That's Entertainment?

 

“And now Ladies and Gentlemen, for your entertainment

on our stage tonight, we have a really, really big show.”

                                                                                    Ed Sullivan, 1963

            We have a serious problem in American society, one that has been growing for a long time. Today, it has reached epidemic proportions. It is the insatiable public hunger for entertainment. This “hunger” – at bottom a need for distraction – has invaded nearly all areas of our lives. We now live in a society of constant noise: television, radio, cell phones, and recorded music. We sit at stop lights and often the music from other cars is so loud that it makes our cars vibrate. This apparently is a new inalienable right, the right to make your own noise no matter how intrusive and annoying it is to others.

            This entertainment hunger is addictive! Television is the primary culprit. It is the 20^th century medium, which - from an innocent beginning - has now become a monster. It feeds the entertainment disease and it is with us every hour of every day. It is almost impossible to escape it. Everywhere one goes, televisions are blaring whether people are watching them or not. When I was rector of a parish and doing a lot of home visitation, often I would have to ask people to turn off their TV’s so I could talk with them. Remember when we were content with just one television set in the home? Now everyone in a household has to have their own. Some people have to sleep with them turned on. Apparently many people are uncomfortable with silence. No wonder! They experience so little of it.

            Here is a story about the pervasiveness of television programs and how our brains absorb and retain what we hear. In 1989, just before I came to St. Louis, I went to Honduras with the North Dakota National Guard. I was the chaplain with the 164^th Combat Engineer Group. Our people were building a farm-to-market road and our rotation in country lasted three weeks. On the night before we were to fly back to the States, we were taken to a bivouac near the airport, fed, and given army cots. There was literally nothing to do and so about three hundred soldiers were just lying on their cots early in the evening wide awake waiting for darkness. Suddenly I heard someone start singing, “Flintstones, meet the Flintstones, they’re the modern stone age family, from the town of Bedrock, they’re a page right out of history . . .” Most of the soldiers joined in and sang through the whole lyric of the Flintstones theme song. When they finished, the leader sang, “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip, that started from this tropic port, about this tiny ship. . .” Again a large number of the soldiers joined him in singing the Gilligan’s Island theme. This went on for a long time through many, many television program theme songs. I just laid back on my cot and laughed! I was amazed that all these guys retained an almost perfect memory of all those songs. Thinking about it later, I was not so amazed. They had all been raised on this stuff and had heard it countless times. They had all been away from television for three weeks and most of them were a bit homesick. Singing those TV theme songs was very expressive of a need!

            The amusing thing about television today is that, even with the multiplicity of channels available, there is very little that people want to watch. Years ago, we would have thought that having 150 program choices would be entertainment heaven. Sadly, the human hunger for entertainment has become so jaded that most of what is on is no longer satisfying. Enter the bizarre in the form of reality TV. Someone please explain to me the popularity of this phenomenon. Don’t people know that it’s all carefully staged? If this stuff has anything to do with reality, God help us.

            This introduces an attendant issue in the entertainment discussion, i.e. the reality programming called television news. The onslaught on our minds & emotions by television news reporting and commentary 24/7 has changed the world and not for the better. I have to observe that the steady barrage of political opinion from the left on CNN and the right on Fox has contributed greatly to the cynicism and division in our country. I say, “Enough already!” This steady barrage of (bad) news is depressing. People are sick and tired of it!

            It is amusing to me what all this communication capability has done to people. They are isolated & insulated in their own little worlds of social media, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, texting, etc. The other day I was in a coffee shop in Bismarck, North Dakota with my brother and a friend of mine. We were doing some reminiscing and we happened to notice three young people sitting at a nearby table. Well, they were sitting together but that is about as far as it went!  We watched them for a while and not one of them ever spoke to the other two. They were totally absorbed in their lap tops, IPads and cell phones. So much for face to face conversation! People would rather play with their electronic toys than talk to each other.

            Speaking of electronics, I have a theory about the poor level of achievement in public schools. One of the reasons is the great difficulty which education has with the issue of homework. Today’s children have been brought up on a steady diet of television, music, cell phones, and video games which they can enjoy literally all the time. Entertainment! This “training” makes it nearly impossible for a child to sit down in front of a text book and do math problems. That is definitely not entertainment! It’s work! Which is a child going to choose, entertainment or work? You’ve got to be kidding!  The whole system breaks down at the point when the student has to sit down and do the work. Boring! How often have you heard that? The entertainment culture has bred a deep need for instant gratification.

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            My real problem with all of this has to do with the fact that many people think that everything should become part of the entertainment culture, even the church. What kind of churches have popped up everywhere and have enjoyed a rapid rate of growth? You guessed it! It is churches which entertain people with performances of popular music. It’s called entertainment evangelism. The people sit in comfortable theatre seats and enjoy musical and other presentations which require no input or participation on their part. They have seemingly done away with a formal liturgy and the sacraments. Is this really the church? I wonder!

            Worshipping is not about entertainment! It is about transcendence and a sometimes agonizing assessment of our personal lives. It is about the element of personal sacrifice modeled for us by Jesus. It’s about personal transformation, a painful process at best. It is about a call to die to self and a summons to rise to new life in the community of the faithful. It’s about a call to reconciliation and mission and personal witness! I have rarely found the church to be entertaining. I have found it to be deeply challenging and fulfilling! The church quite frankly is serious business and it ought to be so. What we desperately need in our society is less entertainment and a more serious focus on the many perplexing questions about life which confront us daily. Our souls are dying in this glut of entertainment.

 

                                                                        The Rev. Dr. Richard B. Tudor