic, but from the businesslike pursuit of personal gain, power or duty. In fact, one-third of TV’s violent people, according to Gerbner, could be considered “professionals” in the business of violence.

Marriage seems to shrink men and make them unfit for the free-wheeling, powerful and violent parts. Women appear to gain power through marriage, while losing some of their capacity for violence. Finally, dominant majority-type Americans are more than twice as likely as all “others” to commit lethal violence and then live to reach a happy ending. In the symbolic shorthand of TV, the free and the strong kill in a good cause to begin with.

Thus there is an interesting trade-off in the TV world. The price of being good (the teacher) is impotence. On the other hand, the price of having power (the scientist) is to be evil -- unless one happens to be a powerful white American, in which case the end justifies the means and one is rewarded with the American image of happiness.

But what about those who have no power? Let’s take another example -- the comic book, a powerful medium among the semiliterate and disadvantaged youth who today have so little power that they face between 25 and 50 per cent unemployment.

Frederick Leaman has conducted an informal study of the hidden message of comic books. He visited three drugstores in a large city and asked for their best-selling comics. From a group of 26 stories and 87 characters he constructed the comic-book world. It is a world of conflict and contest, populated predominantly by the young, white and middle-majority. Of every ten characters, seven commit some crime. Killers represent 13 per cent of the population.

But here is the underlying message: in more than half (54 per cent) of the stories, the key to superstatus is the consumption of some chemical substance that can effect a drastic transformation. One of every five characters uses drugs to seek superpower, superintelligence or eternal life. Furthermore, it is the positive, active, violent characters who use drugs most. The heroes comprise two-thirds of all drug takers. Only 17 per cent of their antagonists -- the villains -- use drugs. The role of the drug user is untainted by villainy. Ergo: heroes use drugs in good causes. Or consider the roles of black in Saturday-morning television for children. According to Joyce Sprafkin, blacks occupy 40 per cent of all human roles in record commercials, while in commercials for board games, less than 6 per cent of the parts are assigned to blacks.⁷Black and white children are systematically being taught that blacks may be musical, but they don’t engage in games that require thinking.

The Central Myths

We are dealing with a complex society, and it would be impossible to detail all the images and symbols that go into creating its commonality. However, there are a few central myths and values from which most of the images and symbols spring.

1. The fittest survive. According to sociologist Marie Augusta Neal, the major myth of our Western culture is the social-Darwinian theory initiated by Herbert Spencer -- the concept that between ethnic groups there exist genetic differences large enough to justify programming for unequal natural capacities for responsible decision-making, specifically in the interests of the group one represents. Sister Marie points out that social Darwinism dominates our policy-making regarding education, jobs, geographical residential allotments, provision for recreation, health services and the uses of human beings to carry on wars.

It is no accident that in Gerbner’s TV-violence profile, lower-class and nonwhite characters are especially victimization-prone, are more violent than their middle-class counterparts, and pay a higher price for engaging in violence.⁸As our myth suggests, the fittest survive, and the fittest in our mass-media world are not lower-class, nonwhite Americans.

2. Power and decision-making start at the center and move out. The political word comes from Washington; the financial word comes from New York. While watching television, one has the sense of being at the edge of a giant network where a single person at the center pushes the right button and instantaneously millions of us “out there” see what has been decided.

Of course, there are alternatives to the myth of power moving from the center to the edges. Our own Declaration of Independence proposed that government derives its power from the consent of the governed -- in other words, that the flow of power should be from the periphery to the center. But the opposite model was much more supportive of the needs of the industrial revolution and the rise of a major nation-state, and today it is clearly essential to the maintenance of both a centralized governmental bureaucracy and a capitalist economy.

