The Art of Watching Watchfully

“I can’t see the point in the theatre – all that sex and violence. I get enough of that at home, except for the sex, of course.”

Blackadder the Third E4, ‘Sense and Senility’ (1983)

 

Hey kid, you know how bad it is for your eyes to be so close to the screen, right? Not that I can talk.

I hazard that it has likely already reached your attention, O Culturally-Informed Reader, that the talented folks at Disney this week made a certain announcement pertaining to a certain decision about character portrayal in a certain upcoming live-action remake of a certain beloved animated classic.¹ (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you might like to check out a couple of the hyperlinks in the footnote below, but equally, it probably won’t impinge too greatly on your understanding of what follows, because) I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to use a particular reaction that some people have apparently had to it as a launchpad for a post I’ve been meaning to write for ages. Check me out with my bang-up-to-date references.

Basically, what’s going down is that some Christians have apparently decided to boycott the upcoming Beauty and the Beast remake because it is going to feature Disney’s first openly gay character and love scene. I’m not going to explain here why I think that this boycotting decision specifically is a bad idea: for that I’d point you to an excellent article written by some guy called Luke that presented itself for inspection on my Facebook newsfeed earlier today.² Rather, I intend to highlight what I see as the logical unsoundness or even the sheer oddity in a Christian adopting a position of this type. I’ll kick off by borrowing a paragraph from the aforementioned Luke:

Think about it this way. If you choose not to see the film or stop your children from seeing it, that is your prerogative. But you should ask yourself, would I do the same for a film in which pre-marital heterosexual sex is shown (or implied)? Rather than the turn-off-the-tv [sic] approach that Christians can be guilty of, perhaps we should see the movie with our children then have an honest conversation about the scene in question, if necessary?

And I’m thinking, well, yeah. I mean, duh, right? And once you’ve asked the question as to why fictional portrayals of one particular type of sexual sin and not others should warrant a boycott, there’s no good reason not to ask a further question as to why fictional portrayals of one particular type of sin, namely sexual, and not others should warrant a boycott. The logical conclusion, surely, is to avoid consuming any media that depicts any sin at all. The slight snag with that approach is that sin features fairly heavily in things like, ooh, let me see, the Bible – and one can’t very well boycott that in the name of upholding Christian values, now can one? Indeed, the Bible is relentless in providing lurid details of exactly how vile and depraved humans can be. I dare you to read straight through the book of Judges in one sitting; by the time you get to the bit where some guy is busy cutting up the corpse of his girlfriend who died as a result of being gang-raped by a bunch of guys who were actually interested in her boyfriend until he physically forced her out of the door and into their clutches,³ the entire catalogue of every wrong that has ever been portrayed in a Disney film is going to look like very small potatoes indeed. The Bible has to be explicit about sin in order to expose to us what we’re really like and how desperately we need to be forgiven and sanctified.

 

Look, it hasn’t even got an ‘explicit content’ warning. Outrageous.

So it’s a non-starter to boycott all portrayals of sin. Next possibility: if the Bible only describes sin in order to condemn it, might we take that as the precedent, the base measure? Should we boycott any media that depicts sin in a favourable light? Well, this option leaves us the Bible, granted, but I honestly don’t think it leaves us anything else. Even fiction, or non-fiction, firmly intended and carefully crafted to be as God-honouring as possible is still going to bear the effects of human fallibility. Even media that is utterly saturated in a Biblical worldview is not going to have the perfection of perspective that the word of God does, and that means it is going to stray, subtly or less subtly, towards excusing or even elevating certain sins.

But we’d be mad to cheat ourselves out of all media that isn’t divinely infallible – do bear in mind that this includes sermons and Bible commentaries and books pertaining to matters of Christian living as well as, you know, absolutely everything else – and so we’d be sure to allow ourselves access to some of it, and that means we’d be obliged to start drawing lines, and that means we’d have to make decisions about where those lines ought to be drawn, and all of a sudden we thus find ourselves in a situation not actually all that different from where we are right now. How much favourable portrayal of sin is allowed before something becomes boycott-worthy?

On top of that, how does one tell for sure whether sin is being portrayed favourably or not? Granted, sometimes it’s pretty obvious, but other times it’s difficult to tell what the creator of the media is actually trying to get at, and it’s highly likely that not everyone will agree on the matter. It’s not as if we can let some Grand Authority on Boycott-Worthiness sit around watching TV all day and issuing official Christian policy on which items of media sit on which side of the line – human fallibility in judging what constitutes correctly condemnatory portrayal of sin was, after all, what landed us in this mess in the first place – so we’re going to have to watch and read and listen for ourselves and exercise our own powers of discernment on whether this material is sufficiently God-honouring to be worthy of our attention.

And look where we’ve landed.

Earlier this year, I decided that a fun way to spend a few minutes might be to fill in a survey issued by Desiring God about habits of media consumption among Christians.⁴ A lot of it was about pretty straightforward fact: in an average week, how many hours do you spend watching films (um, four maybe, if I watch two films?), watching TV shows (oh help, it varies hugely – maybe three?), watching live sport (oh good, an easy one: none whatsoever), and so on, but there were some deeper questions of belief and policy too. One of the questions asked me to characterise my general approach to deciding what media to consume: do I watch pretty much anything without giving the matter much thought; do I exercise heavy-handed censorship upon what I watch, but allow myself to become unrestrictedly absorbed in the little media to which I allow myself access; do I watch pretty much anything, but endeavour to exercise Biblically-informed criticism upon it as I do…?

