40-year-old book remarkably insightful about state of culture and religion today
Book review: ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business’ by Neil Postman, ★★★★★
Few writers have more accurately explained the current state of American religion, at least its most visible aspects, than has university professor Neil Postman.
What passes for American Christianity on television, he wrote, “is not anything like the Sermon on the Mount.” Instead, it honors celebrities and influence. And while Christianity is at its core a “demanding and serious religion,” what the American public sees of it is “another kind of religion altogether.”
Postman wrote those words in 1985.
If prophets are people who have uncanny knack for predicting the future, Postman was a prophet: His 40-year-old book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, often reads like it could have been written today as he describes the influence of television on American culture, including the most visible displays of Christianity.
Postman published his book the same year that a predecessor to American Online, Quantum Link, started making online information and entertainment available to the masses rather than just computer nerds. Postman was off in calling the computer “a vastly overrated technology,” but his prescience about television turning news into entertainment more than makes up for it. It takes little reading between the lines to interpret him as predicting that a game-show host could one day become president of the United States:
What all of this means is that our culture has moved toward a new way of conducting its business, especially its important business. The nature of its discourse is changing as the demarcation line between what is show business and what is not becomes harder to see with each passing day.
A key problem with television, as Postman saw it, is its disconnected nature, the way it is good at entertaining without providing context or a connection with the outside world in the way that words on a page can and have done for centuries:
Together, this ensemble of electronic techniques called into being a new world — a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is a world without much coherence or sense; a world that does not ask us, indeed, does not permit us to do anything; a world that is, like the child’s game of peek-a-boo, entirely self-contained. But like peek-a-boo, it is also endlessly entertaining.
If Postman were writing the book today, he undoubtedly would be writing about what mass media is turning into: something that, in a sociological sense, fits Postman’s description of television but to an exaggerated degree. What we have today with social media and streaming is something like a combination of short-form and long-form television, but more ubiquitous and with the addition of hyper-targeting, making the viewing experience even more disconnected from the world as it really exists.
The television of Postman’s day tended to be broken up into segments of around eight minutes, making it unsuitable for thoughtful, informative programming. And when television did make an effort at serious information, the programs were aired at off times, the Sunday-morning news interview shows being the prime example. These days, the proliferation of TikTok and its imitators means that an eight-minute segment is longer than the norm. And the widespread use of scrolling means that video influencers are forced to grab the viewers’ attention in a matter of seconds — not the recipe for presenting detailed information, much less serious discussion or in-depth background.
TV and authenticity
When Postman wrote his book, the dominant face of Christianity as viewed by the culture was the rise of televangelism, which Postman saw as destructive for the way it puts celebrities, rather than abstract beliefs, front and center:
CBS knows that Walter Cronkite plays better on television than the Milky Way. And Jimmy Swaggart plays better than God. For God exists only in our minds, whereas Swaggart is there, to be seen, admired, adored. Which is why he is the star of the show. And why Billy Graham is a celebrity, and why Oral Roberts has his own university, and why Robert Schuller has a crystal cathedral all to himself. If I am not mistaken, the word for this is blasphemy.
There is no doubt, the professor wrote, that religion can be made entertaining. But, he asked, does that destroy religion as something authentic?
In a sense, the answer came after the book’s publication in the rise of the “seeker-sensitive” approach to evangelism, the kind that led to the immense growth of megachurches, a movement in its infancy in 1985. In countless churches across the country, church services were designed to be entertaining. The problem, as one of the early adopters of seeker sensitivity, the Chicago-area Willow Creek Community Church, determined some years later, is that such an approach might have been good at drawing crowds but wasn’t so good at promoting spiritual growth.
And in recent years, it has become obvious that the fusion of entertainment and politics along with the fusion of entertainment and religion has led to a dangerous mix of all three: The quest for power has eclipsed the call for the first to become last, creating a Christian nationalist movement that has turned traditional Christian priorities such as love for the foreigner upside-down.
Postman closes his book by asking what can be done to reverse the ill effects of television on American culture. He isn’t satisfied with any of the answers he comes up with but hopes against hope that education — making people aware of the destructive effects of an entertainment-based approach to civic involvement and faith — can make a difference.
Consecrated space
Perhaps that’s right. Or perhaps, at least in that part of American culture that has to do with religion, a challenge to entertainment as a dominant force comes in offering an authenticity that is difficult to impossible for videocentric media to provide. While I’m hesitant to give the churches that fought covid meeting restrictions much credence at all, they may have been right about one thing: Group support for spirituality is something that comes from meeting in person with fellow believers.
Postman wrote that one reason that television fails at providing authentic religious experiences is because there is no way to consecrate the space in which television is experienced. Such a space doesn’t have to be in a church, mosque or ashram; a slab of wood set up in an outdoor amphitheater can serve as a makeshift altar, for example. When I think about three very different types of Christian worship services I have attended this spring and summer, I can’t help but agree with Postman’s observation. I found all of them meaningful in part because they were held in spaces set aside for something other than entertainment and where my focus could be on the proper focus of worship. These services were a Catholic gathering of contemplative prayer and song in a hotel basement with light from candles and music led by a soloist gently playing acoustic guitar; Latter-day Saint services, all held in a very plain sanctuary, featuring untrained lay speakers and traditional hymns on piano and organ; and an evangelical/Pentecostal service with soft-rock music led by a praise band followed by a sermon.
Even though the LDS and Pentecostal services were or are available for viewing via streaming, neither fell for the trappings of television. Even in the Pentecostal service, there was nothing done to treat the musicians or preacher as celebrities; I hope the preacher there doesn’t feel insulted if he reads this, as I’m intending this as a compliment, but what was most striking about him was his ordinariness despite being a skilled speaker. He was there to teach and share, not to flaunt charisma or wealth or become the center of attention in the way that so many TV-centric pastors have done. Looking back on these times of worship, I’m struck by the genuineness of it all, a type of genuineness that simply isn’t replicable for mass or social media.
In concluding his chapter on religion, Postman wrote that the danger isn’t that religion has become the content of television, but that television shows may become the content of religion. While that transformation has happened in places, it isn’t complete. Those involved in religious leadership would do well to heed Postman’s advice if they hope to prevent expressions of faith become something other than just another TikTok short or Instagram reel.