Mind Renewal in a Mindless World

6 · Connects Blamires's cultural diagnosis back to the primary text (Romans 12), asserting that Paul's command not to conform to the world is precisely the call to develop a Christian mind that thinks according to God's categories rather than secular thought patterns

It's a very serious thing, and yet it is generally unknown simply because we aren't thinking about it. And yet here is Paul saying in the 12th chapter of Romans that we're not to be conformed to the the world. We're not to be thinking like the world, going along with the world's pattern of behavior. It's secularism, it's humanism, it's relativism, it's materialism. But rather we're to be transformed from within and actually have a Christian mind and think as God thinks.

7 · Escalates the diagnosis beyond Blamires's 1963 assessment: the problem has worsened from loss of Christian mind to near-total absence of serious thinking in Western culture, justifying the sermon title's phrase 'mindless age

Now, that book was written in 1963, as I said, about 30 years ago. Things have not gotten better in the past three decades. As a matter of fact, they've gotten worse. To the point at which today I would say it's not a matter of us no longer having a Christian mind. There's hardly any mind at all. That's really what our modern culture is like, which is what I'm getting at when I talk about mind renewal in a mindless age. We live in mindless times where people really are not thinking very deeply about anything at all.

8 · Catalogs the cultural forces producing mindlessness: materialism displaces abstract thought with mall-cruising, philosophical skepticism removes motivation to pursue truth, and fast-paced living eliminates the uninterrupted time required for reading and reflection

Now, a lot of causes for that. One is our materialism. We are secular in that respect. We think that the good of life consists in the things that we have. Materialism works against the mind, the spirit. You don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about things abstractly. If what you think the chief end of man is is to acquire as much as you can or to cruise the malls. You spend your time doing that, you're not thinking. We also live in a society that is skeptical philosophically. What I mean by that is we really doubt that you can get to know truth or come up with absolutes that have any meaning. And so if you don't really have any absolutes out there to be discovered, well, why should you waste time thinking about it? Right? So that has an impact. We also live in a very fast paced culture. You know, we race from appointment to appointment, we fly from here to there. We have this business deal to enact, and we have the children to take here and the children to take there and so forth. And we're rushing back and forth so fast that you really don't have time to think. It takes time to think. It takes uninterrupted time to think. You have to sit down with a book and read and reflect and so forth. And that's just not the kind of world in which we live. So we have all of those things working against us. And they're working not only against the non Christian world, but out there, they're working against the Christian world as well. In some ways, Christians are busier, more preoccupied with things than other people because we have all the church activities we have to attend to as well as the kind of things we do in the world.

9 · Isolates television as the primary culprit behind cultural mindlessness, subordinating the previously mentioned factors (materialism, skepticism, pace) to this single dominant force shaping modern consciousness

Now, having said all that, having talked about this kind of philosophical skepticism and materialism and the fast pace of our life, I do want to say that I think the chief cause of the mindlessness of our times is television. We live in a television culture. It's very important what happens to us as thinking or non thinking people because of television.

10 · Transitions into an extended illustration of television's cultural power by introducing Ted Koppel's Duke University graduation address, which Boice will use to develop his argument about television's nature and effects

Let me tell you how I first got alerted to this and began thinking about it a number of years ago. Now it would be five or six years ago. Ted Koppel, who's well known from the Nightline program on television, gave a graduation address at Duke University.

11 · Narrates Koppel's address, highlighting his application of the Ten Commandments to contemporary scandals (Wall Street, televangelists) as a call to ethical recovery

It was really a very impressive address for a secular person before a secular audience. Ted Koppel talked in that address about the Ten Commandments. And you may have heard somebody refer to it. One thing he said in the address is when God gave us the Ten Commandments, he gave us ten Commandments, not ten suggestions. Ever hear that? And furthermore, he says, they are the Ten Commandments, not were the Ten Commandments. And then he did. I think it was rather brilliant as well as courageous. He began to take the Ten Commandments, especially those in the second table of the law, and apply them to the great scandals of our time. You will not bear false witness. And he linked it up to the insider trading scandals on Wall street involving Botsky and others. And he said, there's a command that has bearing on our culture. You shall not commit adultery. He talked about the scandals with the TV evangelists and so forth. He went down through a number of them and sort of recalled people to an ethical base. We need to rediscover ethics in our society, is what he was saying.

12 · Develops Koppel's opening provocation—'America has been vanitized'—by describing Vanna White's role on Wheel of Fortune and her global imitations

Now, I thought that was very impressive. But what interested me most about what Koppel said is what he said in the very first sentence. Very first thing that Ted Koppel said when he stood up before this secular graduating audience is this. He said, america has been vanitized. He knew nobody knew what that meant. He was coining a word. It was the first time that the word vanitized was ever used, I suppose. And so in the next sentence, he explained what he meant. He said, that's vanitized, as in Vanna White. I can always tell how spiritual an audience is, whether they laugh at that. You see, spiritual ones don't laugh at all. They don't know who Vanna White is. I did not at the time know who Vanna White was, but I have watched her since. Vanna White is this very attractive blonde lady on the Wheel of Fortune game show who has this very difficult job. Anna White stands over on one side of the game board, and the contestants call out the letters that are going to be involved in what is spelled out here, what they're trying to guess. And when they guess one of those letters, Anna White goes around and touches it or turns it to light it up on all the places where the letter occurs. And when she gets over to this side of the game board, she claps her hands. Now, that is what Vanna White does. It's a very difficult job for which she is paid an awful lot of money and for which she is very well known. Not only is she well known, she's imitated. You know, that all over the world there are televised game shows like Wheel of Fortune that have a character named Vanna White, except they give her different names. I was just with some Australians and was talking to them about it. They have one out there in Australia, and her name is Adriana. She doesn't even have a last name. It just sort of adds to the mystique. And there's a girl like this in Germany, in the German version, one in France and so on.

