America vs. America’s Media
Media as a Principality of Satan
As a Christian media minister by trade and training, I can’t emphasize enough the fact that the principality of media is the number one enemy of the church right now. If you consider that while God destroyed two cities over homosexuality, it ought give all of us pause to know that homosexuality is merely the current ledge that the media has been successful in prodding the church onto. I’m afraid to say that without drastic, immediate action, it’s about to get worse. If the slogan of today’s sodomites among us is “It gets better,” my warning to you as a church leader, or as Joe Churchman, is that actually, “It gets worse.”
While it’s easy to react viscerally to the evils thrust in our faces every day by the sodomites, and the baby-killers, may I posit to you that the principal enemy, like all demonic forces, is a principality rather than a person or group of people. This particular principality is a principality you think you know, but which you vastly underestimate, and you underestimate this principality out of pride. You consider yourself above it and not susceptible to its influence. Now, if that’s not a characteristic of the Antichrist, I don’t know what is. I’m talking, of course, about the media.
The Devil We (Think We) Know
“I blame television.” Funny, right? Remember a time when even atheists used to say such quaint, anachronistic-sounding idioms, calling television “The Idiot Box” or “The Devil’s Box?” Do you remember a time when, further still, these sincere, heartfelt accusations, by your English teacher, or by your father, or his father, were said with zero sense of irony or humor?
Let remind you what that time was really like. Columbine hadn’t happened yet; neither had the decades-long streak of mass-shootings that led one BBC commentator to infamously conclude that mass domestic violence is “just another day in America.”
What About Christian Media?
God used Christian media to bring me to Christ, which is one of the principal reasons I went into media studies, and later anchored and reported the news. I was imbued in my education with a positive view toward the media as a neutral tool with no inherent bias. The “Technological Determinism” and “Hypodermic Needle” theories were bylines. My media courses, perhaps in an attempt to churn out successful reporters who would donate earnings to the college, buried the lede in this regard. So, I was more than blindsided by the realities of the industry when I actually started working in it.
Buying Your Soul for God at a Price
In this regard, I can empathize with the pastor who is afraid to respond to the latest media attacks on the church. After all, there are pastoral careers at stake. 401(k)’s. Of course, my response to the threats on my career as a reporter were, and continue to be, much different than those of the pastors today. When the worldly forces of Satan attack me, I just preach the Gospel harder. And, in spite of the threats that have been made to me, and my own former colleagues at WBZ Boston blacklisting me (yes, the bloody communist unions who run CBS are the real blacklisters, not patriotic Americans) I just preach the Gospel harder, and double-down on the threat to all of God’s people, and by extension, the very existence of America, posed by media.
Well, When, What About Christian Media?
So, what about Christian Media? What about Fox News?
Here’s the thing. Again, God happened to use the medium of Christian media to bring me into a relationship with Jesus Christ. So, how is it possible that I could say that media is inherently evil?
The apparent paradox here finds its resolution in a tricky logical problem with the question and its underlying assumptions. Here’s the logical loophole the enemy used to trip me up, and is probably using to trip you up, in attempting to get to the bottom of this apparent contradiction. This will require thinking caps, so grab it if you haven’t already.
So, we’re trying to justify two seemingly incompatible, seemingly mutually exclusive ideas: first off, that media is inherently evil; and second, that Christian media is good. How can Christian media be good if all media is evil?
Without going into too much detail which you can get into in this other writing of mine, the answer is simply put as such. Think of a choking man who stops breathing and collapses on the floor. Sounds like a great candidate for CPR? So you go over and perform CPR, the pinching of the nose, the chest compressions, the whole bit. Now, if the choking man actually hadn’t been choking, it would be wildly inappropriate, unwise, even evil for another man to seal his lips around the other man’s on the floor by any counts; but; considering that this particular maneuver will in fact save the other man’s life, it is a valiant and noble deed.