In our society, people at the center make decisions about what the others need and what they get. Mass production means standardization: whether people want it or not, the items on the shelves of our supermarkets become more and more the same, while mass advertising convinces us that we are getting more and more diversity. The idea that people in the power center should plan for others extends from corporate home offices to national church bureaucracies to the social welfare agencies. The result is that corporate business leaders wonder why they are so low in the credibility polls, church leaders wonder why they are losing their jobs and their budgets, and social workers wonder why the poor don’t appreciate the plans that have been worked out for them.

3. Happiness consists of limitless material acquisition. This myth has several corollaries. One is that consumption is inherently good -- a concept driven home effectively by the advertising industry. Another is that property, wealth and power are more important than people. We need only consider the vast following for Ronald Reagan’s proposition that the Panama Canal is ours because we bought and paid for it to see how far this myth has made its way into our consciousness. We did, after all, pay for the Canal Zone. The fact that our control of the canal today results in depriving people of Panama of their human rights is regrettable, but a deal is a deal. Or recall the city riots in the late ‘60s. It was when looters started into the stores that the police started to kill. Both human life and property may be sacred, but in our mythology property rights are just a little more sacred.

4. Progress is an inherent good. At one level this myth is symbolized by the words “new and improved” attached periodically to every old product. But the myth goes much deeper than that. Lewis Mumford believes that the “premise underlying this whole age, its capitalist as well as its socialist development, has been ‘the doctrine of Progress.’ ” Progress, he writes, “was a tractor that laid its own roadbed and left no permanent imprint of its own tracks, nor did it move toward an imaginable and humanly desirable destination.” Rather, “the going is the goal” -- not because there is any inherent beauty or usefulness in going, but because to stop going, to stop wasting, to stop consuming more and more, to say at any given moment that “enough is enough” would spell immediate doom.⁹

5. There exists a free-flow of information. Of course the whole import of this analysis is that instead of a genuine free-flow there is consistent, pervasive and effective propaganda and censorship. Such a view is resisted most of all by the men and women who spend their careers reporting the news. But they are the very ones least able to judge the matter, for they were selected and trained by the system so that they could be depended upon to operate within its assumptions and myths.

This is not to condemn newsmen and newswomen any more than others of us who function uncritically within the system year in and year out. When Walter Cronkite says, “And that’s the way it is,” he is summing, up mostly the information our society wants and needs to hear that particular day.

Consider the flap when Roger Mudd, on the campaign trail with Ronald Reagan, filed a story on how the telenews for all three networks had covered Reagan that day. Reagan had said nothing new or newsworthy, and he had indeed talked before a total of only about 2,000 people at shopping centers. But that morning he appeared before the network cameras so each could have something to send back as the day’s “news.” Mudd’s story about the manufacture of news was killed by Cronkite, because it reflected negatively on the profession. But when Cronkite’s rejection itself began to be circulated around the nation’s pressrooms, CBS decided to run the Mudd story on the morning news; only a small fraction of viewers saw it, but CBS averted revelation of censorship which could have been even more harmful to its “free-flow” image than the original story.

Society’s Values

And what are the values that the mass media communicate on behalf of our culture? Power heads the list: power over others, power over nature. As Hannah Arendt points out, in today’s media world it is not so much that power corrupts as that the aura of power, its glamorous trappings, attracts.¹⁰Close to power are the values of wealth and property, the idea that everything can be purchased and that consumption is an intrinsic good. The values of narcissism, immediate gratification of wants, and creature comforts follow close behind.

Thus the mass media tell us that we are basically good, that happiness is the chief end of life, and that happiness consists in obtaining material goods. The media transform the value of sexuality into sex appeal, the value of self-respect into pride, the value of will-to-live into will-to-power. They exacerbate acquisitiveness into greed; they deal with insecurity by generating more insecurity, and anxiety by generating more anxiety. They change the value of recreation into competition and the value of rest into escape. And perhaps worst of all, the media constrict our experience and substitute media world for real world so that we are becoming less and less able to make the fine value judgments that a complex world requires.

