The Guns of August

The public outcry against violence after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy sparked a spasm of rescheduling of television programs. Many long-booked shows were postponed in favor of “less violent” features. Even comedy sequences in “The Flying Nun” were considered inappropriate. The more violent programs were not permanently dropped, however, but were simply reshuffled for release in late summer. One network official predicted that August would probably be the bloodiest month in television history.

The concern over America’s so-called climate of violence has prompted many to take a belated long look at the most potent of mass-communications media—television.

Representative John Murphy of New York City is convinced that TV is “blunting or immunizing” Americans to the “often tragic consequences” and “wrongness” of violence. He is leader of fifty congressmen who last month called for the Federal Communications Commission to make a study of violence on TV, a move FCC Chairman Rosel H. Hyde favors. The National Association for Better Broadcasting has repeatedly found “too many” incidents of violence on TV. President Johnson’s new Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence will include television in its study. Senator Thomas Dodd plans to reopen hearings of his juvenile-delinquency subcommittee, which in 1965, after a ten-year span of monitoring TV and listening to testimonies and to reports of responsible studies, concluded:

But others, while decrying the portrayal of violence for its own sake, believe that violence is so integral to human nature that the media must include it where warranted in life presentations. As playwright-actor Ossie Davis points out, violence in the arts is always preceded by violence in life. Indeed, a vast cultural wasteland would be created if every violent scene were expurgated from every literary work (TV adds animation and sound), including the Bible. And who, with social perspective intact, would ban violence from news accounts?

Still others contend that depiction of violence can even be beneficial. Roman Catholic communications specialist Donald F. X. Connolly, for example, would have fewer TV killings and more woundings in order to show young people that “brutality only causes suffering and never really solves anything.” While his point is worth at least further thought, it also underscores the manipulative potential of media-beamed violence to achieve desired—or undesired—effects.

Where is a modern-day Solomon with guidelines to determine just how much televised bloodshed and terror is “excessive,” how many Indians shot dead are “too many,” how much brute force is “too much,” and in what instances murder and assault are “warranted”—especially during prime time, when so many impressionable children and young people are watching?

That television exerts a powerful influence is undeniable. In more than nine out of ten American homes, at least one TV set operates an average of five to six hours every day. And sponsors and politicians willingly pay premium prices to sell their products and themselves. But between commercials, critics claim, TV’s disproportionate amount of violence “sells” a damaging philosophy to many unwary viewers.

The average person may perhaps accurately say that his exposure to TV violence has produced no objectionable aftereffects. And he may with some validity point to the millions of televiewers who have not been moved to violence. But substantial evidence indicates that reform is needed; even casual monitoring supports this. In most programming—from cartoons (Elmer Fudd firing his blunderbuss at Bugs Bunny) to the outright shockers (a killer strangling his rape victim) and even newscasts (oozing wounds in living color)—violence must be cut back.

As a first step, the industry needs only to implement its own Television Code, which states in part: “Material which is excessively violent or would create morbid suspense, or other undesirable reactions in children, should be avoided.”

Our nation has not only granted telecasters the right to use the airways but also imposed upon them the responsibility of self-regulation, with all its built-in difficulties. It is no secret that intra-network conflicts rage over the question of violence. Many sponsors and producers favor less violence, but—as Washington Post columnist Lawrence Laurent notes—advertiser-supported TV equates violence by gun, knife, and fist with high ratings. Thus possible braking remedies within the industry are canceled by heavier pressure from ratings-and profit-conscious executives. The networks and stations must nevertheless fulfill their self-control obligations, or else Congress and the FCC must act.

At the heart of the control issue is, of course, the age-old clash between the right to protection and the right to production. It is obvious that a balance must be struck between security and freedom; a society cannot simultaneously have 100 per cent of both (police state and anarchy). But surely, in spite of thorny constitutional questions, the responsibility to protect our children (and our nation’s failing moral health) weighs more heavily than the right to project violent images over the public channels.