So, basically, media as a totality is choking and suffocating America from within. Christian media, and even Fox News – though Fox News is vastly demonic – let’s suppose for the moment a fallacy that Fox News is a Christian news outlet, which it’s not – just for the sake of illustration. I use Fox News because as I detail here, what makes Fox News Fox News is that, essentially, it is a scathing critique of every other outlet. In other words, Fox News is where you go to see how the other 99% of media, from Silicon Valley to CNN, is pulling the wool over your eyes. Implicitly, then, if the media weren’t evil to begin with, there would have arisen out of the ashes no Fox News. Fox News is a reaction to the evil news media, doing what Christian Radio attempts to do in a more direct if less effective way: to put out the fires set by the preeminent media. In this way, conservative, Godly media is truly reactive. Fox News appears to be on the offensive but, like the church, it is constantly on the defensive. And so, while it affords some metoo-style ideological comfort food, this comfort food is, really death which lulls its audience into a false sense of security.
Is Christian Media Evil?
To bring this back to the way God brought me to faith through Christian Radio; again, Christians are much too malleable by media influence, because of our pride that somehow we are above its influence.
In other words, yes, God used the medium of Christian radio to bring me to faith in Him, to educate me as to His Character. And He did so marvelously. However, just as there would be no need for Fox News if the media were in totality actually informative, honest, and accountable to cooler heads; there would be no need for Christian media, for Christian radio, if media in totality were not in and of itself such a cultural-warping, Satanward force leading America into the abyss.
In other words, if the particular church of my youth had not been reverse-evangelized by the media so as to develop a certain stench of death and disbelief, a very palpable, ubiquitous “gentleman’s agreement” among churchgoers that God was something to be talked about from the pulpit on Sunday but which, even in church, had no real consequence or bearing on anything –
Then the “false fellowship” offered by Christian Media which God used to bring me into a relationship with him wouldn’t have been necessary. And may I say, radio evangelism falls far short of actual Biblical fellowship. Actually, I’d go so far as to suggest it’s not real fellowship at all.
God’s Judgement vs. “News Judgment”
The pet Bible verse of the News Industry for attacking Christians is “Judge not, lest you be judged.” Ironically, the news industry considers among the principal qualifications for news personnel “news judgment.” The implication: God’s people who read the Bible and obey him are not qualified to judge right from wrong, but the unelected “Fourth Estate” is. It doesn’t make sense, does it? Unless, of course, your primary motivation for doing what you do is to profit from your audience.
A War as Old as the Republic
David Barton of Wallbuilders is fond of recounting that America’s pastorate were its original newsbearers. And it makes sense, doesn’t it? Why would you trust someone who had not been duly elected as a spiritual and moral authority to inform you of what’s important and filter out everything else?
And Americans don’t trust the News Media. We never really did. Journalism has always been a disreputable industry, of people whose bread is buttered by attacking others. Unbeknownst to its audience, usually the audience is the principality that the media attacks with the most vitriol.
Media attacks us using rather slick methodology – and this is where most of us are too proud to admit that we have been, but need not be, victimized by it. If we were honest with ourselves for even a moment, we would acknowledge that it offers us very little useful information. It is our collective sloth which yields to its glittering, yet continued, pelting attacks upon our own personal character both individually and as a nation.
Media Personalities as Expert Electronic Manipulators
The personalities paid to speak at us on various media channels have not earned, as the pastors of old did, the right to speak to us through their strength of character, their personal testimony, or their credibility in any other way. Rather, they have attained their position by mere virtue of their expertise in manipulating the electronic medium, and by demonstrating their willingness to do so in a way that profits their employers and by extension their shareholders.
Because of their seemingly omnipotent and omniscient qualities, which are enabled by sheer electronic trickery and a vast network of writers who all have agreed to make their own living perpetuating this vast illusion, the anchors and anchorettes routinely dupe an entire nation into believing that they are credible, local, intelligent moral authorities who are qualified to inform us, and by implication, to assign value to and filter what passes through our mind’s eye and what doesn’t.
