Subject matter alone does not provide the answer.

When is a book immoral? For the 4,000 residents of Girard, Pennsylvania, that question recently erupted into a public battle.

The controversy centered in Studs Terkel’s 1974 book Working, a collection of interviews with working people. It had been assigned reading in an English class for 15 high school seniors. “There is one chapter in that book about a policeman, and there’s 44 times there he used that four-letter word,” complained one of 30 parents who were offended by the book. The author, meanwhile, traveled to Girard to convince the townspeople that his book deserves to be read.

Books are not alone in arousing moral objections today. Public concern focuses even more on the morality of television. Donald Wildmon, head of the National Federation for Decency and the Coalition for Better Television, made national headlines in the summer of 1981 by threatening a boycott of sponsors of immoral TV shows. A year later the delayed boycott was revived, focusing on NBC television programs and the products of its parent company, RCA.

Questions about the morality of certain books and television offerings inevitably involve Christians. When should a parent turn off the television set? The local pastor has become a fixture in clashes with school officials; but just when should he allow himself to be drawn into such a controversy? What can a Sunday school teacher say about the listening and reading and viewing habits of young people who are in the process of establishing their own moral standards?

These questions do not yield simple answers. Three issues, however, are especially crucial for our thinking about the matter.

Effect On The Audience

When is a book or television program moral or immoral? The primary answer concerns its effect on an audience. Morality involves human behavior. The morality of a book or television program is ultimately judged by what happens in the mind and conduct of the reader or viewer. Mere words on a page or images on a screen are of themselves neither moral nor immoral. They become so when they are assimilated by a person and translated into action.

No book automatically influences people morally. Even the Bible is not a moral book for every reader. In every age there are some who read and study the Bible but experience no moral impact. People have even used the Bible to defend immoral acts. So the influence of a book or television program depends on how it is assimilated, and this makes it an individual matter. The same book or program might be moral for one person and immoral for another.

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As a result, formulating lists of “approved” and “disapproved” books and programs is not the primary way to attack the problem. It is more important to consider how people read books and view television. One criticism of Terkel’s Working charged that it contains negative attitudes toward work. The mere presence of these, however, does not make the book immoral. Readers who were offended by such attitudes responded to the book morally. For those who were influenced to despise work, the book was immoral. In both cases, the crucial factor was the reader’s response.

As readers and viewers, we have several alternatives to burning books and censoring programs. We can begin by encouraging Christian audiences, including teen-agers, to be aware of what goes through their minds as they read books and watch television or movies. Some simple questions will help this awareness: What moral issues does this book or program raise? What viewpoint does it take toward those issues? What does the Bible say about the same issues? In view of these factors, how has the book or program influenced my moral attitudes or behavior?

It is when we open ourselves uncritically to the moral input from what we read or view that books and television programs will naturally have an immoral influence on us. If, however, we read and view them through the lens of biblical morality, we should be able to encounter an immoral viewpoint without threat to our own morality. Christians may be offended by a book or program in such cases, but they have not been swept into immorality. Offensiveness is not the same as immorality.

We have focused first on the audience, not because it is the only factor, but because it is the most crucial. There is no substitute for being self-aware about the moral influences to which we subject ourselves. The danger is greatest when our guard is down. Advertising, in fact, may have a more detrimental influence on Christians than suggestive jokes on the Johnny Carson show.

Perspective

Although the main criterion by which we judge the morality of a book or television program is its effect on the reader or viewer, we need to consider more objective factors. We understand these better by recognizing that books and television affect our subconscious minds. We are not fully aware of the moral influence our reading and our television viewing exert on us.

Christians also need to be concerned about the moral health of the society in which they live. It has been difficult to combat obscenity and pornography partly because it is hard to prove that books and movies cause immoral behavior. Can we, therefore, in the absence of such proof, find a more objective criterion for judging the morality of books and television?

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One criterion is the moral perspective of books and programs: they present their material from a stated or implied bias; they are an invitation for the audience to share their viewpoint; they have a built-in strategy to get the reader or viewer to approve of some things and disapprove of others. The moral impact of the “Phil Donahue Show” depends chiefly on the bias that Donahue himself imposes on the interviews. Even the questions an interviewer asks imply a perspective.

We sometimes hear the claim that moral books and programs avoid portraying immorality, but this is untrue. The Bible contains an abundance of realism and depravity. In it are examples of violence, adultery, rape, homosexuality, murder, lying, stealing, and a dozen other types of immorality. Yet the overall effect of reading the Bible is moral for moral readers. How can this be, when the same experiences have so often been the occasion for immoral writing and television drama?

The crucial factor is the perspective from which the immorality is portrayed or discussed. The Bible describes depravity within a strongly moral framework. Its disapproval of immoral acts is obvious. Equally important, it places examples of positive moral behavior beside evil as an alternative and a norm. We can read about Joseph’s rejection of sexual temptation as well as of David’s adultery.

A moral book or program is one that offers a moral perspective (as opposed to an immoral one) for the approval of the audience. Conversely, an immoral book or program is one that recommends immoral behavior and attitudes. Judged by this standard, the problem with many books and television programs, as well as movies today, is not simply offensive subject matter such as Archie Bunker’s profanity, or the endless web of promiscuity in soap operas. The problem runs deeper than that and consists of the moral bias from which the subject matter is presented.