In terms of the economic system, the media are the obedient servant of capitalism. The high technology required for our current mass-communication system, with its centralized control, its high profits, its capital-intensive nature, and its ability to reach every individual in the society, is perfectly suited for a massive production-consumption system that is equally centralized, profitable and capital-intensive. Our production-consumption system simply could not exist without a communication system that trains people to be knowledgeable, efficient and hard-working producers and consumers. The fact that capitalism turns everything into a commodity is admirably suited to the propaganda system of the mass media, which turns each member of the audience into a consumer.

In terms of the political system, the media, again reflecting the values of the society, give us politics by image. The whole media approach to Vietnam was guided by the necessity of a superpower to create for itself an image that would convince the world -- and itself -- that it was number one, the mightiest power on earth (our most important value). The experience of Watergate is also revealing. Several observers have pointed out that the public, its leaders and the media were offended and shocked not so much by what the president and his men did as by the fact that they got caught -- publicly, red-handed, in a way that simply could not be imaged away. And after Watergate we see the immediate return to the old value system: those who were indicted and convicted have been overwhelmed with high offers from publishers, the press and television to tell their Stories. This simply drives home the point that our society demands “positive images,” including even more lies and fabrications, in order to mitigate the horror of the cover-up, to rehabilitate the criminals in the American TV viewer’s eyes, and above all, to help restore through imagery the public’s confidence in the political system.

What is the Christian response to this value system? The answer is obvious and undeniable. The whole weight of Christian history, thought and teaching stands diametrically opposed to the media world and its values.

Christian Values

Instead of power over individuals, the Bible calls for justice and righteousness (Amos 5:23-24), kindness and humility (Micah 6:6) and the correction of oppression (Isa. 1:17). Instead of power over nature in order to consume and waste, the Genesis story affirms the value of humanity’s guidance and transformation of nature, in harmony with the whole of creation. Instead of affirming the value of wealth, Jesus tells the rich young ruler to sell all that he has (Matt. 19:21).

Sister Marie Augusta Neal compares the classic definition of justice rooted in entitlement -- that is, the protection of property already possessed -- with Leviticus 25: 1-29, which prescribes that property must be returned every 50 years to the people who sit on the land. And Jesus simply tells us to give our coat to the person who needs it (Matt. 5:40). As for the idea that money can purchase everything, there is the story of the wealthy man who built bigger barns and Jesus’ question: “What does a man gain by winning the whole world at the cost of his true self?” (Mark 8:36). The values of narcissism, of immediate gratification and creature comforts are placed against Jesus’ affirmation that one who wants to be a Christian must leave self behind, must take up the cross and follow Jesus’ way (Matt. 16:24).

Against the myths that we are basically good, that happiness is the chief end of life and consists in obtaining material goods, there are arrayed the affirmations that human beings are susceptible to the sin of pride and will-to-power, that the chief end of life is to glorify God, and that happiness consists in creating the kingdom of God within one’s self and among one’s neighbors.

Clearly we find ourselves living in a society completely at odds with our professed religion. What can we do about this situation that will make any difference?

Reviving the ‘Twofold Vision’

Perhaps the first and the most difficult thing we have to do is to spend a good deal more thought in understanding what the media are saying to us and to help others understand it also. Media education involves much more than reading film reviews and the media section of Time, the New Yorker and Saturday Review. It means quite literally having to be in this world but not of it.

Let me illustrate what this task requires. In The Broken Covenant (Seabury, 1975) Robert Bellah describes the growing dominance in America from the middle of the 18th century of what William Blake called “single vision” -- the scientific-technocratic view of the world that everything is amenable to reason and that there is no need for the imaginative perspective supplied by religion. But Blake called for “twofold vision,” which adds to practical rationalism the awareness that there is always more than what appears, and that behind every literal fact there is a depth of implication. To Blake the cutting off of this dimension was a kind of sleep or death.

I suggest that our society is today cultivating single vision, and that the desensitization that we detect all around us is a kind of sleep or death of awareness and conscience. We must revive in people a habit of double vision that can identify myths and values underlying society and can evaluate them from a perspective that transcends society’s limitations.