Furthermore, these voices whispering in our ear do all this in ways that legitimate friends and community-approved moral voices – like the colonial American Pastor – are simply powerless to do. Thus, our Pastor gets to speak into our lives for a total of about 45 minutes per week in the form of a sermon. However, the unelected Fourth Estate, which again derives its power not from strength of character or the reasons we elect or appoint a worthy pastor or even an unworthy politician – the unelected Fourth Estate we foolishly invite into our mind’s eye forty-fold into our lives.
Our False Justification For Choosing Bad Information
We justify this apparent dichotomy of inviting voices we know are evil – ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN – into our lives for as many as 40 hours a week compared to the one hour or less we invite our pastor, who actually has a vested interest in our own edification. It doesn’t even have to be a pastor; it could very well be a good Christian friend, a brother or sister within the fellowship. And we justify all this because – well – we fancy ourselves somehow immune to the evils of the media. We understand that it is evil, and yet we believe, falsely, that media has no bearing on us.
Forty hours – okay, even ten, if you’re better off than most Christians – even pastors. I know Christian leaders who steep their minds in Days of Our Lives. It’s foolish and absurd.
Here’s another reason we are so easily duped by media influence. We are natural creatures and media is an unnatural force. Think of the ubiquity of pornography in run-of-the-mill commercials, like Abercrombie and Fitch Catalogues, which feature naked people in a bath tub. By the time it’s made an impression in your mind, the damage is already done. It’s not a fair game; short of stripping during a sermon, it would be difficult for your pastor to compete for visual impact. But again, the imagery of the pornographic commercial industry is an artificial force. Once it’s wormed its way into your mind by way of media, print, TV, “social” or otherwise, our natural minds are tricked by the artificial medium, which used electronic trickery to etch something which confuses, upsets, and tears away the very fabric of the logical minds God gave us to discern good from evil.
Application: Getting Practical
So what does it all mean? What do I do, turn off my TV? That’s a great start. But perhaps, even now, you are as I am somehow feeling a bit powerless to confront the principality of the media in our lives. CNN has a vast network of people who work 24-7 to scare all of us out of our wits, and so let us all throw up our hands as America crumbles into the abyss, right?
Well, not exactly. I can’t say I have an easy fix, but I do have a simple fix.
We need to, as a church, collectively double-down on revealing the nature of the beast for what it is; an incredibly confusing, divisive, inherently pornographic and evil principality whose purpose is not to inform us nor even enlighten our spirit in the form of entertainment, but rather to take advantage of us and undermine everything we read in the Word of God.
Preachers ought contend with the media directly; ought be vigilant about studying it as we study all cults – and that is what media is. A cult appropriating authentic fellowship and, in the case of “Christian media,” occasionally even church itself. (Check out Neil Postman’s chapter in Amusing Ourselves To Death called “Shuffle Off to Bethlehem.) As one saved through Christian Radio, I’m careful here to not accuse Christian media of being evil, but being a kind of last resort many Christians have resorted to like CPR – wholly inappropriate of its own, perhaps, but an appropriate response to direly confusing times for a media-befuddled America.
A High Stakes War for America’s Soul
The American church won’t simply fall off the cliff and die, if we continue down the slope we’re on. No, it won’t be quick and painless, with a bloody splattering, and that’s it. The church will, if it makes no repentance, have a front-row seat as to the increasingly hellish fruits of its inaction unless it enacts change quickly, as I’ve had here in Sodom and Gomorrah. The church will have a front-row seat to the sodomization of America, and eventually, the players will creep out into the audience, and force all of us to bend over and grab our ankles, in the famous words of Rush Limbaugh. He’s absolutely right. Oh, that such language weren’t necessary. But alas, these are terrible times, unprecedented in American history.
Naturally, when the American Church fails, America herself will fail, as America is a nation Constitutionally built upon her church, the only foundation which has ever sustained America, morally, ethically, and in every other way.
It’s not the media’s responsibility to correct itself. DuPont long poisoned the Ohio River with toxins which caused birth defects and untold agonies for those who swam in and drank the polluted water downstream from it. I hear they’re playing the same game now in North Carolina. Don’t use Teflon products, by the way!
