See No Evil, Read No Evil

At the start of my teaching career back in the seventies, I also served as the chaplain in a church-related college.  Those were memorable years when students would stop by my office to discuss problems, and not all of those problems were spiritual.    

I vividly remember one conversation with a student, as she came into my office full of rage.  She was angry that she was being forced to watch a particular movie for a class and wanted me as the chaplain to protest with her.  Why, she asked, should she be required at a church-related college to watch a film that she described as obscene?  The film in question was an Academy-Award winner that was certainly raw and uncomfortable at points.  I knew that because I had seen the film several years before.

Her anger reminded me of a set of books in our home when I was a child.  The books were literary classics from authors like Dickens, Bronte, and Austin.  As a boy, I took little interest in the books until the day I opened one to find written on the title page the words “morally bad” in my father’s handwriting.  I’m certain that the first book in that set that I actually read. 

This student and my father shared a perspective that some contemporary parents also hold.  They would like to blackball certain books and ideas that are found in school and city libraries. 

I don’t deny that there are books and films that are morally problematic, and we certainly need to consider the age-appropriateness of any work.  Nevertheless, we have to be careful that we don’t avoid books and films that make us uncomfortable and pose hard questions. 

The angry student was a college junior, someone soon to enter the adult work world and a person who deserved a serious answer.  I surprised her by asking a question that must have seemed irrelevant.  I asked if she enjoyed watching a popular TV comedy of the time, “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” She said that she did.  We both agreed that the weekly program presented nothing that was morally objectionable.      

 I then said that if life is like the Dick Van Dyke Show, just one funny episode after another, then the Bible makes little sense.  The view of the human condition in the Bible, I reminded her, is one of brokenness, sorrow, and the need for repentance and healing.  Yes, there are funny moments in life, moments of light and beauty, but that is hardly what the Bible considers the normal human condition. I could have added that none of the stories that students told me in the privacy of my office were funny ones. 

I agreed with the student that there were moments in the film that she was required to watch where sex was portrayed, but I asked if she would agree that those scenes were uniformly dark and depressing.  There was nothing alluring or titillating about those scenes.  In fact, the brokenness of human life and the need for redemption were the major themes of the film.

That was the world, I suggested, that the Bible knows all too well.  That’s the tricky part about being people of faith.  On the one hand, sin is what is broken in our lives.  Sin is the mess we get ourselves and others into.  It’s never pretty.  I never had students share burdens that they were glad to be dealing with in their lives. 

On the other hand, we who are religious are easily tempted to present ourselves as people who aren’t troubled with brokenness. When we do that, our places of worship become gatherings of the pure rather than hospitals for the broken.  That was brought home to me when a friend of my wife told her that while she knew she needed God in her life, she also knew that she couldn’t enter a church until she’d cleaned up her life. 

Had my wife’s friend failed to understand the church or had the church failed to understand itself?