Some of the other questions I pondered for a good while, but not this one: the last option chimed so absolutely with my own media-consumption policy that I could quite happily click on it immediately. And again, I was struck with a sense that this was just obvious. Like, sorry, isn’t that what all Christians do? But in actual fact, it’s not very fair of me to adopt such an attitude, because it’s only within the past few years that what I now see as the necessity of this policy has become a meaningful feature of my life. I’d consider a major turning point in this area to have been a seminar I once attended on a student church week away that advocated approaching media with a determination to ‘watch watchfully’.

We’re already established that if we’re going to allow ourselves to encounter any media at all, we’re going to find ourselves encountering media that denigrates virtue and promotes sin. The best way to respond to this, I believe, is to be very, very conscious of the fact. And yes, that means being aware of specific examples of this or that sin being presented positively, and that that is a Bad Thing, but more importantly, it means taking careful notice of how the broader worldview to which the piece of fiction in front of you subscribes compares to a Biblical one. If it’s not immediately obvious, think it over. What, according to this bit of media, is really important? What is the nature of good, of evil, of life, of humanity, of the universe? How do we find out? And then, when you talk about the media in question, talk about these things too. Have those honest conversations. Understand where culture is coming from and be able to analyse and dismantle that position as appropriate. I’m not saying that having read or heard or seen such-and-such a cultural phenomenon is a prerequisite for being able to preach the gospel in a way that makes sense to our society: the gospel is quite uninhibited by such things, thank you very much. But doesn’t it make more sense, if we’re going to be consuming media anyway, to make a point of knowing how to compare and contrast what media says to what God says, as much where that divergence is wide as where it is apparently less wide, than to construct a necessarily fairly arbitrary list of sins we refuse to see portrayed and so obscure the true message of the gospel behind a catalogue of moral impositions?

 

I of course mean ‘worldview’ in a rather more figurative sense than this quite beautiful image would imply.

If some item of content in a piece of media offends my sensibilities sufficiently that I would boycott the film as a result, that really just proves that that kind of content really isn’t what I need to worry about in terms of my media consumption. What I need to worry about are the lies woven so deeply into my culture that fiction usually just takes them for granted and constructs its storylines round them; what I need to worry about is the possibility that, weaned from birth onto the norms of my society, I might start doing the exact same thing.

A final note before I conclude: if you’ve read my post ‘Conversations with my Internal Nymphomaniac’,⁵ or spoken to me about this topic, you may know that I have a policy of trying to avoid media that includes explicit sex scenes. I do not consider such a policy inconsistent with the argument made above; in actual fact, I’d consider it a component of my watching watchfully. Part of being watchful is being watchful of oneself, of one’s own sins, and of which things are likely to cause one to be tempted. Sex scenes are one example among many; if you realise, say, that certain kinds of lifestyle programmes tend to prompt you to covetousness of a certain kind of lifestyle, or that ‘just one more episode’ is starting to become an idolatrous compulsion, then deciding to avoid particular media as a result seems to me an entirely reasonable response. The key thing is that there is active exercise of discernment going on.

In short, then, I’d encourage us all to worry less about what we watch, and more about how we watch it. I’d encourage us all to watch consciously, critically, watchfully. I love fiction, and I try to evaluate it from a Biblical perspective, and that’s kind of what this blog is all about – which being so, I suppose this post has been, in some sense at least, a justification of my methodology. I really do hope that the kinds of things I tend to ramble about in my cosy little corner of the Internet constitute a halfway-decent example of what watching watchfully looks like, and I really do hope that that might prove in some way vaguely useful to those humans who are kind enough to spend their time reading to the end of posts like this one.

Footnotes 

¹ The BBC will probably do as well as anyone for giving you the particulars: http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/39125727/beauty-and-the-beast-to-feature-disneys-first-gay-character-and-love-scene. 

² Here it is: https://www.premierchristianity.com/Blog/Christians-should-think-twice-before-boycotting-Disney-s-gay-Beauty-and-the-Beast. 

³ It’s a massively grim story, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=judges+19&version=ESVUK, but it’s not exactly exceptional. What about 2 Kings 16, where a woman tries to file a lawsuit against another woman for breaking a pact they had to alternately kill and eat each other’s children, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Kings+6&version=ESVUK? Or the numerous mentions of people sacrificing their own children to foreign gods in fire? Humans are horrific. I accept no dissent. 

⁴ The survey is closed now – results will presumably materialise at some stage – but do check out Desiring God if you’re not already familiar with it; these guys post a lot of good stuff: http://www.desiringgod.org/. 

⁵ Under ‘2016’ then ‘April’ in the box on the right. It’s my second-most-viewed post after ‘Dear Future Husband (Assuming You Exist)’, which would appear to say rather a lot about the interests of my delightful readers.