The best place to do this is in the myths and symbols found in the mass media. Here we see all the appeal of a practical, rational, well-organized society -- and what it does to people: how it drives the rich and powerful onward by preaching the rewards of success; how it motivates and channels the energies of the working millions by encouraging them to be good, to follow the rules, to do what is right, and to produce in order to consume; and how it teaches some that they are poor and powerless and that they had better stay that way.

This twofold vision is no good without a reference point that transcends the culture. The Bible makes it clear that God is on the side of the poor and powerless, and the lives of the faithful right up to Martin Luther King illustrate that there is where God wants his people to be.

But where will this analysis take place? Media propaganda is most effective when it reaches people as individuals in the mass -- as when they are watching TV. The situation least hospitable to such propaganda is one where people meet face to face in small groups -- and this is precisely where the church has its strength. For all its failings, the church remains one of the few places in society where people regularly come together on a face-to-face basis. Here is where media education can and must take place.

Such analysis is not easy. It is complex and threatening. It is far easier for church people to gather together to condemn a TV episode containing more sex or violence than usual -- and thus miss the whole thrust of the analysis.

Media education would have a different focus with different groups. It would aim at helping the poor define what the media says about them, and then to define their real problems and their real role in society -- which could very well lead to action to get out of that role. It would help middle-class workers and consumers understand the ways in which they are being manipulated, to evaluate the satisfactions held out to them by the media, to establish values independent of those of the media, and to develop life styles in keeping with their own goals rather than media goals. If this happened, new myths, new symbols and images would develop, moving into competition with the old, to help transform the society into one better suited to meet human needs.

A second thing we can do is to take a long look at our existing mass-media output on behalf of the church -- and to repent. We simply have to ask to what extent our religious broadcasting and news releases and articles do more harm than good because they accept uncritically the underlying assumptions of the media.

I am particularly concerned about those religion programs that ape the images of the secular media -- images of prestige and power, of sex, escape and nostalgia, with all the trappings that reinforce the myths of secular society -- and then somehow hope to turn the whole thing into a religious statement about the God who requires only justice, humility and love. Those who produce these programs simply do not recognize that all the good words in all the sermonettes are belied by the image projected by the program itself.

In another area, the increase of religion-for-money programs on radio simply attests to the pathetic gullibility and lack of moral sensitivity on the part of a substantial audience. The perpetrators are in some cases charlatans and in other cases innocents who have simply bought the society’s values and applied them to religion without realizing what they have done.

What about the serious programs under religious auspices that try with varying degrees of success to examine the moral and spiritual views of biblical Christianity in relation to the society? Here is the area of greatest moral ambiguity. For transcendent religious values are so much at odds with the society’s values that it is often quite impossible to deal with the real issues on radio and television. Such programs are simply alien to the system. Some sensitization through mass-media programming is possible; of that I am sure. But the dangers of being co-opted by the media are so subtle and powerful that it is incumbent upon us to approach every attempt to program in the mass media with the greatest caution and theological sensitivity.

Briefly, I think we might proceed by an emphasis upon providing perspective, context and meaning to news; by the development of creative alternatives to commercial mass media, such as public broadcasting; by depicting social models of liberation that work; by encouraging further discussion of issues in a group context. I would suggest that we need to find ways of telling the Christian story in a way that relates to people’s everyday questions and problems, and that brings about a kind of primal recognition, so that people say “I already knew that.” It seems to me that there are areas for programming that can do this and successfully resist co-optation by the media and their cultural biases.

Challenges to Power

The third and final thing we can do is to engage in direct social and political action to change the structures of the media so that they will be more open and responsive to points of view that differ from the cultural norm. I am thinking of such action as testifying before the FCC, initiating and building political support for bills in Congress, and instigating court suits and developing stockholder action with broadcasters, advertising agencies and sponsors.