13 · Delivers Koppel's central insight: Vanna White's popularity derives precisely from her blankness—she is an empty image on which viewers project their desires

Now, Ted Koppel called attention, first of all to how well known, how popular Vanna White is. He said, if there were a list Today of the 10 most admired women in America, Vanna White would be somewhere near the top. And then he said, but isn't it interesting? On the game show, Vanna White never says a word. Now, I've noticed since she does occasionally say some things like they're running short at the end of the program, 10 seconds short, you can hear her say to the contestant, I think you did very well today. You know, profound things like that. But at any rate, Vanna White doesn't say anything. And so Ted Koppel asked the question, how can a woman about whom we know absolutely nothing personally be so popular? And then he answered, because we don't know anything about her, that she's so popular. She's a beautiful image on the screen into which we project our own desires.

14 · Completes Koppel's argument: television creates the illusion of knowledge while actually producing ignorance compounded by unawareness of ignorance

I'll tell you exactly how he said it, because he said it very well. He's talking about Vanna White. He asks the question, is she a feminist or every male chauvinist dream? She's whatever you want her to be. Sister, lover, daughter, friend. Never cross, non threatening, non judgmental to a fault. Why is he beginning that way? Well, he wants to talk about television. And what he wants to say is this. We think of television as being this modern communication tool that is so wonderful that all of us know more about what's going on in the world and are better informed than any people in all the ages of human history. And he says exactly the opposite is the true. It's working against knowledge. Because television is not a medium that is pouring out all this information at us all the time. Rather, it's an image on the screen into which we project our desires, you see. So we're not actually learning. We're projecting our desires on the screen and having sort of a vicarious experience with what we see there. But we don't actually know who Vanna White is. And as a matter of fact, we know very little about anybody. Now he's saying that's what's happening to our society. It's bad enough that we don't know what's going on. Or what's even worse is we don't know. We don't know what's going on.

15 · Transitions from Koppel's popular illustration to academic analysis by recommending books, establishing that developing a Christian mind requires reading serious works

Now, that's a popular way of talking about it. I use it to get into the. The subject. But let me introduce a more serious study of the subject. I want to recommend some books along the way. Because the way to become a thinking Christian is to read. Unless you're absolutely brilliant, you can think of all these thoughts by yourself. But I'm not. I have to read. And I'm going to suggest books along the way. The first one I've already suggested is Harry Blaymire's book on the Christian Mind. And if you like that, read It. I hope you will. He's got another one. Since Developing a Christian, Christian Minds come out more recently. Two good books to study, but here's the second or the third one.

16 · Introduces Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death as the academic foundation for understanding television's destructive effect on public discourse, noting Postman's secular credentials to underscore that this is not merely a Christian complaint but a broader cultural observation

I really want to suggest this man is not a Christian, as far as I know. His name is Neil Postman, probably Jewish. Neil Postman, I don't really know, but he teaches at New York University in the area of communications. And he's written a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death. And that has a subtitle, Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. It's mostly about television. Amusing Ourselves to Death. Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. I want to just review a little bit about what Postman says in that book.

17 · Contrasts Orwell's *1984* (totalitarian suppression of thought) with Huxley's Brave New World (voluntary abandonment of thought through entertainment)

In the preface he makes the point. This book came out in 1985 and he reminds us that it's just one year after 1984. And the significance of 1984 is that there was a futuristic novel by George Orwell by that title that projected a future age, sort of a utopia, but it was an anti utopia. Orwell envisioned an age where you had an oppressive government. You know, we have the term Big Brother. You know, Big Brother is watching you. That came from Orwell's book. We have the term double speak, where you say one thing but you actually mean the opposite. That came from Orwell's book and so forth. Well, Orwell had this vision of a society. We think of it more or less as the communist society in which people are kept from reading. Nobody's allowed to read a book, nobody's allowed to think because the state is forcing them to do what the state wants it to do. Well, he says in the preface, we forget that about the same time that Orwell wrote 1984, there was another futuristic negative utopia novel by Aldous Huxley. And his book was called Brave New World. And it pictured a world in which nobody read any books. But the reason was quite different. It's not because they weren't allowed to read any books. It's because nobody wanted to read any books. You see, in this world, everybody's taken care of, everybody is happy, everybody is entertained. They have something like television watching them all the time and that they're watching it all the time. They have a drug that they kind of take that makes them feel good when they watch television. They sort of have a little thing they hang onto with their hands, it's called the feelies that make them actually feel what's going on and everybody just sort of lulled into nothing.

18 · Establishes Postman's central thesis: the shift from typography (word-based communication fostering thought) to television (image-based communication discouraging thought) represents a fundamental change in how Western culture processes reality, with devastating consequences for the capacity to think

And what Postman says in the beginning is look, we look at the former communist states and we say, oh yeah, there's that big, bad negative utopia. Orwell really had it right for them. And he forgets that the Western world has fallen into the pattern of the negative utopia described by Aldous Huxley, you see, and then he goes in to talk about how it happens. He makes a point contrasting two kinds of communication. He says, there was an age when communication was dominated by topography that refers to writing type. And he said, you know, in that age where people communicated by words, they read magazine articles, newspapers, and began to think according to the kind of laws that you have when you write something down, people really could think and they really didn't know what was going on. But he says the age of typography has been supplanted now by the age of television, where we're not communicating chiefly in words, though of course we do have that at the same time, but we're communicating chiefly by images on a screen. And that is not an age that is inducive to thinking.

19 · Contrasts Lincoln-Douglas debates (six-hour word-based exchanges producing informed voters) with television politics (image-based, no time for reflection)

Now, let me just illustrate it a little bit. Think back. I know you can remember back a hundred years or so to the famous debates, political debates between Abraham Lincoln and Douglas. Now they were famous. That was sort of a high water mark in the politics of America. These two men would get out on the fairground out in Illinois or somewhere, and they'd have thousands of people there for the fair and there'd be a little platform like this and they'd have it all set up and Lincoln and Douglas would debate the political issues of the day. They would debate the political issues of the day for six or seven hours. And people would gather around and listen to them for six or seven hours. People really knew what was going on. Furthermore, what they debated was picked up by the reporters and by means of the telegraph, it was communicated all over America and it appeared the next day in the newspapers. And people read the newspapers and they really did know where Abraham Lincoln stood and where Douglas stood and where the other political figures of the day stood. So when they went to the polls to vote, they were voting intelligently. They knew what they were talking about. Now, you see what Postman says is, words do that. You know, when you read an article, you think about it, if you can still think, and what you do is you understand what that person is trying to say and try to get into it. If you don't agree with it, you say, I don't agree with that and why don't I agree with that? You think it over. You say, well, because he's leaving out this. And you begin to produce arguments that are to the contrary. And it helps to stimulate your thought and firm up your own opinions. But you don't have that on television. Television doesn't give you information. It presents pictures and furthermore it doesn't give you time to think about it, even if it did present information, because it changes quickly from one thing to the other.