Author Claude Brown, Jr., in caustic reaction to mounting cries for censorship, probably speaks for the majority of persons on the source side of the media:

It is doubtful, however, that Nero’s script men and producers could be bailed out on grounds that they were only serving what was wanted by SRO coliseum crowds. Persons at all source levels of the media—like anyone else—must bear the weight of individual moral responsibility. And beyond their ability to reflect and interpret society adequately, they must reckon with their power to shape society for better or for worse. Scripture says, after all, that every man must some day “give account of himself to God.”

But Brown’s point is nevertheless well taken. Psychiatrist-author Fredric Wertham agrees: “The problem of violence in the media is really the problem of violence itself.” And Ossie Davis pleads, “If violence truly offends us, let us first root it out of our own hearts.” On this ground both telecaster and televiewer meet and stand in common need of the cleansing, reconciling love of Jesus Christ.

Short of this they would do well to consider Genesis 6:11: “the earth was filled with violence”—an observation made shortly before the hand of God fell in cataclysmic censorship.

THE CZECH CATERPILLAR KEEPS STIRRING

Thirty years ago the Western democracies sold out a third of Czechoslovakia to Nazi tyranny. The transaction at Munich on September 30, 1938, placed such a blot upon history that the city’s name now appears in dictionaries as a commonly used term denoting dishonorable appeasement.

The Czechs have never recovered from Munich. The relative ease with which they moved into the Communist camp after World War II may be attributable less to their taste for Marxism than to their wariness of the West, which let them down so badly.

At any rate, the 15,000,000 Czechs have been becoming increasingly uneasy over Communist restraints. In January, Stalinist ruler Antonin Novotny was deposed. Under his successor, Alexander Dubcek, there has been some liberalization, and something resembling a free press has emerged. One astute evangelical observer on the European scene declares, “If Czechoslovakia will manage to carry through this phenomenal step of independence, Communism will not be the same in Europe again.”

Czechoslovakia’s drift is an embarrassment to the cause of international Communism and a bad omen to the traditional Reds. Knowing this, the Soviets have tried to put on the squeeze by various methods. Yet the restlessness of the caterpillar-shaped land has continued.

Dubcek and the other leading figures in Czechoslovakia still are firm Communists. They vow not to yield on basic ideology. But this may not be the sort of movement in which a leader can set an arbitrary limit. One thing worrying the Russians is that change like this tends to be open-ended. Czechoslovakia might well keep right on stirring until it wriggles entirely free of the Communist cocoon.

For these and other reasons Soviet leaders brought intense pressure upon the Czechs, unilaterally at their meeting at Cierna, and multilaterally at Bratislava.

The problem is more than ideological for the Soviets. Loss of Czechoslovakia would crack the geographical buffer zone around the borders of the U. S. S. R. It would open a corridor from free Europe into the Ukraine, the most populous, the most restive, and the most nationalistic of the fourteen non-Russian “republics” in the Soviet Union.

What has liberalization done for the Christians of Czechoslovakia? Apparently not much, so far. Blahoslav Hruby, a Czech native and an expert on Slavic church affairs for the National Council of Churches, says many reports confirm that liberalization proceeds much more slowly in the churches than in the political life of Czechoslovakia. The voices for church freedom are finding outlets, not in the religious press, which seems still to be dominated by Stalinist-era clergy, but in cultural publications. One recent article in such a periodical declares:

Another Czech periodical, also secular, recently published an open letter from a group of clergymen of the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren (Presbyterian) to the new Minister of Culture. The minister was asked in quite strong terms to clarify his position on religious freedom. As Hruby notes, publication of this document prior to this year “would have been considered treason.”

The current Czech climate is embarrassing not only to politicians of the Communist establishment but also to Christian clergymen who have tried to accommodate themselves to the Marxist system. For a number of years there has been an organization of Protestant church leaders from Communist countries known as the Christian Peace Conference, and their headquarters has been in Prague. They have been little more than apologists for Communist policy and critics of the United States, particularly its involvement in Viet Nam. The new political climate may encourage them to change their tune a bit.

