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It's Thanksgiving night 2005, and millions of American eyes strain toward the TV to watch … a football game? A Waltons reunion show? Some Capraesque tale trying valiantly to return us to our moral roots?

Try Survivor: Guatemala, first in its time slot and number ten for the week

in the Nielsen ratings, with an estimated 19 million viewers. From its opening footage of barely clad women crawling through mud to its ritualized closing line, "Gary, the tribe has spoken," it underscores with oomph the nature of our national moment, when cathedrals have morphed into malls and sanctuaries into screens.

We've lived with the current burst of reality TV for five years now. With approximately half of all American television shows falling into the genre, according to Nielsen Media Research, how much more reality can we take?

It's the law of the jungle that has grabbed us, curiously, here at the end of history. We thrill to shows like Survivor and The Apprentice as they, frothing with animosity, sex, and intrigue, dare virtue to intrude in any meaningful way. Call this the anti-community wing of reality TV. Here there are no adults, only overgrown kids doing whatever it takes to "have it all" (the supposed reward for The Apprentice's champion) or to win "immunity" (the weekly hope of Survivor contestants). Their conversations, taped for all the world to hear, reveal a remarkably banal form of moral poverty. "It's the Weaver-butts. They suck at driving," we hear one of the Amazing Racers declare, as families cavort around Utah competing in an elaborate scavenger hunt. "Marcus—he's useless! He's a nuisance," an Apprentice contestant complains about one of his teammates.

This is immaturity by design. Reality TV's stock technique, the private aside to the camera, incites by intention the very opposite of Christian confession. It's not repentance of sin that takes place behind this curtain, but rather the mere unveiling of sin—not self-mortification, but self-inflation, or what an older, wiser generation termed "vainglory." And it is this, pitifully, that drives the competitors on.

If the anti-community reality shows make virtue impossible, the super-community shows make it inevitable. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that at a recent taping of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, footage of screaming crowds cheering on a family about to receive a new home was taped well before the family arrived, "as production crew members hopped up and down to stir the growing throng into a frenzy." Such is "reality."

NBC ventured in this direction this past fall with Three Wishes, featuring evangelical superstar Amy Grant as the emcee. Its premise was as simple as Santa Claus: The network comes to town and begins to entertain wishes, winnowing them quickly down to three. One week later, all kinds of corporate-sponsored miracles have taken place, including, so far, a costly surgery for a young girl with a fractured skull, a rent-free house in South Dakota for a hurricane-stricken family from New Orleans, a professional-quality football field for a high school in California, and even the reuniting of an adult adoptee with her birth mother.

The needy are fed and the deserving rewarded in the super-community shows. Great gifts are given by great folk. And the jungle is far, far away.

If only it were true.

The awful, beautiful complexity of human experience—including our own moment in time—requires richly textured rendering for true self-understanding. Without art of this quality, our inevitable misrepresentations of our experience end up diminishing us in our own eyes; we seem more shallow or simple or happy or wholesome than we truly are. And virtue—the realizing of our divinely designed moral shape—becomes just a mirage. Or it is simply forgotten.

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February 2006, Vol. 50, No. 2