Taming the Image - Christianity Today

The band is rockin’, arms are swayin’, and you’re about to come on screen in high definition with such stunning visual clarity that even people in the nosebleed seats can see your perfect smile.

Is this a rock concert? A beer commercial? Or just a typical Sunday morning?

These days, it could be any of the above.

Whether you’re a questioning congregant, a concerned pastor, or a perplexed professor studying the effects of media on religious practice (like me), the use of technology in the worship setting is worth considering.

Media are not neutral. Like ideas, they have consequences, especially in the church. And some of these consequences should give us pause. In Technopoly media theorist Neil Postman writes, “A preacher who confines himself to considering how a medium can increase his audience will miss the significant question: In what sense do new media alter what is meant by religion, by church, even by God?”

Given the impact of new media, we should carefully consider the medium of Christ’s message.

We don’t want to reduce our religion to an ideology that is but one of many in a marketplace of ideologies. Nor do we want to make the mistake of having the medium we deploy compromise the authority of the message we proclaim.

Image is King

Two years ago the Chicago Tribune redesigned their paper to be more image and web-friendly. They simultaneously eliminated half of their staff—mostly the word people.

This illustrates an undeniable reality: In our society, the written word is no longer the dominant mode of communication. Instead it is visual media comprised of pictures, film, video, symbols, logos, and certain art forms. And our culture worships the images they convey to us. It is no coincidence that film is the most expensive art form we practice and that actors are revered as royalty. We typically place the TV in the place of honor in our homes, a place in other cultures reserved for the family shrine. We pay the most money for those whose image we most want to see, which is why the visually mediated—athletes and movie stars—are the highest paid individuals in our society. These images now consume eight hours (in media consumption) of the average American’s day. And their ubiquity makes them invisible to us, leading us to overlook their impact. If you’re tagging yourself on your friend’s Facebook page right now, or reading this article while watching American Idol, or saving for a wider and flatter TV, then I’ve got news for you. God may be your co-pilot, but the Image is in the driver’s seat.

If the church wishes to emulate our image-obsessed culture, it must also invest in the visual and reduce the emphasis on words. Here’s a formula for how a church could do it:

Get a celebrity pastor (young, good-looking, charismatic with a powerful stage presence—all perfect qualities for the image culture)

Multiply his impact by super-sizing his image in the churches via giant LCD projector.

Create network affiliate stations and channels to broadcast images of this celebrity.

Lather, rinse, and repeat.

Why have we seen this model be so effective in drawing a crowd? It’s no mystery. It fits the chief characteristics of our digital age perfectly:

Disincarnation: As Marshall McLuhan puts it, “on the air and on the phone” you have no body. This might be alright until you get to church, at which point a fundamental problem arises: “Discarnate man is not compatible with an incarnate church.” The entire message and point of the gospel is that God put on flesh in order be with us, and to die for us. Any church use of a medium that disincarnates an incarnate God is going to be at odds with its own mission.

Distraction: As T.S. Eliot put it, we are distracted from distraction by distraction—and he said that almost 70 years ago! Since then, things have only worsened. With fast paced, jump-cut, multi-channel, multi-sensory stimulus overload, paying attention has become a full-time job.

Instant gratification: With electronic media, information travels at light speed and, along the way, it accelerates our expectations of just about everything. We are no longer willing to wait for anything.

Narcissism: Not just the shallow look-at-me narcissism so prevalent on social media sites, but the real-deal narcissism as in building a grandiose alternative persona in order to compensate for and or shield your true self from exposure. In self-help books, there is no cure for this; there are only books for coping with people who are narcissists.

Passivity: Despite the development of two-way media resources, most people use media for passive consumption. This results in a passivity that allows people to live vicariously through watching other people’s lives. If you do post to the web, it’s most often a re-post of someone else’s activity, confirming your passivity even as you attempt to be active.

Mental lethargy: The net result of these characteristics is the dumbing of the population. Apart from the “Jay Walking” segment on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, we see this displayed in declining literacy and student test scores.

While our culture is dominated by Image, historically the church has always been dominated by Word. Image has an undeniable immediacy, but it tends to reveal only the surface of things. The Word is better able to cultivate deep reflection and precise, critical thought. Trading the Word for the Image is no incidental move. It changes what we say, as well as how we say it. Yet given the culture’s wholehearted adoption of the Image, does the church have any choice but to follow suit? Must we accommodate the culture by imageizing our churches? Or do we defy the spirit of this age and do something truly countercultural—reinvest in the Word at a time when it is becoming less and less popular?

Embracing the Word

When new movements of faith arise, they are usually linked to significant changes in media forms and practices. Consider these key movements of our faith. Each seems to have involved a rejection of dominant image-based means of communication, and a corresponding embrace of word-based media.

When Abraham announced “Never again shall I worship gods made by human hands,” he was directly countering the spirit of his age by exchanging the worship of visible gods for the worship of the invisible God.

When Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, they not only left Pharoah’s idols, they also left his pictographic system of writing for an alphabet. And it was God who encouraged this countercultural move with his second commandment: “Thou shalt make no graven images.” As Neil Postman put it, this is “a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between the forms of communication and the quality of a culture.”

When Martin Luther and the Reformers used Gutenberg’s printing press to disseminate their ideas, it directly undercut papal authority. Even though Luther wished to simply “reform” the corruptions he found in the church, with the agency of the printing press, his writings soon stirred up such dissent that the genie was out of the bottle. Thanks to the printing press, anti-Catholic fervor spread simultaneously as literacy rose, which is why the Enlightenment happened after, not before, the printing press.