20 · Demonstrates television's structural inability to inform by noting that the average news segment is 45 seconds—insufficient time to convey meaningful information and immediately displaced by the next segment before reflection is possible

Let me illustrate a little bit how it works. Take news on television. That's where we would start. Because we think whatever the entertainment on television might be, at least we have the news programs. We get all this great news from the networks, so we really know what's going on. Do you know that the average news segment on network television, not the local television, our local television in Philadelphia is a joke. But on network news out of New York, the big networks, the average news segment is 45 seconds. Now, how much news do you think you can get in 45 seconds? Plus, not only do you only have your 45 seconds, maybe you could say something significant in 45 seconds if you had time to think about it. But of course, immediately it changes to something else. And so immediately what you've just seen is out of your head, you don't really get time to reflect on it.

21 · Personal anecdote from Memphis TV interview: witnessed a Japanese typhoon story (30 seconds, many dead) immediately followed by 'now this' and a cooking segment on teriyaki

Sometimes it's tragic. I remember I was in Memphis a number of years ago, we were doing one of our reformed theology conferences there and somebody in Memphis thought, well, they had connections with a TV station they could get us on to do an interview. And so they set up an interview for me on the Friday before the conference started. And I had come in the night before. So I went down to the station, it was Channel 6, as I recall. And they have this TV news show at 12 o' clock noon. They wouldn't have put this on at night, I think, but they did it at noontime. And I was supposed to have a two minute interview. Well, I'm sitting there in the studio waiting for my two minute segment and I'm listening to them do the news and they're reading it off the teleprompter, of course, and here they're reading the first news story and the second news story and then all of a sudden right in the middle of it, there is a beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. You know, that's the clue that you got a fast breaking news story, right? Something had just come in over the wire, picks you up. You got to listen to this sort of thing. Well, it was all on the teleprompter, it's a staged thing. You know, it might have been fast breaking, but it wasn't fast breaking enough that they couldn't get it. Actually, they were ad libbing this. It was on the teleprompter. So this thing comes on and I'm watching this and what it was is a storm that had struck some of the islands of Japan and there had been a lot of destruction. It was a typhoon, a lot of people were dead and cities were flooded and that sort of thing. Now what you should have done if you were responding to that in a human way, is stop and think in terms of the victims of the tragedy. It should evoke some kind of compassion in your heart. I mean, it might be half a world away and there might be nothing that you can do about it, but here are people that are dying, are dead, you see. But that isn't what happened. This thing went on for about 30 seconds, about the right length for a fast breaking important news story. And then this announcer said, now this. Well, that rang a bell with me because Postman's chapter on TV news is called now this. He says those are the words you hear most often on network news. And you know exactly what it means. It's a conjunction. It's linking up this little segment with the segment that is to come. But it doesn't operate the way a conjunction operates. A conjunction links, that's the meaning of the word conjunction. This is actually a conjunction that separates. And what it means is what you're about to see has no relationship whatsoever to what you have just seen. Furthermore, it probably doesn't have any relationship to anything. And so he said, now this. And you know what happened? They switched to their version of the Galloping Gourmet. There's a local one there in, in Memphis. And it was taped in advance, but the guy wasn't doing this in the studio. So they went to this little tape segment. And what was this man teaching you? How to make teriyaki. It was ludicrous. You see here we've got a real life tragedy. Now this we switch over to the other thing, we forget all about it because what we want to do is prepare a Japanese dish.

22 · Extends the Memphis illustration into systemic critique: television news prevents human response to tragedy because its purpose is commercial—keeping viewers watching to sell advertising

Now you see what Postman is saying. If we're operating that way, we're given the impression that we know what's going on, but we don't know what's going on. And the. And even if we did, we don't have any time to really think about it like human beings. What if the announcer thought about it like a human being, you know, there are a lot of tragedies on television. I sort of got into the habit in Philadelphia. When I see the news at night, which is not every night, but when I do, I count the number of murders that are the news stories. How many different murders are they're talking about that night? Five or six, you know, normally at a time. Not five or six people necessarily killed every day. Some spillover from the day before and so forth. But I hear people dying, you know, and then they love the pictures of the body bags being brought out. And if they can get weeping people on the screen, you know, that's just great for television. What would you think of an announcer that was actually touched by that, like a human being should be? There's a mother that's lost a three year old child. A random drive by shooting in the drug area of the city. This woman's crying. What if, if the announcer recognized the tragedy in that family, that this lawlessness in our society is snatching away three years old and he would begin to cry. Announcer like that wouldn't make it on television. You get rid of him. You can't do that because they're there to sell goods, you see. And the whole objective of television news is to make it interesting, keep it moving quickly. Go from a commercial to a news story to the weather and so forth. So you'll watch our channel rather than somebody else's channel. And we can charge more for our commercials than they can. It's the way it operates. That sounds cynical, but it's not. That is exactly the way it's done.

23 · Pivots from television news to television politics, introducing Postman's chapter title 'Reach Out and Elect Someone' to signal the next extended illustration of television's destructive effect on public discourse

Let me switch to another area, an area that we know a little bit better. How about politics on television? We're glad we have television because we get to see the guys, right? If you see the guys, you ought to know where he's coming from, what he really believes. Well, do we really know what's going on? You know, this particular chapter in Postman's Book is called Reach out and Elect Someone.