Again, if we choose only to develop programs whose primary criteria are those of the media industry, and if we cozy up to the industry in order to get whatever scraps of goodwill and time and space it is willing to offer, then we simply have gained access to the media at the loss of our own soul. The mass media surely constitute one of the most powerful of all institutions in society, and if we believe that God is on the side of the poor and the powerless and of justice and love, then we have to be ready to challenge the pretensions of that power and to do battle with it. At the same time, we must do battle in love, not forgetting that many in positions of power accept their role as uncritically and even unknowingly as those who are powerless accept theirs.

I therefore think it is wrong to attack the media as if they were being manipulated and mishandled by greedy people at the top. In reality, the media reflect our own greed and weaknesses far more than we care to admit or to analyze. This means that we can’t solve the problems of TV by grouping spots together or reducing the number of ads. Although such measures might help ease the irritation, they do nothing about the fundamental media problem. The solution is much more radical: a change in the beliefs and assumptions and economic base of the entire society.

Our social and political problem is thus to change enough individuals to bring about a change in the social structures -- and that will enable even more individuals to change. Social action and personal persuasion are reciprocal, and we cannot afford to neglect either one.

I do not want to leave the impression that we are doomed to be shaped wholly by inexorable social forces and that the situation is hopeless. In the 1940s. Reinhold Niebuhr observed:

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.

Our Christian theology is fundamentally at odds with the theology of our society, and the mass media happen to be one of the most important arenas for resolving the conflict. It will take clear thinking, hard work and a good deal of faith, hope and love. But it is our society and our lives that are at stake, and I can think of no more exciting challenge.

Notes

1. “Eyes Have They, but They See Not.” a conversation with Rudolf Arnheim, by James Petersen. Psychology Today, June 1972, p. 55.

2. “A skylight Open to the Neighbourhood,” by Abraham Moles, Inter-media. International Broadcast Institute, February 1976, p. 6.

3. Stanley Kubrick in Cultural Information Service. January 1975, p. 12.

4. Quoted in Advertising Age, November 21, 1973, p. 7.

5. George Gerbner. address at International Communication Association, April 21, 1972.

6. “The Social Uses of Drug Abuse,” by George Gerbner, Annenberg School of Communications. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. undated.

7. ‘‘Stereotypes on Television,” by Joyce Sprafkin. Media Action Research Center, New York City.

8. Violence Profile No. 5. by George Gerbner and Larry P. Gross, University of Pennsylvania, June 1973.

9. Quoted in “Home to Roost: A Bicentennial Address.” by Hannah Arendt, New York Review, June 26, 1975. p. 3.

10. Ibid.. P. 4.

Divorce is much on my mind these days. In the past couple of years, two of my close friends have been unilaterally divorced by their high-powered professional husbands of some 20 years. One, left fairly secure materially was traded in for a woman 20 years her junior. The other, through the exigencies of no-fault divorce laws and the principle of (so called) equal division of marital assets, became a classic example of the feminization of poverty Fortunately, the children in both cases were nearly grown and thus less likely to be seriously affected by the fallout of divorce.

I also have two male colleagues, each with young children, who have been left by their wives. One of these separations ended in a unilateral divorce and the predictable shuffling of children between households. The other couple eventually reconciled -- in part because they lived in an atypical jurisdiction where nonconsensual divorces require a longer time to become final than ones mutually agreed upon. That mandated extra year, along with church and professional counseling, helped the wife to reconsider.

In each of these four scenarios I was struck by something that researchers regularly point out: divorce is almost never neat and clean. It seldom ends the conflicts that preceded the divorce, especially if minor children are involved. And even when custody and economic support for children are not an issue, the pauperization of women often is. Since the no-fault divorce revolution began in California in 1970 and spread to all 50 states, divorce decrees have generally mandated an equal division only of the couple's present assets and liabilities. Rarely do courts distribute future benefits (such as pensions and insurance policies), let alone future earnings.

