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In the foreword to his 1986 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman suggested that the culture Aldous Huxley envisioned in Brave New World had become reality.

"As [Huxley] saw it, people will come to love their oppression [and] to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think," Postman wrote. "[What he] feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one."

Postman argued that entertainment technologies had changed public discourse. As in Brave New World, Postman feared that an overload of information reduced culture to passivity and that truth was lost in irrelevance.

In the new book Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment (InterVarsity Press), author Richard Winter says that the same cultural occurrence has "seduced and brainwashed" people away from God.

Christianity Today assistant online editor Todd Hertz spoke with Winter, a professor of practical theology at Covenant Seminary, about how technology and exciting entertainment have created what he calls a "deadness of soul."

What were you seeing in culture that you wanted to address?

Everywhere I looked, I saw people using electronic entertainment. My children come home at night with not just one video, but two or three. They also spend hours on end playing computer games with their friends. I began to wonder what effect this was having on them.

I explored the literature on boredom and came across this idea that overstimulation can lead to boredom as much as understimulation. People tend to lose the ability to develop their imagination and creativity because they're so dependent on input instead of producing something themselves.

In her book Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind, Patricia Spack wrote that the word boredom came into the English language about 250 years ago. From then on, there has been an incredible rise in references to it in literature.

You will see that technology boomed in the same age. Access to greater technology increases at the same time that the use of the word boredom does in poetry and literature. People also now have much more leisure time at their disposal and shorter working days than they did back in the 1800s.

How does your theory differ from what Neil Postman argues?

It's very much the same. His book title is so great: Amusing Ourselves to Death. I have very similar themes, but I place it in the Christian context because the decline of Christianity is a very significant factor in all of this. There's a parallel between the rise of these incidences of boredom and the decline of Christianity, faith, and spirituality.

Does the lack of faith cause boredom, or has more boredom created a lack of faith?

I think it's a little bit of both. There's a vicious circle—a deadness of soul leads to boredom, and boredom of course leads to deadness of soul.

Someone who is not a Christian [will experience this deadness of soul] because they're cut off completely from God and from any bigger sense of purpose and reality. On the other hand, when a Christian becomes jaded and feels that God is far away, this person gets bored with prayer and with Bible study. He or she then feels a certain deadness of soul as well.

[The problem] comes down to a loss of a bigger picture of life that, for a Christian, would give significance to all the small details of life. As I wash the dishes, work in the garden, or vacuum, I see it in the context of both the commitment to my relationship with my wife and my family, but also as a commitment to God that I'm called to do these things. And Christ should be Lord of every detail of my life. The seemingly boring, mundane things have a much greater significance in the big picture if you live with faith.

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January (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47