24 · Unpacks Reagan's claim that 'politics is just like show business': in show business, the goal is to convincingly pretend, not to be; therefore, televised politics rewards the appearance of integrity/competence over the reality, making image management rather than substance the path to electoral success

And he begins with a comment that Ronald Reagan made when Ronald Reagan was president. Ronald Reagan says politics is just like show business. Well, that's not surprising. Of course, he was an actor. He certainly saw the parallels. You'd expect that sort of thing. But when you begin to reflect on it, politics is just like show business. What does that mean? What is show business? You put on something on the stage, what you're doing is pretending, right? That's not bad on the stage, but you're pretending. If you're playing A king in the role. You're pretending to be a king, but you're not really a king if you're playing an angry role. You're pretending to be somebody angry, but you're not really angry. So if politics is just like show business, then politics is what is pretending. So the objective of politics is not honesty and integrity and competence. The objective of the political process is to appear as if you have integrity and honesty and competence. See, that's what it is. So the way you get elected is to create the right kind of image, not necessarily to be the thing itself.

25 · Traces the birth of televised politics to the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates, where radio listeners (processing words) judged Nixon the winner while TV viewers (processing images) judged Kennedy the winner

Now, how do people get elected today to the highest office? Do they get elected like Abraham Lincoln did by discussing the issues? No, they don't. It's not the way people got elected today. You know, the TV age, as far as politics is concerned, came in the year that Richard Nixon finally won the presidency. You know, he had lost it earlier to Kennedy as a result of the television debates, the first real televised debates. And the general wisdom of the politicians as they reflected on that debate and the subsequent loss of the election by Nixon is that he lost it because of the debate. And the reason he lost it is it didn't come across well on the screen. I'm sure you remember that he's supposed to have had a hard image for a soft medium. It is interesting. You know, after that debate, they did surveys of people who had seen it on television, people who had heard it on radio. They were broadcast simultaneously. And those who heard it on radio, by large percentages, this is like 60 or 70% agreed that Nixon had won the debate. And those who watched it on television, by equally large percentages, agreed that Kennedy had won the debate. Well, it wasn't lost on the. On the campaign managers. They knew exactly what was happening. Television doesn't work like the old, you know, radio is still talking by words. It's not by images. And so they said, look, if we're going to win in the future, we're going to have to do it differently.

26 · Quotes Nixon's 1968 campaign manager Bill Gavin's internal strategy memo (revealed in Joe McGinnis's The Selling of the President): explicitly abandon 'linear logic' and 'reason' in favor of 'impressions' that 'envelop' without demanding intellectual engagement

So the next time around, they conducted Nixon's campaign as a televised campaign. He had a campaign manager. His name was Bill Gavin. And Gavin wrote some documents that were to guide the campaign. We know what they were because a political writer, his name's Joe McGinnis, wrote a book called the Selling of the president in 1968, when he finally won the election. And he quoted Bill Gavin. And here's what Bill Gavin said in one of these documents. With the campaign workers, break away from linear logic, present a barrage of impressions of Attitudes, reason pushes the viewer back. It assaults him. It demands that he agree or disagree impression can envelop him. Invite him in without making an intellectual demand. Get the voters to like the guy, and the battle is two thirds won. That's the way they conducted the campaign. And Richard Nixon won.

27 · Briefly analyzes Reagan's 1980 and 1984 victories as primarily television triumphs—his actor's training made him effective on the medium, which mattered more than policy differences with his opponents

How about 1980 or even 1984, when Ronald Reagan won? Why did Reagan win in 80 and even more decisively in 84? Was it because of his convictions, his policies? I think they had something to do with it. They were distinctly different. But really the chief reason why he did so well, he was an actor. Came across well on television. Good on television. Right.

28 · Analyzes the 1988 Bush-Dukakis race to demonstrate that substantive policy differences (foreign policy, abortion, civil rights, Supreme Court) were not the actual issues voters engaged

Let me take the most recent campaign, except for the very most recent campaign, the campaign in which George Bush beat out Michael Dukakis, 1988. Now, I think you can fairly say that neither one of those guys is a wonderful television personality. None of them were Ronald Reagan. Bush won. But what was the issue of that campaign? Why did George Bush win in 1988 over Michael Dukakis? What was the issue? There's only one issue in the campaign. I challenge you. Now, think back to that. Here you've got one man who's supposed to be a conservative Republican, whatever that means. Another man is supposed to be a liberal Democrat, whatever that means. I would suppose that the two of them different on foreign policy, different on domestic policy, different on the issues of abortion and civil rights and the extent of law and the role of the Supreme Court, all of those things. But, you know, think back. That's not so far back. Can you remember on any one of those, this is what George Bush believed and this is what Michael Dukakis believed. You can't remember those things. It's not that far back, but you can't remember them. The reason is, those were not the issues of the campaign. There was really only one issue in that campaign. Now, you're going to think I'm being facetious on this, but I'm not. This was the issue of the campaign. I can express it in five words. Is George Bush a wimp?

29 · Develops the 'wimp' issue: Bush looked wimpy on television, so Dukakis's strategy was to associate Bush with weakness

You haven't forgotten that, have you? That's the question they were raising early on. Why were they raising the question, is George Bush a wimp? Well, because he looked like a wimp on television. He's tall and kind of ungainly and, you know, he held his head over to one side a little bit and his voice wasn't terribly robust and he looked wimpy. So if the Dukakis camp could get the voters to associate the name of George Bush with wimpyhood. Then Dukakis would win because nobody wants a wimp for a president. You gotta have a strong president. So what did Dukakis do? What is the one image you have of Michael Dukakis in that 1988 campaign? You can remember, can't you? Michael Dukakis riding around on a tank. Can't you remember that? Riding around? He wanted to dismantle the military. That was Dukakis point of view. Riding around a tank was ludicrous in terms of what he actually stood for. But you see, he was trying to show that he was strong and George Bush was wimpy.