Usually the husband has a greater future earning potential than the wife. The failure to assign a portion of those earnings to homemaking women displaced from long-term marriages can be disastrous. Not only do such women lose the pension the couple had planned on for their joint retirement; they are also, by virtue of their many years as unpaid nurturers, poorly equipped to re-enter the job market. Add the fact that mothers are almost always assigned primary custody of minor children and that child support is not mandated in almost 40 percent of all settlements and in any case is often irregularly or never paid, and you have a recipe for all kinds of trouble.

Female-headed households are scarce not only on cash but on time, since no second adult is available to supervise the children and since many mothers must work long hours for low pay. Moves to lower-cost housing can also add to the social disruption children experience in the wake of divorce. Even if a divorced father does support his minor children, he is rarely required to do so during the financially demanding college years. Not surprisingly, teenagers growing up with only one parent are at greater risk of dropping out of school, of having a child of their own during the teen years, and of being neither in school nor in the work-force during young adulthood.

These outcomes have been well documented, particularly in Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee's Second Chances: Men, Women, and Children a Decade After Divorce (1989) and Sara MeLanahan and Gary Sandefur's Growing Up with a Single Parent (1994). Some people see these problems as cause for national moral alarm; others, merely as reason for minor tinkering with the legal system. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead leans toward alarm.

Though Whitehead sees the church as one of several civil institutions that could strengthen families, she is not much interested in the church's potential role as a source of ethical reflection and public-policy recommendations. This should not surprise us, since churches themselves have all too often abandoned this calling. David Blankenhorn noted in Fatherless America (1995) that over the past three decades "many religious leaders -- especially in the mainline Protestant denominations -- have largely abandoned marriage as a vital area of religious attention, essentially handing the entire matter over to opinion leaders and divorce lawyers in secular society." Don Browning, director of the Religion, Culture and Family Project at the University of Chicago Divinity School, has observed that in the 1970s and '80s most mainline Protestant denominations severely cut back their funding of family ministries programs while continuing to fund government lobbying efforts. Church leaders apparently concluded that rising levels of teenage sexual activity, divorce, single parenthood and the feminization of poverty were inevitable and irreversible, and so they focused on lobbying for governmental and therapeutic programs to cushion the worst effects of these trends.

Efforts like the Religion, Culture and Family Project, supported by the Lilly Endowment, are aimed at questioning such assumptions and getting mainline churches to engage in theological, ethical and practical reflection on family matters. Evangelicals of a social-justice bent have mounted like-minded projects on a smaller scale, such as the Crossroads Program sponsored by Evangelicals for Social Action (seeded by Pew Trust money in 1992) and its ongoing series of publications on faith and public policy.

Whitehead's book is an expansion of her much-quoted 1993 Atlantic Monthly article "Dan Quayle Was Right." She again documents the steep rise in divorce rates after the 1950s and quotes studies showing that, contrary to the assumptions of many therapists and liberal feminists, divorce has long-term effects on women's material welfare and on their children's social, educational, emotional and economic prospects. But the book differs from her earlier piece in not trying to analyze the effects of divorce and out-of-wedlock birth as a single phenomenon. This is methodologically wise, for the situation of middle-class divorced parents is significantly different from'that of the average never-married young mother.

As her title implies, Whitehead's primary concern is to show that ideas have consequences. Partly because of the growing acceptance, individualization and even romanticization of a "divorce culture" in America, approximately half of all first marriages -- and at least as many second ones -- do not endure. Taking a leaf from Robert Bellab and colleagues in Habits of the Head, which discusses American "instrumental" versus "expressive" individualism, she examines the rise of "instrumental" -- or what was once called "vulgar" -- divorce in the earlier part of this century, and then the development of "expressive" divorce over the past 30 years.