Even more interesting is the relative reticence of World Council of Churches leaders to speak about the Czech situation. Avant-garde ecumenists who take pride in being on the frontiers of social change are suddenly speechless. They have never addressed themselves as aggressively to oppression in Communist lands as to irregularities in the West, so a move toward democracy in a Communist country evokes little reaction. Indeed, it must come as a surprise to left-leaning churchmen that any people, having once tasted the glories of Marxist socialism, should want to move back to supposedly decrepit democratic processes.

One aspect of the Czech situation must raise the eyebrows of churchmen of contrasting ecclesiastical stripe. That is the way the new Czech climate has come about: not through revolution, in the usual sense, but through evolution. This might give pause to those who think that only the exercise of military force will reverse the tide of Communism. The Czech lesson may be that there is another way, a peaceful way. The fact that this may be a most significant reversal to the Communist cause, and a dramatic break in the worldwide balance of political power, lends support to the more peaceful approach.

Even while ecumenical leaders in Uppsala were debating the pros and cons of violent revolution as a means of bringing about social change, the Dubcek government was firmly but bloodlessly reasserting itself and standing up to the angry roars of the Russian bear. The Czechs knew they might yet be involved militarily but the measure of their progress on a purely diplomatic and political level was admirable.

It is appropriate that a movement for reform among the Communist-dominated peoples should begin in the ancient city of Prague. Here the courageous Bohemian John Huss preached religious reformation a century before Luther nailed his theses to the church door at Wittenberg. The church where Huss preached has been restored and now stands as a monument to that great Christian, who died at the stake for daring to challenge unbiblical practice. Its architectural simplicity is itself a symbol and a sermon, an implicit rebuke to the accretions and excesses of medieval culture. But more than that it speaks for spiritual freedom, and one can even speculate that its presence in the heart of the majestic Czechoslovakian capital contributed to the quest for release from the bonds of Moscow.

THE VATICAN ON BIRTH CONTROL

Pope Paul VI deserves to be admired for the courage and conviction of his encyclical Humanæ Vitæ. With so many Protestant and Roman Catholic leaders clamoring for accommodation to the whims of secular man, it is refreshing to see ecclesiastical authority take a stand for what is thought right rather than what is popular. The evangelical can but wish that the pontiff had reserved his valor for an authentically biblical commitment.

After years of deliberation, the Pope has chosen to reaffirm traditional Roman Catholic teaching on birth control. He concedes that conjugal love is noble, and that husband and wife do well to consider environment when planning children. But he specifies the unreliable rhythm method as the only moral contraceptive means. Its unreliability seems to be the element that makes it morally acceptable, for the Pope underscores the premise that “each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life.”

The encyclical’s conclusion rests on a very simple though vulnerable argument. The argument is that sexual intercourse in marriage has both a unitive and procreative meaning and that these meanings are inseparable. The clear implication is that of all the contraceptive methods, only rhythm safeguards both these aspects.

The Achilles heel of the papal pronouncement is that it is alien to biblical revelation. Its roots are not in inspired Scripture but in the Roman Catholic philosophy of natural law. Throughout the document Pope Paul appeals openly and frequently to this natural-law rationale. It is the means by which the church lays claim not only on the Christian faithful but also upon the secular masses.

The Bible says clearly that marriage alone sanctifies sexual intercourse, which is the divinely given means for propagating the human race. But it does not teach—as the Pope does—that intercourse is justifiable only if conception may result. The Apostle Paul in First Corinthians 7:3 ff. legitimates sex in terms of interpersonal fulfillment. Protestants believe that conscience should be informed by Scripture and is answerable to God alone.