30 · Bush's response was the Willie Horton revolving-door ad—criticized by media as unfair but actually perfectly logical within television's visual-impression framework

Now how did the Bush campaign respond? Well, they responded by hitting back strongly against Michael Dukakis. And so you had this ad campaign that made everybody furious because it seemed so unfair. Remember they had the guy, Willie Horton who had been locked up and Dukakis had an early release thing there in Massachusetts. This guy got out and he killed few more people or something like that. So the Republicans did this campaign ad where you had a revolving door on the prison and all of the convicted prisoners were going in, the door was swinging around, they're coming right back out again, you know. Oh, the media was outraged at that. Peter Jennings and Dan Rather and so forth. They said this is the most unsubstantial, unreal, dirtiest campaign in all of history. But they missed the point. You see, it's the way to television operates. It's not what Bush stands for, it's not what Dukakis stands for. It has nothing to do with the character of the two men. I don't think that was characteristic of Bush. You saw him for four years. I would say his strength is his ability to compromise politically. That's both a strength and a weakness. And it showed up well in the Iran war because he get all the allies working with him. That worked pretty well. Didn't work so well on the domestic front. Couldn't do that quite so well with the Congress and so on. But it seems to me his real character was that. Not this hard hitting character. But he won the campaign because he proved that he really wasn't a wimp. That's the way it worked.

31 · Briefly applies the analysis to Clinton's victory—good television presence (curly hair, twinkly eyes) mattered more than substance

Why did Bill Clinton win? Heaven only knows why Bill Clinton won. But I think the reason he won is that he was a better television candidate. He looked good on television. Looks arrogant on television maybe, but he looks good. You know, he has curly hair, he has twinkly eyes and so forth. Might have character behind it, but you see, until you see the guy in operation, you just don't know, you see. So we look at television, we think we know them because we see the pictures. But what we see is carefully orchestrated. You see, we really live in a mindless culture.

32 · Pivots from politics to religion, introducing Postman's chapter 'Shuffle Off to Bethlehem' to signal that the same television dynamics corrupting politics are now corrupting religious practice

What I'm leading up to is that all of this has bearing on religion. Neil Postman has a book on religion which he calls Shuffle off to Bethlehem, talking about how television, because it's chiefly entertainment, turns even religion into entertainment.

33 · Categorizes religious television: successful shows are either entertainment-format church services (vaudeville) or religious talk shows (PTL Club as Christian Merv Griffin)

You see, the television shows that do well, the religious television shows that do well are those that are chiefly entertainment. They operate in entertainment format. There are exceptions. Billy Graham's an exception. He's an exception. Almost everything he does, but he's not on every day. He comes on periodically. Certain periods, they televise campaigns. You see Graham preaching there on the television for the bulk of the program. From a medium perspective, that's bad. Television doesn't move quickly enough. It's good religion because he's actually preaching, you see, he's an exception. But the long standing programs, the ones that do well are either the ones that televised church services, which are chiefly vaudeville with all their entertainment numbers and that kind of thing, or they're talk shows like Merv Griffin. PTL Club is like that. You sit around the living room, you sort of bat things around, you have religious subject matter rather than the secular subject matter. But that's the kind of thing that works. That's entertainment. That's not teaching the word of God, just entertainment, you see.

34 · Introduces Postman's central critique of religious television: the issue is not what you gain (audience, money) but what you lose—a sense of God's transcendent presence

Now you say, well, what's wrong with that? I mean, why not have religious entertainment better than secular entertainment? Well, maybe, except that we're in the business of having to do with God. And that's what's missing on religious television. Now here's the secular man, Neil Postman, writing about it. He says, I don't say, what do you gain when you put religion on television? You know what you gain? You gain a mass audience and you make a lot of money. Of course, that's a downfall also. But he says, I don't ask what you gain, I ask what you lose. He says, what you lose is a sense of the transcendent. What he means is a sense of God, the presence of God. This is a secular man, I think, telling us this. He said, in order to have a sense that you're there on spiritual business dealing with God, you don't have to have a cathedral, you don't even have to have a church like this. You can meet in a gymnasium. But what you do is you set up a pulpit, you open up a Bible. If you're liturgical, you hang a cross on the wall and people come in, they're quiet. There's a hymn, there's an invocation. You pray for the blessing of God on the service. There's a sense that you're there to deal with God. But that's exactly what you don't have on television. All you have on television is the screen. And the only thing you see on screen is the picture. And the picture is the picture of the star, right? And the stars get the idea that they're stars. They begin to live that way, and it becomes not a religious thing at all.

35 · Quotes Postman's summary judgment: televised religion strips away everything essential to historic religion—ritual, dogma, tradition, theology, transcendence—leaving only the preacher as star and reducing God to 'second banana

I want to read you what Postman says. When you put religion on television, everything that makes religion an historic, profound and sacred human activity is stripped away. There is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence. On these shows, the preacher is tops. God comes out as second banana.

36 · Quotes Postman's devastating diagnosis: television inherently plays the visible (Cronkite, Swaggart) over the invisible (Milky Way, God) because the medium traffics in visible images

Let me read you something else, he says. He explains, it's the way it is, the way television operates. He's not saying they're setting out to do that. CBS knows. Now, this is a little old. Remember back in the 80s when he wrote this? CBS knows that Walter Cronkite plays better on television than the Milky Way, and Jimmy Swigert plays better than God. For God exists only in our minds, whereas Swigert is there to be seen, admired, adored, which is why he is the star of the show. Then he's got a profound statement. He pauses and he says, now, I'm not a theologian, and maybe I don't know the right word for this, but I think the right word for it is blasphemy.