Instrumental divorce was originally limited to wealthy socialites, business magnates and Hollywood stars. It was seen as a cynical means of upward social or economic mobility. "Apparently," notes Whitehead, "the rich dealt in spouses as brashly as they traded in stocks and bonds." But most people, despite a voyeuristic interest in the coupling and decoupling of the rich and famous, viewed such behavior as anything hut admirable. From church pulpits to women's magazines to leftist publications such as the Natwo, instrumental divorce was decried as self-indulgent behavior that brought market values into an area of life meant to transcend such considerations.

The guardians of public morality fretted about the spread of vulgar divorce to the middle and working classes. And spread it did. In Francis Ford Coppola's 1986 movie Peggy Sue Got Married, one character -- a twice-divorced, middle-class real estate broker -- sums up the notion that husbands are commodities, like houses: "You should always trade up.

Certain structural forces contributed to this change. Women have become steadily more independent in terms of earning capacity, making it more possible for them to leave miserable marriages and survive economically, even if not to live lavishly. And compared to Europeans, Americans from colonial times on have regarded marriage as an institution based more on mutual affection than on economic or political convenience. Consequently, divorce has been relatively accessible in America -- at least for Protestants -- on the grounds that it protects the true purpose of marriage: mutual affection. Still, marriage was regarded as the institutional norm, with occasional divorce a regrettable necessity, to be used as a last resort and with due regard for the welfare of exspouses and children.

The cult of expressive divorce, as mediated by therapists, self-help books and other vehicles of popular culture, changed all this, Whitehead argues. She sees the culture of expressive divorce as a major force behind the doubling of divorce rates between the 1950s and 1980s. It shifted the normative image of marriage from that of an enduring covenant to that of a limited contract -- and later, under no-fault divorce, to a contract that could be dissolved by either partner for any (or even no) reason whatever.

Expressive divorce also recast divorce in a positive light, as a growth experience for everyone involved. Women would learn to be their own persons, and children would benefit from lessened conflict and a relational network expanded through stepfamilies. Whitehead thoroughly analyzes the popular (and empirically quite unsubstantiated) rhetoric of expressive divorce, and points out how lawyers, therapists and real estate brokers benefited financially from the steady increase in divorcing couples.

In the past decade a series of studies, especially on outcomes for children, have stripped the cult of expressive divorce of some of its triumphalism. While the culture still regards divorce as an inalienable right for adults, it focuses now on helping kids cope with the admittedly difficult aftermath of divorce. These efforts range from writing divorce-centered children's novels to producing greeting cards that absent parents can send their offspring (more brave new market opportunities) to advising children to become patient parent figures to adults preoccupied by their divorces and by new romantic relationships. The ironic upshot is that "as adults enjoy more freedom in the pursuit of a satisfying intimate life, children's family lives become increasingly subject to arrangement, regulation and control. A culture of divorce soothes children with antidepressants, consoles them with storybooks on divorce, and watches over their lives from family court."

Although Whitebead is good at documenting the rise of the divorce culture, she is surprisingly thin on policy recommendations. She concludes that "because marriage and parenthood are part of our affectional and private lives," reversing the divorce culture is "largely a matter for civil society rather than for government." Since "the breakdown of marriage was not caused by changes in the tax code or divorce laws," it is unlikely to be resolved by them. Commitment to marriage can be strengthened "only through a change of heart and mind, a new consciousness about the meaning of commitment itself, and a turning away from the contemporary model of relationships offered by Madison Avenue, Wall Street, or Hollywood."

Reviewing Whiteheads book in the New Republic (April 14), Margaret Talbot retorts that such moral exhortations for commitment will simply fall flat since they fly in the face of the American ideal of marriage as an enduringly affectional relationship. The expectation that marriage will be based on affection is not one that Americans are likely to give up, Talbot says, and she doesn't think they should. Inevitably, she believes, "the higher the expectations of marriage the greater the number of divorces. Idealize marriage, and the real complications of love and sex and companionship and family will bite back." For Talbot, Whitehead's call to preserve less-than-perfect marriages for the sake of social and child stability (a common view in Japan, for example) verges on being un-American.