For illustrations, consider the following specimens, which typify what has become the norm in most current books, television programs, and movies:

• Sexual promiscuity is portrayed as a normal aspect of life, among both married and single persons, with no implication that it is wrong.

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• A hero whose primary feat or trait is something immoral (for example, committing robbery or practicing homosexuality) is portrayed in such a way as to generate sympathy from the audience.

• Characters who advocate a moral or Christian viewpoint are portrayed unsympathetically or held up to ridicule.

• An immoral act such as lying is treated comically, encouraging the audience to laugh at it and tolerate it instead of condemning it as wrong.

• The camera takes an audience through a crime from the criminal’s viewpoint rather than the victim’s, with the result that the audience tends to look upon the crime as an exploit that brings gratification.

• A moral act like marriage or honesty is recommended only because it is expedient, not because it is morally good.

• A book or program totally omits a Christian moral perspective, thereby encouraging an audience to agree with whatever viewpoint is included. For example, when a story by D. H. Lawrence portrays people as governed by their animal instincts, any resistance that readers offer to that viewpoint will have to come from their own resources, without any help from the story itself.

If situations such as these are characteristics that make books and programs immoral, it is easy by contrast to identify what makes them moral. A moral book or program recommends a moral as opposed to an immoral perspective. It shows immoral behavior and attitudes to be wrong and blameworthy. And it includes examples of moral behavior and attitudes as alternatives to immoral ones. The problem with most books and programs that meet these criteria is that they are moralizing as well as simply moral. They state their moral point explicitly rather than embody it in the moral patterns of the story or image. They fail altogether to earn the right to make their moral affirmations by first acknowledging how difficult it is to be good. They are preachy instead of incarnational.

A moral book or program makes the good both attractive (sympathetic) and convincing (true to our experience of life). The television series “Little House on the Prairie” does the former, but it often fails to make its moral patterns convincing. The Wilder family is unrealistically courageous and heroic, its antagonists too thoroughly villainous. We feel manipulated. By contrast, the movie Chariots of Fire lets the story do the talking, avoids a simplistic view of the hero’s antagonist, and makes virtue win our sympathy with action instead of sermonizing.

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Subject Matter

Can the very subject matter of a book or television program be a moral issue? It can, but this is an area where we need to tread cautiously and avoid making quick judgments. The effect on an audience and the perspective that a book or program takes toward the subject matter are far more reliable as guides to their morality or immorality than is subject matter by itself. The presence of profanity or a scene depicting sex or violence does not necessarily make a book or television program immoral in its overall impact or perspective. The effect of morally objectionable subject matter must be judged in terms of the import of the whole of the book or program as well as its parts.

But why should we be concerned about mere subject matter at all? It is because the books we read and the programs we watch fill our minds with images or pictures of life. These images become the habitual furniture of our minds. Some of these pictures of life are refining and sanctifying in their moral influence. Others are coarse, cheapening, and degrading in their impact.

In the long run, we become the sum of our indulgences, including the books we read and the programs we watch. If we habitually fill our minds with images of sex, we begin to view people as sexual objects. Someone has estimated that by the time of high school graduation the average American young person has vicariously participated in 20,000 murders while watching more than 15,000 hours of television. What is the most common result? It is a dulling of reverence for life and a blunting of respect for the worth of persons.

It might appear that the Bible portrays evil no less realistically than modern books and movies. In fact, someone has written an attack on the Bible using the format of a book review, claiming that it is an X-rated book “filled with whatever goes into a best-seller these days.” But a moral book like the Bible preserves distance between the reader and the immorality it portrays. Distance in books or movies means reticence or restraint in descriptive details. The Bible employs distance in portraying such realistic events as the adultery of David and Bathsheba, and Ehud’s assassination of Eglon. Modern books and movies use the opposite technique of detailed description. In the process, the reader or viewer frequently crosses the line from merely contemplating sex or violence to participating in it.

The strategy of books and programs is to give form to our own feelings and impulses. These inner impulses are a mixture of good and bad, waiting to be encouraged or discouraged by outward stimuli. The effect of some subject matter is to awaken the wrong impulses—impulses toward hatred or violence or sexual license or dishonesty or expediency or materialism. Even subject matter, therefore, can be a moral issue.

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Controlling The Moral Impact

Plato said something profound about the moral effect of books and literature in a society when he wrote, “Great is the issue at stake, greater than appears: whether a person is to be good or bad” (The Republic, Book X). As Christians, we stand with Plato and against modern trends.

Books and television stimulate a response—one that can be either good or bad. Books, television, and movies have replaced pulpit and classroom as the leading influence on the morals of society as a whole. They are not morally neutral, like a car or a gun, but are instead like food that we digest. As such, books and television can either nurture or poison us morally.

Controlling the moral effect of books and television requires both internal and external controls. The most crucial control is inner, and it consists of mastering the effect that books and programs have on us as individual readers and viewers. In addition to such personal control of our own moral responses, we need to scrutinize both the subject matter and perspective of books and television programs. Some are inherently dangerous to the moral health of individuals and society.

Leland Ryken, professor of English at Wheaton College, Illinois, is the author of a number of books, including Triumphs of the Imagination: Literature in Christian Perspective (IVP, 1979).

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