37 · Extends Postman's analysis to its ecclesiological consequences: television's pervasiveness (7

Now, somebody's going to say at that point, well, okay, but still, it's better to have religious entertainment on television than secular entertainment on television, right? Well, the problem, you see, is that because television is so pervasive and because people are watching it so much of the time, the average television set in the average home is on seven and a half hours a day. The average person watches it more than two hours a day. The average teenager watches two hours, mtv, every day, okay? It's on so much, it's so pervasive, that there are tremendous pressures on the churches to conform to what is seen on television. What does that mean? Basically, it means that church should be fun. Another way of saying church should be entertaining. It's another way of saying church should be amusing. You know what the word amusing means? First part of it? The A is the negative. Amuse means to think it means not thinking. That's what amusing means. And so church becomes amusing. We don't want people to think about their souls. They don't want to think about their souls. So we don't want them to think about their souls. Because if we're trying to get them to do something they don't want to do, they won't come to church. What they want to do is have a good time. They want to sing kind of catchy songs that are upbeat. So when they go away, they say, oh, oh, didn't we have a good time in church today? You see, that's what you want to do. And so there's enormous pressures on a minister to conform to the TV image. What are they told? Keep it short, brother. Nobody going to listen to long sermons today. Can't be long. Can't be as long as Dan over there. He tells me he preaches 45 minutes. That's suicide today. Preach 45 minutes. My goodness, people can barely listen. Five minutes. I mean, if you can stretch a sermon out to 15, you're doing great. And the only way you can do that is if you take. Tell stories. I mean, you're not going to talk about theology, certainly. I mean, who's interested in theology today? So you say, don't talk about sin. Don't talk about redemption. Don't use a word like propitiation. I mean, it's even hard to pronounce that, you know? And if you want to talk about the character of God, forget it. Who cares whether God is sovereign or holy or omniscient or transcendent or whatever else it may be. Tell stories. People want to feel good. They're depressed. So tell them something that lifts them up. They're discouraged. Give them encouragement. That's the way it's done. And eliminate anything in the service that is somber or boring. You know, the number one complaint about people today when you poll a secular audience why they don't go to church is that it's boring. Well, no wonder it's boring. They're not interested in God. Of course it's boring if church does what it ought to do.

38 · Observes the progressive elimination of Scripture reading (from Puritan whole chapters to modern five-six verses) and pastoral prayers (with ACTS structure: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication) from evangelical services

You know, I get into a lot of churches, and as I travel around, I kind of observe the sort of things that happen. And I notice that the scripture readings, for example, are getting shorter and shorter. You know, back in the. In the Puritan age, they read a whole chapter of the Old Testament, and they read a whole chapter of the New Testament, and we don't even read a chapter, you know, and we certainly don't do both. And we sort of handle, you know, five or six verses, if we do it at all. I mean, churches don't bring scripture at all. And how about prayers? Prayers are disappearing in the evangelical churches. I don't know if you've seen that, but maybe you don't get around as much as I do. I'm sure you have them here. But, you know, I get into churches and I find that what happens is this. We always begin with prayer. I don't know why, but we do. And then when we take up the offering, we always pray. And I do understand that because it requires the supernatural work of God to get people to part with their money. That. That at least makes sense. But, you know, there used to be pastoral prayers. Remember the word, pastoral prayers, where the pastor prayed for the flock. Remember the old acts, acrostic, adoration, confession, thanksgiving and supplication. People used to adore God. They used to rehearse the attributes of God in their prayer, acknowledging his sovereignty, his grace, his holiness, all of those things. And then on the basis of that, confess their sin because of God as a holy God. And we've really come into his presence. We. What we're aware of is our sinfulness. So we confess that we're a sinful people. We have sinned against you in thought, word and deed. We have done that which we ought not to have done. We have left undone the things that we ought to have done. And there's no health in us. I used to pray that and then begin to thank God for things. He's been awfully gracious. We're sinners, but he's been terribly gracious with us. Think of all that we have that we enjoy. We don't deserve any of it. And then finally we begin to make supplications for those who are lacking health or sufficient money to survive or a job or whatever it may be. That's what pastoral prayers used to be. They're gone in the evangelical churches today, or going. Because God is going. We talk about God.

39 · Introduces David Wells's diagnosis from No Place for Truth: evangelicals hold orthodox beliefs (God's sovereignty, holiness, Christ's deity, virgin birth) but experience 'the weightlessness of God'—belief without behavioral impact

David Wells, who is a professor at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, has written a book called no Place for Truth or Subtitle Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? And he analyzes what's going on in the evangelical churches. And when he talks about God, he says it's not that the evangelical churches disagree with God. They're not atheistic. They all believe there's a God. And if you quiz them, they give you the right answers. Is God sovereign? Oh, yes, he's sovereign. Is he holy? Yes, of course he's holy. Is Jesus Christ God? Yes, Jesus Christ is God. Believe in the virgin birth? Oh, yeah, we believe in the virgin birth, all that. But David Wells says it's the weightlessness of God in the evangelical churches, it just doesn't seem to make a difference, you see. And then he talks about theology and the word he uses there is the inconsequentiality of theology. We believe it up here, but it doesn't have any consequences. It doesn't make any difference the way we live because we are not thinking about it. And in many cases, we're not even thinking being taught.

40 · Transitions from diagnosis to prescription: the solution to evangelical weightlessness and inconsequentiality is recovering serious theological thinking

Now, what I want to suggest, and that's what we're going to work at, at some length tomorrow, is that we need to recover that in the churches today and as individuals, we need to recover it. In my judgment, there is nothing that is so needed in the evangelical church today as thinking Christians.

41 · Recommends John Stott's Your Mind Matters as a brief, accessible resource demonstrating the necessity of mind in various areas of Christian life

Now, I mentioned a number of books. I mentioned the two books by Harry Blamire. I mentioned the one by Neil Postman. There's a tiny little book by John Stott. It might not even be in print anymore. You might have to get it out of a church library. But it's called your mind matters only about 50 pages long, 56 pages, I think. Very easy to read. But what Stott does in that is go down through various areas of the Christian life. And he tries to show that your mind really matters in each one.

42 · Develops the necessity of mind for worship: worship is ascribing God's true worth, which requires knowledge of what God is like

He talks about worship. We come to church to worship God. How can you worship God mindlessly? You can't do it. Because what is worship? Worship is ascribing to God, you, his true worth. In order to ascribe worth to God, you have to know what God is like. You have to know his worth. That's why Jesus said to the woman of Samaria in the fourth chapter of John, verse 24, those who worship my father must worship him in spirit and in truth, that is, on the spiritual level. It's not a physical thing. It has to do with spirit, with spirit, but according to truth, the truth of the Word of God. Unless you've studied the Word of God, unless you've been taught the Word of God, unless you know the Word of God, you. You don't know God. And if you don't know God, if you're not thinking about God, you can't worship God. So what are we doing in our churches? We're worshiping man. We're talking about felt needs and we're singing songs that make us feel good. I notice that a Lot of the modern songs have to do with us. The old songs all had to do with God. You see, that's what's happening. You need your mind to worship.

