How ‘wholesome entertainment’ can be wrong-headed

I’ve never been a big fan of calling the merely vulgar ‘ground-breaking.’

I can’t sit through more than about four minutes of Glee and I find even 45 seconds of Deadwood painfully trite in its practiced obscenity.    The sort of person who writes a script merely to offend a former Sunday School teacher is revealing more about himself than he is about the story, so you won’t catch me defending the gratuitous F-bomb or the camera that lingers over a cowgirl making water on the prairie.     And sex is such a divine thing, in my book, that I don’t know any artist who can compete with God.  It’s pointless to try, and, really, why put a theater full of people, or a million television-watching families in a couple’s bedroom?   Aren’t the eyes of a beautiful woman, smiling at her man in a way that speaks invitation, a lot more powerful?   Isn’t the resulting imagination more intense, and certainly more tasteful?

But a story-teller has to tell the truth, and the greatest truth-teller of all — the Almighty — has given us a guideline in scripture.   It begins with a story of a couple who walked around in a garden naked and unashamed.  It moves to a story about one brother killing another, in a jealous rage.   It pictures a day of vast wickedness on the face of the earth, a strange time when “the sons of God” came into the “fair” daughters of men, who bore them children called “giants” or “nephilim.”    It speaks of a cataclysmic divine genocide of all things, sparing only Noah and his ark and family, from a vast global flood.    It tells of a post flood patriarch who drank so much wine he fell asleep naked in his tent, uncovered.

I’m only on chapter 9, of the first of 66 books.  I haven’t gotten to Samuel and the violent death of all the Amalekites.  I haven’t discussed Samson and his beautiful concubine, Delilah.   I haven’t talked about Ehud sticking a knife in the belly of the king and calling it a message from God, nor have I taken you anywhere near the Song of Solomon.    We haven’t discussed the sort of dancing Herod must have enjoyed enough to promise half his kingdom, nor have we seen the poor baptist’s head on a charger.   We haven’t seen the adulterous woman dragged through the street, after being caught in the very act.

The Bible is a great story, a dramatic story, and it’s full of sex and violence.

It’s also full of redemption, of good triumphing over evil, of violence used to maintain the peace, or to pay the wages of sin.   It’s the story of the weak prevailing over the strong, when God is on their side.    It is not, generally, the story of a monastic withdrawal from life.   It’s a story where God pours out his blessings — spiritual and material — on those who love and obey Him.   It’s the story of good king Boaz, and this charming passage:

And when Boaz had eaten and drunk, and his heart was merry, he went to lie down at the end of the heap of corn: and [Ruth] came softly, and uncovered his feet, and laid her down.

It’s the story of a guy who had a little too much to drink but didn’t take advantage of a poor woman who offered herself to him!  Would you rate such a story with an innuendo meter and deny the flock the honorable ending?  There are Christian movie ministries who actually assign staff to watch movies, so as to count the curse words, inventory the innuendo and report how many times someone lights up a cigar or pours a brandy.

They don’t get it.  Wholesome isn’t just about watching your language;  it’s about watching your heart, and God tells us — through His story — that our hearts are desperately wicked.  How can you redeem the characters in your story if they don’t ever experience real temptation, real misery, real trial?

You see that’s the nature of the word ‘wholesome.’   Wholesome is ‘Whole.’  It’s the ‘whole’ story, not the half of it that pleases some weird, self-imposed, pasty-faced version of self-denial masquerading as the faith of our fathers.   Our fathers butchered bulls, read the Bible everyday, attended meeting twice on Sunday, sometimes carrying their muskets with them.  They traded corn for a little rum by the fire.   They were real men who took real women to wife — most of them for life. Sometimes the Christian justice of the peace had to fine them for voicing a profane oath or execute them for armed robbery.

On the contrary, what we tend to see today is a Christian values movement that tries to be more holy than the very word of God itself.    One woman scolded me for using the word ‘fornication’ in our first episode.   I told her I counted 35 instances of that word in the King James version of the Bible.   She said that wasn’t for children.  I asked her “is the Bible for children?  How do you teach them if you don’t read to them?”

And I’m serious.   I believe that somewhere in the last 150 years of the church we fell for reverence over holiness, for silence over singing, for hunger over the feast, for pious dogma over scripture.    Sadly, we fell for dumb obedience over thinking as well.  Some of these Christian movie reviewers don’t review anything.  They summarize plots, and they don’t appear to know the difference between the two.  They dutifully report the number of F words, but they are straining so hard for gnats they don’t even choke on the camel they swallow with every paragraph:  they’re just helping the pagans with their publicity.

And the ‘wholesomeness’ they call for isn’t whole at all.   The standard they are calling for would have done what centuries of corrupt church officials have tried to do without success — ban the very Word itself.