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Recently, a CT editor ran across a six-minute clip on Google Video. Its purpose was to instruct people who were joining a particular church what to expect when it came time for them to be baptized. That's not a bad idea because baptism is an alien thing in modern culture. When John the Baptist dunked repentant Jews in the Jordan, he was building on analogous practices: the convert baptisms practiced by the Pharisees, the ritual baths in the mikveh that worshipers would take before climbing the Temple Mount, and the washing ceremonies of pagan mystery religions.

For people raised outside the church, an instructional video makes sense. Unfortunately, the medium is full of hidden temptations. Twenty-two years ago, when Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, he pointed out that television has the inherent property of turning everything—including catastrophes—into entertainment. Broadcasting fragmented items, connecting them only by "now this … ," the medium itself requires us to suppress ideas in order to make room for stimulating visuals.

Since Postman's observation, we have continued to amuse ourselves with media that have isolated and distracted us. Much of the time, we plug our ears with "earbuds," shut out the noise and bustle of other people, and cocoon into our private sonic world. Or we sit at our computers and surf videos on YouTube, moving disconnectedly from cute pets to harmless explosions of Mentos and Diet Coke. Entertainment, of course, is not the problem—just the way it now dominates our culture.

Which brings us back to that baptism video. It illustrates Postman's thesis that television has become the metaphor for all discourse, and, as Stefan Schoerghofer writes, that "off the screen, the same metaphor prevails. People no longer talk to each other they entertain each other."

As this metaphor has entered Christian worship, we use video clips to make the message more compelling. We can be seated just a few rows from the pulpit and be more likely to think about the quality of video than the preacher's words.

The baptism video, though it was posted on the internet, was clearly designed to be shown in a worship service. ("If you haven't signed up yet," says the pastor, "I'm sure that after this video you'll be really excited about it and want to sign up. So don't everybody rush to the information center at once after the service. Be careful. Please form a line.") The pastor cannot help using the ironic vocabulary of cheap comedy. And the video is subject to the temptations inherent in the medium: words that have to be bleeped out, pushing a baptismal candidate off the edge of the pool, showing a (thankfully) blurred image of what is supposed to be a naked candidate, and getting drenched when a candidate cannonballs into the pool. This is the vocabulary of Comedy Central, not the discourse of discipleship.

It's not that humor should be banned from worship. Hardly. As Frederick Buechner reminds us, the gospel is a comedy; who has not experienced grace as so wonderfully absurd that at times we cannot help but laugh? And it is one of life's joys to be amused (and distracted) in the cycle of work and rest. But the church must take its cues about humor not from the entertainment culture as much as from the gospel itself. Baptism, the watery half of the "by water and spirit" new birth, is joyous, even hilarious, as much as any birth can be. But the joy of baptism does not comport with an ironic smirk, and definitely not with pratfalls.

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October 2007, Vol. 51, No. 10