Religion & Values on TV #1

Religion and Values on TV #1
14 August 2005
Rev. Arline Conan Sutherland

“You’ve got to be taught to love and to hate. You’ve got to be carefully taught,” wrote the famed lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, who, by the way, was a Unitarian. Where do we learn to love and to hate? Who teaches us? Certainly television is one of, if not the, dominant media in our culture today, and every image, every sound bite, communicates values and illustrates the way things should or could be. This sermon series is not one of those turn off your TV and live a better life crusades. Even though I actually think that we all – especially our children - would be better off if we reduced our consumption especially of graphic news stories and programs with violent content. What I am hoping to explore with you is what we are learning about ourselves and others, about religion and morals and values from TV. I am not trying to cast television as the Whore of Babylon or even as merely wicked or as a guilty pleasure. Rather I want to see what role television plays in our religious lives.

There are three points I will explore in these sermons. The first is expanding our ideas of what is sacred, or holy, religious, or spiritual. The second is to take a critical look at the values and morals communicated on TV. The third is to think a little about what we get. What are the senses of meaning, the webs of significance that we receive from TV?

This congregation is in the midst of calling a new minister. The society’s bylaws state that the primary responsibility of the senior minister is to provide spiritual leadership to the congregation. OK. But what do we mean by spiritual? Maybe it would be a good idea to give more content to the concept?

One of four councils in our new governance structure is the Council on Spiritual Life. Those of us who work with that council are wrestling with what we mean by a life of the spirit. A goal for this coming year is to enliven our understanding and deepen our involvement in our personal spiritual lives, that of the council, and that of the congregation. Two conversations about the spiritual life of the congregation have been called. One of them is at noon today. Join us if you can. We need all the input we can get.

One place to begin is with some history. This is the simplistic broad stroke version. For most of our history people in the United States conceived of and experienced religion as something that encompassed one’s entire daily life. The most obvious and extreme examples would be groups such as the Quakers, the Amish, and Orthodox Jewish communities. Within those communities of faith every action and daily behavior has a religious connotation – from the prayers said at the moment of awakening, to the language used, to the clothing one wears, to the food one eats and the ways in which it is prepared. All have religious connotations. People identify and think of themselves as for instance: the people who are married under the chuppah, or those who refer to one another as thee and thou and wear clothing that is designed to accentuate certain notions of what it means to be a man or a woman or the correct way of being human, or as those who don’t eat meat on Friday and who pray the rosary, or those who have been saved by being submerged in a river.

Sidebar – where did the majority of the images that have flitted through your head as I spoke come from? Movies such as Witness, or The Fiddler on the Roof, or The Chosen, or Friendly Persuasion, or Brother Where Art Thou?

Question. How do you conceive of your religion? Is it something that permeates your daily life or is it more of a Sunday morning thing? If you were born and raised in a tradition that understood religion to be part and parcel of your identity and culture as well as your ethnicity and family, how hard has it been to shift your thinking and practice? Why did you shift?

Religion in this country was legislatively freed from government control with the ratification of the first amendment at the end of the 18th century. One hundred years later, at the end of the 19th century, one could say religion in the States was well on its way to being free from its Protestant monopoly. Starting in the early years of the 20th century, another shift in the ways that people have experienced and accessed religious and philosophical thought can be seen. There was a greater mainstream acceptance of non-Christian and even non-Western religious traditions. Not only did increasing numbers of people not identify with a religious tradition, average Americans became more tolerant of that stance. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was the era of the first films.

Starting more or less at the end of WW II, this process began a rapid acceleration. Most individuals now choose among competing elements in the marketplace of constructing meaning. Some of these options may previously have been considered non-religious. In other words, society has been changing the ways in which we express ourselves religiously.

If we think of religion as the search for meaning and webs of significance, as a method of answering the ancient questions, who am I, and how shall I live? Then we will benefit from looking not only at what is considered “officially religious” but also at what we may consider “secular.” In a way this should be most congenial to UU’s who assert that the sacred can be found in the most amazing places. Even on TV?

Do you remember the first time you saw TV? Some of us are old enough that we remember a time when there wasn’t TV. Having spent the early fifties as a child in the Middle East, I remember very clearly. When we returned to the States, my parents decided not to have a TV in the house. Their children were fine with that decision, not knowing any better, for about a week when we got to know some of the neighborhood children well enough to be invited in to watch. We already felt like strangers in a strange land. We were woefully ignorant of American culture. We never really even listened to the radio and were as unaware of the top 40 orThe Shadow. Television gave us entrée into this, our native land, whose ways and language we were learning as fast as we could. I have never forgotten greeting the other kids at the bus stop the morning after we first saw the Davy Crockett show. We knew as much as they did. We belonged. It was an ecstatic moment. Connections of this kind are as fraught with religious import as any one can imagine.

Our sense of community, our values, morals and spirituality are powerfully influenced by what we see on TV. The vast majority of the values communicated are those of the dominant culture that has the resources required. Some examples: The examples were elaborated on ex temporarily

Bridge of Starship Enterprise was an image of Kennedy era thinking. Remember what it looked like? --- What constitutes a family? Beaver, Brady Bunch – single parents, gay parents. Extreme Makeover –bodies and houses. Questions not posed – why don’t these people have a more adequate safety net? Why doesn’t our government provide more adequately? Is all we need a bake sale and a group of willing neighbors? Can we really do it all ourselves?

It has become commonplace to speak of a culture war in our country today. There are conflicting ideologies, varying definitions of who we are as a people, differing interpretations of how we should live, and what values we want to hold up. Television is one of the primary arenas of the conflict. Messages abound. Looking at them critically can assist us to discern what messages we are receiving when for instance we watch the West Wing – a show I refer to as an alternate universe in which, at times, I wished I live, or Reality TV, or the news.

Over the next two weeks I plan to address such questions as, how is religion and the supernatural portrayed on TV? I’ll talk about shows like Oprah, Law and Order, the X-Files, Buffy, and Joan of Arcadia.

I also will take a look at how religious themes are portrayed. Where do we find mythic stories such as Exodus and the Apocalypse? The final battle between good and evil? How are religious rituals such as confession recast?

And we’ll think together about the categories of critique: class, gender, sexual orientation, race, and religion as well as look at how a show such as 24 influences the ways we think about terrorists and expedient means of extracting information from them in time to prevent a nuclear device from destroying Los Angeles.

How we as Americans and how we as UU’s find the sacred differs from generation to generation. Unitarian Universalism holds within it a cycle of generations. Each has been affected by different events and tends to hold different values and philosophies. One gulf seems to be between those of us who are over 60 and those of us who are younger. I suspect this is the same difference alluded to some 30 years ago as “You can’t trust anyone over 30!” The role media such as TV had and currently has in our lives is one expression of this difference.

The Matrix Series, the Lord of the Rings, the Simpsons and Harry Potter raise spiritual, ethical and intellectual issue that many younger adults find worthy of deep discussion. Those of us old folks who can participate in these conversations can engage in an intergenerational dialogue that could bind us together in new and creative ways.

Church is one of the few places in our culture where the generations meet and mix and rub up against one another. No one generational point of view is right or wrong. Rather, we need each other; we could complete one another as together we enter the future.

TV shows that will be referenced in the next two sermons include: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The West Wing, X-Files, Joan of Arcadia, Law and Order, Criminal Intent. They are all most easily seen by renting DVD’s. The Matrix movies and the Lord of the Rings movies are also on DVD. Oprah is on channel 3 at 4:00 p.m. Monday through Friday. The Closer is on channel 35 on Monday nights at 9 p.m.

Let us know of any comments, errors and corrections - thanks (revised 8/16/05)