"Our constant need for entertainment has blurred the line between fiction and reality—on television, in American politics, and in our everyday lives.” -Megan Garber
I want to add faith to the list of things that our insatiable thirst for amusement is poisoning.
The article is “We’ve Lost the Plot,” written by Megan Garber and published in The Atlantic on January 30, 2023. In her essay, Garber argues that our culture is being held captive by our need to be entertained. And by culture, she means us.
No, that’s not a new idea. Authors and social commentators like George Orwell and Aldous Huxley of the twentieth century warned us about the immersive lure of amusement.
Garber’s thesis is chilling: “In the future, …we will surrender ourselves to our entertainment. We will become so distracted and dazed by our fictions that we’ll lose our sense of what is real. We will make our escapes so comprehensive that we cannot free ourselves from them. The result will be a populace that forgets how to think, how to empathize with one another, even how to govern and be governed.”
With screens that open doors to every kind of entertainment imaginable (I have immediate access to five screens at the moment—a laptop, a smartphone, a tablet, a watch, and a TV), our attention spans are driven by what amuses, distracts, and enlivens.
If you think about it, it’s impressive that we accomplish anything.
But here’s the thing. It’s not just that we have an overwhelming number of things vying for our attention (we do). It’s that these sources of entertainment want more than our attention. The entertainers (have fun identifying who those are) want to immerse us in an alternative reality. And in doing so, they may steal our souls.
Tell me that I’m wrong. Our attention goes to that which entertains. And in our context, everything that gets and keeps our attention amuses us at some level. If it’s not interesting, it doesn’t get our attention.
Content production is driven by getting people hooked. The pressure to be interesting or entertaining is exhausting (and expensive). Consider all that people do to be—and stay—interesting. With so many things competing for our attention, entities must be more and more entertaining, or they will lose viewers, clicks, and dollars.
Garber acknowledges that we may not find this particularly compelling as we return to swiping through our Netflix queue. “But each invitation to be entertained reinforces an impulse: to seek diversion whenever possible, to avoid tedium at all costs, to privilege the dramatized version of events over the actual one. To live in the metaverse is to expect that life should play out as it does on our screens. And the stakes are anything but trivial.”
Consider how the entertainment world has shaped how we think about ourselves, our vocations, and our faith. We stream programming that tells the story we want to hear. Characters (bosses, co-workers, teachers, ministers) appear in the narrative. Some we come to love, while others are ‘written off’ because their storylines go in a different direction. There are seasons that we like and others that we don’t. Jobs, churches, hobbies, and friendships all suffer the same fate that we ascribe to many of our sources of entertainment. We cancel them when they no longer serve our interests.
In this new world where we must compete for people’s attention, Church becomes a series of episodes we stream or binge. We skip or fast forward through things that bore us and replay the things that don’t. Honestly, if I could have fast-forwarded our pastor emeritus’s Sunday morning prayers when I was a child, I would have. We mourn the loss of beloved characters who are no longer a part of the show, and we threaten to find new programming when the experience doesn’t cater to our preferences.
What happens when Church becomes religious entertainment? If this becomes our reality, it’s hard to know how we remain culturally relevant when competing for people’s attention against the likes of Disney, ESPN, NCAA Athletics, Broadway, Hollywood, Cable News Networks, Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube, Apple, Hulu, and Amazon Prime.
And how about our faith? There’s no telling how our relationship with God is shaped by our expectation that we must be entertained all the time.
With so much to occupy our minds and fill our time, we may believe we do not need God. What a shame. We are more than observers of other people’s stories. We are beloved members of God’s story. Our identity in Christ Jesus should transcend the ebb and flow of what the culture deems entertaining.
Indeed, Church may suffer if it becomes uninteresting. And if we must compete with the media juggernaut listed above, that may be inevitable as we go deeper into the 21st century. So, if we cannot be entertaining, we will strive instead to be authentic and honest in our offerings and gatherings. We will profess the truth of God’s love as detailed in the Bible. We will testify how Jesus shapes our lives to those who will listen. And we will serve others as God calls us to love as He loves us.
No, that may not make for good television. But it certainly will be compelling.
I believe this to be true, and I hope it becomes so for you and your family: Being a disciple of Jesus is worth your time and energy. Actually, I think it’s worth your everything.