But surely some middle ground can be found between Talbot's blithe acceptance of revolving-door intimacy and Whitehead's simplistic call for marital moral rearmament. At the very least, as Amy Black points out in "For the Sake of the Children" (a 1995 contribution to the Crossroads Monograph Series on Faith and Public Policy), there are public-justice issues involved. While legislation is not a panacea for the divorce epidemic, it can be part of the solution both in its restrictive and its educative functions.

Black makes some essential distinctions: childless marriages being terminated by young couples are different from long-term marriages in which one spouse has been a homemaker, and both are different from divorces in which minor children are present. For the first of these, the standard legal division of present assets and liabilities is usually fair, since both parties are young, unencumbered by children, and able to acquire jobs and education. In the second case, even if no children are involved, justice requires that not only present but some future assets be jointly distributed, to prevent the impoverishment of the spouse who has not held a job outside the home.

In the case of divorces involving minor children, however, we need a national policy that places children's welfare first. This should include guaranteed child-support payments, tax breaks for custodial parents, and an expanded definition of marital property to include pensions, insurance, cost of education and reimbursement for economic sacrifices made by one or the other spouse during the marriage. Black also recommends the reinstatement of mutual consent laws in order to slow down the process of divorce and give the reluctant partner (who is often also the custodial parent) more bargaining power in a process often driven not by justice but by whoever can afford the more skillful lawyer. At the very least, she adds, the period between the filing and granting of a no-fault divorce should be lengthened: two to five years is the range in many West European nations.

The U.S. does not have a national divorce policy; hence, although a few states have implemented some of the above reforms, they are easily avoided by what Black calls "migratory divorce" -- that is, establishing residence in a state with more lenient laws prior to filing for divorce. That such states are still the norm is due, some researchers suspect, to the fact that many legislators are themselves divorced men. The first no-fault divorce statute was drafted in California by a legislator who had ended a 25-year marriage to wed a younger woman; of the 14 assemblymen who testified for the law, ten were divorced.

In addition to mounting a bully pulpit on behalf of changed family policies, political leaders could push for revisions to the Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act, a set of national guidelines that states usually follow. The goal should be to provide greater public justice for everyone affected, especially children. Mainline denominations need to lobby for such ends. They should also demand accountability of their members, disciplining those who neglect child support and alimony payments. If secular state governments can shame deadbeat parents by publicizing their names and photos, should churches do less?

Since prevention is at least as important as cure, churches must rediscover ways to help families negotiate the "real complications of love, sex and companionship." Counselors should assume that marriages are more salvageable than one or both spouses believe. Individual and group premarital counseling, community marriage policies, and mentoring programs for couples at various stages of the life cycle should be seriously expanded.

In the end, I suspect that the church's greatest contribution to marital stability and growth will come from living a conviction that flies in the face of American individualism -- namely (in the words of the Heidelberg Catechism) "that we are not our own, but belong body and soul, in life and death to our faithful Savior Jesus Christ." Understood properly, this means that marriage is a creational good -- a wonder, at its best -- that is part of a wider cosmic drama of human fallenness and redemption. By living out hope in a community that breaks down barriers of age, class, sex and ethnicity, the church can model a love ethic from which families can draw strength. The American idolatry of romantic love has disconnected couples from living communities of discipline and love -- communities which marriages need.

Churches cannot single-handedly reverse the ethic of romantic narcissism. Government has a God-given role in promoting the public-justice aspects of marriage and family, as Amy Black contends. But churches have durable traditions on which to draw, and they can do much to make good families and communities a living reality as well as an eschatological hope.

Archives: Articles

Analyzing the Military-News Complex

The Unknown History of Televangelism

A New World Order in Communication

Religion and Television: Report on the Research

The Church and Communication in the Technological Era

Mass Media’s Mythic World: At Odds with Christian Values

Parenting and Politics: Giving new Shape to “Family Values”

Deconstructing the Culture of Divorce

The Universal Declaration at 50: Changing the World?