Right now, the Christian approach to fighting the media is the proverbial whack-a-mole. A pastor is attacked here; Judge Moore there, and because of the shock-and-awe Vietnam-style guerilla drive-by hits which the media gets away with in its sophisticated game of 24-7 defamation, libel, and an Ohio River’s worth of evils, which it carefully curates from all over the world to dump into your living room for the purpose of extracting a profit from you – just like Dupont – the media wins every time. And yet, we Christians, we religious leaders even, drink the chemical stew of evil that it doles out to us.
Many pastors don’t so much as warn their congregations, who are often less able to discern good from evil; those who would sooner watch MSNBC as … say … Sean Hannity. They think one is as good as the other. Worse, they think they’re capable of “Watching everything and coming to their own conclusion.” Maybe you do.
I’m here to tell you that the media is stacked against you. I would suggest to you that if ABC reports something it’s actually less likely to be true than if they didn’t report it at all. But so sophisticated is the media’s art of appropriating reality to lead you off the proverbial cliff – with the ultimate motivation of profiting from you and undermining your godly peace of mind – which is a threat to its existence.
I know most of you can’t simply stop consuming news; it’s a compulsion, not unlike gambling or alcoholism.
I can see you reading this thinking, I need to be informed. I need to watch.
Do we really? Do we really need to consume secular news?
Or is now the time for Christians, with the dwindling gray hairs hearing about their churches closing, and pastors of zero character, in their panic, trying to prove their worth by going on Ashley Madison and betraying the gospel they say the believe in –
Is now the time for Christians to finally say with our actions, with our behavior, “no, we’re not going to consume secular ‘news'” from sources we really can’t trust because they’re not from a faith perspective and are not qualified to speak into our lives?
Is now the time for Christians to say, “We’re sick of being manipulated. We’re sick of you attacking the faith, the country we believe in, that our fathers and their fathers fought and died to protect? And who are you to besmirch and mischaracterize us and our religious leaders – and dump all manner of evil from all corners of the globe into our living rooms, our desks at work?”
The cost is real; the stakes are high. In just a mere century, media has transformed a Christian nation which prayed in schools, in Congress, and worshipped the one true God who gave us America, Jesus Christ, into a nation where we must now lock our doors, for fear that our next-door neighbor might be like the axe-murderer we saw on television.
Or will we choose to recognize the devil that we think we know but don’t – the media – I mean television, newspapers, silicon valley, all of these forces all of us know (if you don’t, write me, I can back that up) – are HOSTILE to Christ and America, and by extension, the liberty, security and justice and all the blessings we enjoy here in God’s Exceptional nation?
Will the church continue to drink the poison of media which we know logically, most of us in the church – is evil – or will we continue to drink the poison and squander the gifts of our mind which God has blessed us with?
Will we continue to hand over our minds on a day-to-day basis to Satan and let the yeast of the media continue to bear its illegitimate bastard fruits in this great but ailing nation God has blessed us with?
Or will be choose what is better? Will we make the wiser choice? Will we turn to the local faith fellowship over media; and furthermore, will we become aggressive, offensive, worthy opponents of the number one force, the Public Enemy Number One which has been tanking America since not only the advent of Broadcast but the advent of the teletype machine which made it possible for Newspapers to speed the evils of an entire world onto our Sunday morning once reserved for the Word of God?
P.S./Afterword:
I keep trying to revise this message. Hopefully I’m on the right track here.
Every Christian must be an anti-media apologist. At least, those who study cults ought be anti-media apologists.
So important to study the underlying, the unseen, the structure, rather than the content of the media.
Christians tend to be cerebral. And in being cerebral, we miss the meat of the assault against the church by the media. We stupidly react to their elusive triggers – “gay marriage,” “abortion”. We fail to react to their censorship of God from every story…. the media’s backstory, if you will.
We get fixated on the trees, and in so doing miss the forest. And it’s killing the church. The key to reversing the media’s war on the church, of going on the offensive successfully, is in this.
yes, one-on-one evangelism matters, but to do so, it helps to stop the guy stabbing your arm first.
And that’s what the media has been doing to us as a church. This is important. Every Christian should be equipped as an anti-media apologist.