43 · Extends the necessity of mind to evangelism: entertainment-driven church growth produces unconverted attendees because 'what you win them with is what you win them to

You need your mind for evangelism. We have a lot of so called evangelism going on today and people being swept into the churches and they're not converted. This is what we were talking about last time when I was here a year and a half ago, we were talking about evangelism. And I was saying, see, the tendency today in an entertainment age is to give people what they want in order to grow the church. And if people want entertainment, we entertain them. And when we do that, it works. If you put on a good show, people are going to come, especially if they can come free. You know, you do take an offering and if they're really feeling good, they give something in the offering. But people, if you make them feel good, will come. You know, somebody has said, and I think wisely, what you win them with is what you win them to. You see, the theory is you have to get them in before you can teach them. So we do what entertains them, get them in, and then after we get them in, we're going to teach them right, and then get them evangelized so they get converted. But you see, if what they come for is the entertainment, if you stop doing the entertainment and start teaching, then they go away. And the pressure on the churches, therefore, is to keep up the entertainment and to make it increasingly entertaining because that's what holds the bodies. And you see, that's not kingdom work.

44 · Extended exposition of Mark 1 to contrast signs-and-wonders evangelism with Jesus's actual priority

Some people today want to do evangelism by signs and wonders. You know, there's a whole movement to do that. That's the ultimate entertainment. You know, you get everybody together, then you heal somebody. Wow. Boy, that's exciting. You see, let's all come and see what's going on. You know, Jesus didn't succumb to that. You know, the first chapter of Mark, one of the great chapters in the Bible, I hope you'll remember it. Jesus is introduced in the first chapter of Mark as a preacher. Mark has all these stories. A lot of them are healing stories. But that's not the way he starts off the book. Verse 14 of the first chapter. After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee proclaiming the good news of God. He came as a preacher. He was teaching. He was teaching about the kingdom of God. The time has come, he said. The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news. Now there's a lot in There, that's a summary. But what he's saying is, I've come to preach the kingdom of God, that is the rule of God, that's the gospel. And the way you link up with the kingdom of God is to repent of your sin and believe. So repentance and faith, that's what he's talking about. Now the first story, beginning with the first verse of the chapter, they go to Capernaum. When the Sabbath came, Jesus went into the synagogue and he began to teach. And it says the people were amazed at his teaching because he taught them as one who had authority. A little later on in the same paragraph, they said, what is this, a new teaching? Ah, but with what authority? So you ought to be getting the point by this time. You see, Mark is introducing Jesus as a teacher. Now the next paragraph tells about a healing. Peter's mother in law is sick and she has a fever. In those days the fever was serious. People died by high fever. And so Peter says, why don't you come and see if you can do something? And Jesus does, and he heals her because he cares and he can. He's the Son of God, he can do miracles. A lot of what passes for miracles today isn't miracles at all, in my judgment. But Jesus really did them. Now what happened? Well, the news began to get out. Here's a guy who can heal you. You know, they didn't have many doctors and if they did, you had to pay a lot of money to them and they didn't heal you very well anyway. But here's a guy who can really do it, you know, look what he did for Peter's mother in law. You know, my uncle Joe's had a toothache here the last week. Let's bring him and see if he can make the toothache go away. And here's so and so who was a cripple. Let's see if we can get Jesus to do something about his crippled foot and so on. Pretty soon you have this great big crowd that come and what happens? Jesus heals them. He can do it. They're there. He cares about them, he heals them. Now it gets to be night and they don't have any electricity. So when it's night they have to go home. And everybody does. But the next morning, as soon as the light begins to come up in the sky, all these people come back again, and probably a lot more. Because in the meantime the news is spread. Here's a man who can actually heal people. And so he's got this Great big mass of people there. The disciples are up. They look out, they say, wow, we finally hit it. We got the ticket that's actually filling up the churches. And so they go to get Jesus. He's not there. But where is he? I know where he is. Out praying. That's what he does. He gets up in the morning, goes out and prays. So they go to get him. Here's the way they talk to him. I think this is the way. You have to read this. And they find him. Verse 37. They exclaim, Everyone is looking for you. In other words, what are you doing here? Praying. We've got all these people that need to be healed. We finally got the ticket. What's going to work here? We've been going around these villages on these dusty trails. You've been teaching from the Old Testament law. Nobody's interested in that at all. But they sure are interested in being healed. So come on back here. Stop praying. You can pray tonight when the sun goes down. Get busy and heal the people. Now. Now, notice what Jesus says. Verse 38. Don't ever forget this. Jesus says, in effect, no, I'm not going to do it. Let us go somewhere else, he says, to the nearby villages, so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.

45 · Unpacks Jesus's priorities from Mark 1: Jesus could have spent his ministry healing physical ailments, filling crowds, and seeing healed people die and go to hell

Why didn't he care about the people? All these sick people? Of course he cared about them. Had he run out of power? No, he didn't run out of power. He could heal them. Well, then why didn't he do it? Because he knew he could spend his whole lifetime of ministry ministering to the sick needs of physically impaired people and have them healed and. And die and go to hell. On the other hand, he could go throughout the land and he could teach about the kingdom of God. And as God's spirit worked, some would repent and believe on him. And when they died, they would go to heaven, you see? And that's what really mattered. I'm terribly afraid that the evangelical church is selling out to secularism, filling the churches. It's like you could fill them up by doing miracles, but it's not doing kingdom work. We're not thinking about it. Because you've got to think about the gospel. You got to understand the gospel before you can believe it.

46 · Extends necessity of mind to sanctification: evangelicals are statistically indistinguishable from the world in behavior, demonstrating failure to grow in grace

Let me say one other thing. We also need to be thinking Christians, and we're going to grow spiritually. One of the great problems of our time is that the evangelicals, those who name the name of Jesus Christ as Savior, are when you measure them statistically in terms of all the issues of the day virtually indistinguishable from the world around them. In other words, their mindset is correct, secular. They act exactly like the world. They are not growing in grace. Now, why is that? It's because they don't know the Bible and they're not thinking about it. They don't know the doctrines of the word of God. They're not being taught. If they are taught, they don't really care about it enough actually to do something.