Scripture is silent on contraception. Sound exegesis of the often quoted Genesis 38 passage on Onan rules out divine condemnation of contraception per se. There is ample historical evidence that contraception dates back to biblical times. Since Scripture does not speak directly to the issue, evangelicals tend to conclude that birth-control methods that prevent conception (as distinguished from those that abort a fertilized egg) can be good or evil, depending upon the motives.

A special moral question arises in methods of contraception in which a fertilized egg may be destroyed, for that can be interpreted as termination of new life. This is not a problem with the popular estrogen-progesterone combination pill, which acts by suppressing ovulation and therefore precludes the meeting of sperm and egg. In the case of the loop, medical science does not agree on what happens, though the original theory that it produced an early abortion has been discounted.

Humanæ Vitæ (see also news story, p. 41) is characterized by forthright language and thus is in distinct contrast to Pope Paul’s six earlier encyclicals, which are punctuated by balancing arguments (e.g., “on the other hand”). Some had hoped that the Pope’s birth-control directive would leave the door somewhat open on methods, but it did not. Some tempering of impact lies in the fact that the Pope continues not to speak ex cathedra. However, the whole matter of infallibility is under a cloud of ambiguity (no explicitly ex cathedra document has been issued by the Vatican since 1950, when Pope Pius XII promulgated the highly dubious doctrine of the assumption of Mary). Although a Vatican spokesman said Humanæ Vitæ is not to be regarded as “immutable,” there seems to be little doubt that the Vatican considers it binding upon all Roman Catholics. And the encyclical itself notes that “faithful fulfillment” of what the church regards as the law of the Gospel and natural law are “equally necessary for salvation.”

The World Council And Secularism

The World Council of Churches has made headlines by endorsing the principle of selective objection to “particular” wars. The effect of that resolution is to put the sanction of organized Protestant Christianity behind the movement to permit individuals to select the wars they desire to participate in. The practical effect, for instance in this country, is to assist the campaign of which the Rev. William Sloane Coffin is the most conspicuous spokesman: to encourage the defiance of the laws of the United States which at this moment permit the government to conscript an army in order to implement its foreign policy.

The argument for civil disobedience is, in other words, greatly assisted. The dissenter will now take comfort in being able to say that, to be sure he is breaking the law as narrowly understood, but the law is an unjust law, vide the World Council of Churches.…

The moral problem posed by the World Council is, in the long run, even more disturbing than the political problem. The Council’s declaration has the effect of saying that wars are justified if they are wars of personal passion. That statement is profoundly anti-Christian and indeed recidivist, suggesting the spirit of the more fanatical Crusaders. The Christian doctrine as understood during the Enlightenment is that all wars should be painful and, in human terms, objectionable (love thine enemy). Wars are justified only under clinical circumstances, e.g. and primarily, in order to defend sacred things of great value, to use the phrase of Pius XII; to defend the homeland.

But who is to decide when those things of great value are threatened? The western practice is that such decisions are made by elected governments. Under the reasoning of the Council, what matters is the individual attitude towards a particular war. The individual becomes not merely the absolute moral arbiter on whether he is (as a pacifist) prepared to commit violence under any circumstance; but whether he is prepared to commit violence under this particular circumstance.

An extension of this view of the individual’s sovereignty is pretty frightening. The state is, in the general moral understanding, permitted under given circumstances (e.g. Eichman) to take a man’s life, say for the crime of genocide. But the individual is never permitted to do so. Why not?—if the individual is supreme. If a Christian is going to deny the role of the impartial mechanism of the state in making binding decisions involving the use of violence—whether war, or electrocution, or the use of tear gas—then what is to prevent the individual from asserting his own conscience at such moments when that conscience declares that he believes violence to be necessary?…

The World Council is continuing in the general march of organized Christianity towards a confused sort of secular idealism. The other two recommendations call for admitting Red China to the United Nations, concerning which problem the Council is as equipped to speak as Groucho Marx is to remove an infected appendix; and a call for the economic boycotting of racist nations, which is a splendid way to increase world misery.—WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY (reprinted by permission of the Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.).

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.