The Rated R Church
Copyright 2003 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
I recently had a Christian friend of mine tell me how she loves the animated television show ‘South Park’. For those of you unfamiliar with this American network program it is ostensibly a cartoon about grade-school children but is saturated with morally offensive adult humor. In every episode the same child character is killed in some bizarre and supposedly funny new way. The very first episode, broadcast at Christmastime, featured a fistfight between Jesus Christ and Santa Claus over whom the holiday was really about. The one program I temporarily sat in on had some humor about the Holocaust. As someone who is part Jewish I found this particularly offensive and that was the first and last time I watched South Park.
I wish I could say my friend was the only believer who has informed me what a wonderfully funny show it is. Unfortunately that is not the case.
Another great example of contemporary American pop culture is ‘The Sopranos’, a TV show about a New Jersey Mafia family. This program is full of violence and sexual content. A good example from a couple of season’s back was a graphic scene in which a woman is beaten to death in a parking lot. One Sunday I sat in a church office listening to a number of people on the worship team debate whether there was anything wrong with watching the Sopranos. My greatest shock, frankly, was that debate on the subject existed at all.
I hate to use words like ‘compromised’ and ‘carnal’ to describe the American Church. These words smack of judgement on my part and I am no moral paragon myself, having personally watched some pretty bad things since my conversion. But I am not proud of it and, as a Christian, am deeply troubled by the profound influence our secular culture is having on so many believers in this nation often without anyone giving it a second thought. The idea of holiness as being set apart from the World in the sense that we do not partake in its corruption is taken less and less seriously, at least in the Evangelical fold. The result is a Church that is taking on a darker hue. The biblical mandate for purity is being heeded less and less as we become the ‘Rated R Church’ (‘Rated R’ being an American term meaning ‘Restricted’. It applies to movie ratings and generally means a film is violent and/or sexual in nature.)
The Rated R Church looks the other way when believers indulge in entertainment that is voyeuristic as far as sex and accepting as far as violence. Sometimes it even sanctions such indulgence by claiming that this kind of entertainment is ‘real’ and that our ‘Christian Liberty’ includes embracing such ‘reality’. But sexual purity and living a non-violent life are cardinal Christian virtues. God hates sexual immorality and He hates violence for violence’s sake. I do not like to imagine sitting in front of a TV or in a darkened theater, with Jesus sitting by my side, watching these programs and films.
It is not that denominational standards have necessarily changed. It is more an issue of the unwillingness or inability of church’s to hold its members accountable to those standards. In America if you do not like what a church is asking you to do or not do you just find another church that is more accommodating. It’s called ‘Church Hopping’ and is epidemic among Evangelicals here. Submission to legitimate authority is not exactly one of the better heeded biblical mandates in the United States.
The result of this drift towards casual worldliness may be the slow death of the mainstream Evangelical Church in America. Christian pollster George Barna uses the ‘Frog in the Kettle’ analogy to illustrate what may eventually happen. If a frog touches hot water in a kettle it will immediately feel the scalding heat and attempt to escape. However if you put the same frog in a room temperature kettle and very slowly heat the water the frog will not move. In fact it will sit contentedly in the pot until the gradually heating water kills it. As the people who make up the Church in this nation gradually become acclimated to more and more depraved popular entertainment hearts will continue to darken. True Christianity, with its radical call to holiness, will be supplanted by a religion of accommodation, a religion that might be Christian in name only. And what does our Lord tell us about salt losing its saltiness? It is a sobering thought.
Only true repentance and moral revival will reverse this process. But are we even open to such repentance when so many Christians are telling each other everything is ok and heading off to another R movie or sitting down to watch South Park or the Sopranos? May God, in His mercy, open our eyes to see the end of the road we are so blithely traveling.