We Must Guard What We Allow Into Our Minds
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Blog Series:
Renew Your Mind ~ Transform Your Life
The world is a hostile environment for a Christian’s mind Billy Graham once said, “My grandchildren face more temptation going to school on Monday morning than my friends and I, when we were their age, could find driving around looking for it on Saturday nights." Reinforcing this point, Mary Pipher, has written in her book, The Shelter of Each Other, regarding media:Families are old institutions with very new problems. For the first time in two thousand years of Western civilization, families live in houses without walls. That is, they live in a world in which walls no longer offer protection. Technology has brought the outside world into the living room. Electronic media seeps into the [openings] of homes and teaches children ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that are at odds with common sense. Families are reeling under the pressure of a culture they can’t control. (p 13-14)
We must remember that all television is educational. It teaches values and behavior. Children learn these things from ads:
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- that they are the most important person in the universe
- that impulses are not to be denied,
- that pain should not be tolerated
- that the cure for any kind of pain is a product
They learn a weird mix of dissatisfaction and entitlement. With the messages of ads, we are socializing children to be self-centered, impulsive, and addictive. The television that Leonard Cohen called “that hopeless little screen” teaches values as clearly as any church. (p 14-15)
Peggy Noonan, former speechwriter for President Reagan and who is now a best-selling author, news analyst, and commentator, writes in her book Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness:We are the inheritors of a coarsened society. My generation cooperated happily in the coarsening, of course, in the sixties and seventies…and now we’re stuck with it. The coarsened nation is what we’re left with to bring up our children. A coarse place is by definition anti-child because is it anti-innocence.
Parents today go to great lengths to protect their children from the environment that they helped create.
There aren’t enough good parents to go around. This would not carry such heavy implications if there were a healthy culture to pick up some of the slack but there isn’t. There is only the coarse culture to make things worse.
The old culture may have been a little naïve, but when I was a kid watching television, there were game shows, cartoons, some boring nature show, an old movie, Spanish lessons on educational TV, and a soap opera. That is better than today when the Ghetto Boys on channel 25 rap about killing women, and [violating their dead bodies].
Ms. Noonan goes on to write,Really, you have [to be morally bankrupt not] to know that this stuff is harmful, that it damages the young, the unsteady, the unfinished. You have to not care about anyone to sing these words and put this song on TV for money. You have to be a pig.
Hollywood knows it encourages and discourages points of view, habits, and social tendencies. And deep in their guilty little hearts, filmmakers know they encourage violence in men and boys and sexual acting out in everyone else. It’s what they do for a living.
After shocking and violating everyone on one level so that they get used to it, Hollywood has to come up with even more outrageous violence and sex to get some attention, to grab and get an audience. Imagine what that does to the soul. (summarized from pages 68-70)
So, this is the world in which we now live. It has been deeply corrupted from what it once was, and the corruption is largely initiated in the entertainment industry… which is disseminated primarily through electronic media. And this coarsened culture has its automatic effect on us, whether we want it to or not. We must carefully guard what we allow into our minds Gary Smalley wrote in his book, Change Your Heart, Change Your Life:“Our society is disintegrating, and many Christians are unwittingly caught up in its thinking. Do you know what your children see and hear all day long on TV, iPads, radio, and the Internet, and even from their peers?
“What they see on TV or the Internet is affecting the way they think and react. Please don’t put your head in the sand when it comes to regulating what your kids are exposed to. This is deadly serious. Most of us realize that our society is in big trouble. Many Christians are in big trouble because the world’s values have become embedded in their hearts. But they have no idea that it’s happened, and so they’re oblivious to the danger.”
Neil Postman wrote a compelling book many years ago regarding the impact of television on modern life entitled, Amusing Ourselves to Death. In it, he makes the case that television is fundamentally changing how our brain processes truth and the negative impact television is making on our entire culture. After making that compelling case, he states that the first step in breaking the hold of television is realizing that it has a hold on us. That’s one of the major points I want to make in this blog - that modern media has a hold on us, that the hold is largely bad, and that the first and most important step in breaking that hold is recognizing that it has a hold. If all that weren't bad enough, it is, in a sense, old news. The new news is even worse. Added to all of that has been 24/7 access to any and all manner of godlessness via the ubiquitous internet. And with the recent Covid lock-downs, parents have been appalled to see what their children are being taught in their classrooms, and it makes the things I just mentioned (while all still true) seem like child's play in comparison. We now see our children being taught "drag-queen hour," the legitimacy of homosexuality and transgenderism, shown the value of sexual exploration in early grade school, and other things not just unmentionable but unthinkable a generation ago. We have gone off the deep end, culturally and morally. And this polluted world is the world in which our children and grandchildren will grow up in. Christians must be alert to the dangers and quick to respond. So, we become what we behold, and unless we move to a remote, fenced-in compound without electricity in northern Montana, we are beholding plenty of harmful input from electronic media in the living of our everyday life, and are being negatively affected by it. There are three steps to guarding our minds- Don’t input harmful thoughts.
- Don’t create harmful thoughts.
- Be careful what you let our mind dwell on.
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