How do we follow the example of our ancient counterparts in today’s world? How can we create a church that actively counters an image-based and entertainment-driven culture? Rather than accommodating and gratifying the gods of this age, how can we form people who are not passive, narcissistic consumers with short attention spans?

Embodied Authority

One option is to emulate the Amish. No, really. You may be thinking about the funny hats and peanut butter fluff sandwiches, but don’t forget that they have the smallest carbon footprint in the neighborhood, their men have no struggle with pornography because they have no electricity to bring them the Internet, and their women have fewer body image issues for the same reason. The Amish embody the biblical values of working with our hands, leading a quiet life, and walking humbly with God. They show us that good things can come from being unplugged. Confronting the spirit of the digital age is hard, but by completely disconnecting the Amish demonstrate a good deal of wisdom.

But short of joining an Amish community—which, let’s face it, just isn’t an option for most of us—is there another way to fight the insidious influence of new media? I believe we must begin by abandoning the belief that the methods of communication we use in the church don’t matter, this idea that the methods change but the message stays the same. For example, if I were to reduce this article to a 140 character post on Twitter, it would drastically alter the message. Medium matters.

“A Videostreamed sermon on the incarnation would be ironic at best.”

In a discarnate age, the only option Christians have for presenting a credible, authoritative, and transformative gospel is to embody Christ. We need to be wary of trying to transmit a message of embodiment through a medium of disembodiment. Stephen Downey writes, “A video-streamed sermon on the Incarnation would be ironic at best and offensive at worst.” And when most people are consuming electronic media ad nauseum, then the primary medium for a countercultural church must be an unplugged one.

Adopting and baptizing the new visual technologies is a losing strategy as well. The church will never do it as well as the culture. If James Cameron can spend $500 million, invent a new camera and new 3D techniques in order to produce the most visually stunning film ever recorded, and you can’t remember a single character’s name, do you really think your church budget is going to somehow do a better job of telling the Jesus story with PowerPoint, YouTube clips, or an internally-generated video? Even if you have the budget and artistic talent within your church to make quality films, because it is an image-based medium, it cannot penetrate the surface the way word-based communication can.

The new media techniques being employed in our churches may distract us from being bored in church for a little while, but beyond that they have no staying power because they have little authority. And they have little authority because they reflect the seen reality rather than the spoken truth. Take a great sermon from a hundred or a thousand years ago. When we read it, the message is still authoritative, and often still applicable. But watch a video of your favorite preacher from five or ten years ago and I guarantee it will be somewhat embarrassing. The visuals will take away from the message. Wow, just look at those clothes! The sincerity and theology is obliterated by the dated look of the fashion of the time. The authority of the word is eroded by the overwhelming power of the visual.

Window or Mirror?

So should we avoid visual media, movies, and art altogether? Of course not. Christians should engage all of these, but very carefully and fully aware of the implications each medium has on our message. We need to choose media that function as windows rather than mirrors. In a window we can see through the medium and discover God, “in whom we live and breathe and have our being.”

In a mirror we can only look into the medium and find ourselves. This window/mirror distinction parallels the word/image distinction made earlier. It is a question of looking through versus looking at; staying on the surface or plunging deeper within.

The opiate of our age is image-based entertainment that leads to passivity and narcissim.

It isn’t that video is incapable of looking through, it’s simply that in its most common use, it is a medium of looking at. When viewing a video at church, we are looking at the preacher, at the scene, at the trees or waves that accompany the song lyrics or announcements, at the production quality and budget, and at the favorite images of the technical team.

But consider what video screens cannot do. They cannot make an altar call of significance, because they cannot perform the laying on of hands and praying for the penitent. They cannot baptize. They cannot make the congregation dance. They cannot place ashes or holy oil on your forehead. They cannot serve communion. They cannot say they are glad to see you and have it be personally meaningful. They cannot take you aside and say, “Let me pray for you after the service.” They cannot perform a funeral service. They cannot forgive your sins.

I have only been in two services where I felt video projection did not distort or become the message. In the first case, the image of an icon was projected onto the ceiling of the rented auditorium the church was using. Throughout the service, as worshipers looked up, they encountered an ancient icon and could use it as a focus for their meditations on the sermon. But if they did not look up, they would never know it was there.

In the second case, two projectors showed the hands of a church artist as she painted an abstract river and a tree of life image. This was set to music and placed in the service during a regular part of the liturgy. It was a living thing, lasted only three minutes, and was profoundly original in its use of layers and image to place the viewer’s mind into the day’s Scripture readings. In both cases the viewer was not aware of the technology, and in both cases the technology, the nature of the projection, and the use of film technique was not apparent. And each of these was done only once, and never repeated. If they were done weekly, they would have gotten really old, really fast. As singular instances of spiritual creativity, they were subtle, thoughtful, and profound in their effect.

Marx famously called mass religion the “opiate of the people.” This kind of religion accommodates itself to the culture. By doing so it gains power and grows membership by baptizing the assumptions of the culture in the name of Christ. I believe that the opiate of our age is image-based entertainment that leads to passivity and narcissism.

But if our goal is to foster authentic transformation through deep immersion in the Christian story, then we are going to have to employ forms of communication that do not conform to the spirit of our digital age. It will mean having the courage to take the hard way and invite people to unplug, to rediscover the penetrating authority of words, and recognize that our faith must be embodied by people and not simply projected with pixels.

Read Mercer Schuchardt is associate professor of media ecology at Wheaton College.