47 · Introduces Paul's approach to sanctification in Romans 5-6, focusing on Romans 6:11 as the first imperative in the letter

You know how people are. To grow in grace. Let me tell you how Paul approaches it. I spent a lot of time these last years teaching Romans. I've been doing it now for almost eight years. I'm getting to the end, believe, believe it or not, going to finish up at the end of July. Third volume is going to come out very soon. Fourth volume of the series. It will end on the radio soon. I think the greatest lesson of all I learned personally as I'm studying Romans is how Paul treats sanctification, which he gets into in the fifth and sixth chapters. The 11th verse of Romans 6 is in the same way. Count yourselves dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Now, that is the first time in the entire letter that he tells his listeners to do something. Up till now he's just been explaining doctrine, and now for the very first time, he tells them to do something. And it has to do with sanctification. In the same way he says, reckon yourself to be dead to sin, but alive to righteousness. He's going to spell out what that means. Alive to righteousness means mortifying the members of your body, not giving them over as instruments of unrighteousness, but rather to God to be instruments of righteousness. You know what he's about talking, talking about. But his basic principle is reckon that you're dead to sin but alive to righteousness. Now, reckon is the word of Gizomi. It's the same way God reckons the righteousness of Jesus Christ to us and our sin to him. So it's punished him. It has to do with operating on the basis of that which is factual, true. You can't reckon on something if it isn't true. So he says, reckon that you're dead to sin, but alive to Christ and life. And that's because that's happened to you. If you're really a Christian, you've died to sin and now you're alive to Christ.

48 · Backs up to Romans 5 to explain the doctrinal foundation for Romans 6:11's reckoning command

Now you back up and you say, well, what does that mean, died to sin? Well, he just talked about it in the fifth Chapter the End. He's talking about the mystical union, first of all of ourselves with Adam. So when Adam sinned, we sinned in Adam. And the punishment of Adam comes upon us. We are involved in his transgression. God takes us out of that spiritually. He joins us to Jesus Christ. So the benefits of Jesus Christ's death apply to us as well. Well, we were dead in Adam, now we're alive in Christ. We were under condemnation, now we are justified. That's what he does in that chapter. You don't hear about that much. You know, that's one of those difficult doctrines, mystical union, union, Adam and so forth. Federalism. People don't even talk about that today because it's hard to be understood. But that's what Paul has talked about. And it's on that basis now that he builds his doctrine of sanctification.

49 · Explains Paul's sanctification logic: growth in grace begins with understanding what happened at salvation—God irreversibly transferred you from union with Adam to union with Christ

And what's he saying? He says, if you're going to grow in grace, the first thing is to understand you have to know it. You have to think about it. What happened to you when you were saved and what did happen to you when you were saved? God by his grace took you out of Adam and he joined you to Jesus Christ. And because God doesn't repent of what he does, you can't go back to being what you were. So if you can't go back to being what you were, what should you do? The only rational thing to do is go on and be what you are. In other words, you can't go backwards. The only way you can go is forwards. Now you say, well, yeah, but doesn't mean Christian sins. Yes, Christians sin. But look, it's like this. You have an adult. You ask the question, can an adult go back to being a child again? No, adults grown up can't reverse the aging process. But can an adult act childish? We know the answer to that. Yes, an adult can act childish. But what do you say to an adult that acts childish? Well, women say it to men all the time. What do you say to them? You say, for heaven's sake, just grow up. Right? Isn't that what you tell them? That's exactly what Paul is saying here to the Christians. You can't go back to being a non Christian. You might try, but you're only acting childish. If you do that, for heaven's sake, grow up, go on and act like a Christian. Right? That's his approach to sanctification.

50 · Applies the Romans 5-6 exposition to the congregation: churches must teach this kind of doctrine, believers must know and think about it, and television must be turned off to make time for Bible reading and reflection

That's the kind of thing we have to hear in the churches. We have to know these things. We have to think about these things. And if I may say so, we've got to shut off our televisions for a little bit at least every day and read the Bible and actually think about it if we're going to grow in grace now, you must want to think about it or you wouldn't come tonight.

51 · Closes by previewing tomorrow's program: examining major doctrines (God, revelation, sin, evil) to explore how genuine belief should produce different behavior

What's on television tonight when you go home? Forget about it tonight, come back tomorrow morning because we're going to pick up at this point. And what I'm going to do tomorrow is take the various great doctrines of the faith as we have time and say, what difference does it make if we really believe in God? We ought to act differently if we really believe in God, and how is that? And same thing for revelation and the doctrine of sin and evil and some other things. So we're going to do that in two parts tomorrow, starting at 10 o' clock tomorrow morning and then 7 o' clock at night. Mind renewal on a mindless age. We need thinking Christians.

52 · Closing prayer asking God to quicken awareness that the mindlessness problem is real and personal, and to work transformation so that attendees emerge as Christians who think about their faith and communicate its difference to family, workplace, and neighbors

Let's pray. Our Father. We've just really gotten into this tonight because we're beginning just a little bit to analyze the problem. It would be hard to do that if we only had one session. We'd have to be talking in a more substantial way about some of the truths of the Bible. But we're beginning to lay the foundation here to see why it's necessary that we actually, in this area of thinking and reading and meditating and above all, Bible study, operate differently than we have. So as we talked about the problem, we ask that you would work to quicken in us sense that there really is a problem and that we're part of it. It impacts us. We're not what we should be as Christians in our time and begin to work in us so that where we are in our family, yes, and maybe to some extent in our workplace and certainly in our contact with friends and neighbors, we might begin to emerge in the days ahead as those who are actually thinking about the faith because they're thinking about it and are able to talk about it and to communicate to others that it really does make a difference to be a child of God. So bless us as we try to do that in these days for the sake of Jesus Christ, our Savior. Amen.