Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Television and the Soul

(Reprinted from the issue of December 2, 2004)

You’d think that the uproar over Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at last season’s Superbowl would have taught the television networks that there are limits to the American public’s tolerance for broadcast indecency, particularly when it’s smuggled into sports events that attract family viewers. But no, ABC has crossed another line, with a blonde exposing herself to a football star in an ad to promote her hit sitcom. It was supposed to be funny.

It was also calculated to stir “controversy” and get publicity. Which it did. Bogus artists and TV executives alike have long since caught on to the cash value of “breaking taboos.” Nowadays there is nothing safer, or more lucrative, than being “daring.” And this game can go on forever, as long as there are any moral standards at all.

Once upon a time, when we were presented with indecency in art or entertainment, our first thought was for its possible impact on children. But today even the kids are so jaded that it seems futile to try to shield them. A woman makes a crude sexual pass in a men’s locker room, and the wee ones are supposed to laugh (and leer) right along with the rest of us.

Well, I’m not just worried about the kids. I’m equally worried about the rest of us, including myself. Let’s not act as if only children are harmed when mortal sin is made light of. Not only is this evil; it’s now inescapable. We can’t even complain that it’s sprung on us unawares, when we risk seeing it at any hour we venture to turn on the television. The medium is almost a nonstop occasion of sin.

Feminists have taught us to be sensitive to “sexual harassment,” a fashionable phrase for what used to be called caddish behavior. But why isn’t lewd enticement of men also seen as unacceptable aggression? The “joke” in this case is that the athlete, not very subtly, succumbs to the blonde’s allurements, men being what they are; there is no suggestion that his own dignity is being violated by an invitation to lechery.

You didn’t use to have to explain these things to people. But popular entertainment is now pitched at viewers who either don’t know any better or, more likely, take pride and pleasure in being sophisticatedly “naughty.”

Better a nation of prudes than one as debased as this one has become. At least a prude senses that something serious is at stake: our immortal souls. But even the prudes are squeamish about giving their real reasons.
 
Our Souls Are at Stake

We’re hearing a great deal about “values” this season. This seems to be a polite euphemism for the delicate and unmentionable subjects of Heaven and Hell. They seem to be especially unmentionable among the more enlightened and highbrow sort of Christians. I gather from reading some of them that Jesus came to set a good example for us and to promote the cause of social justice, not to die for our sins (“sin” being another word in dubious taste) and to help us go to Heaven rather than Hell.

In his book Why I Am a Catholic, for example, Garry Wills makes only five or six brief references to Hell, all of them tinged with scorn for the very idea; he tries to explain why he is a Catholic without suggesting why on earth anyone else should be. Apparently Catholicism is a pretty low-stakes, take-it-or-leave-it sort of thing.

Even the latest Catechism of the Church deals rather gently with the dreadful subject of eternal damnation. I can’t remember the last time I heard a sermon about it. It’s as if this is a matter children really must be shielded from, for fear of frightening or, as we now say, “traumatizing” them.

C.S. Lewis says somewhere that he has never known a truly serious Christian who didn’t have a vigorous belief in Hell. Maybe what the kids need most is a good trauma. Instead they are getting the message that sex is fun and can’t do you any harm if correctly performed; sex “education” offers techniques of “safe sex,” without the faintest suggestion that fornication (another banned word) is, in the ultimate sense, most unsafe.

Prudery is seldom genial; the man with a fund of dirty jokes may be superbly genial. But the sternest prude, unless he is merely fussy, may be deeply charitable. In his way, he is very likely trying to help us get to Heaven.

This country is suffering from a severe prude shortage. Things like the aforementioned commercial encourage us to congratulate ourselves on not being prudish; that is, on not seeing that the blonde is not only coveting the athlete’s body, which is coarse enough in itself, but is also attacking his immortal soul.

The whole modern world seems designed to make us forget that our souls are at stake. The whole New Testament throbs with the urgent and opposite message; so does all really Christian literature, including even most heretical Christian literature. I often listen to an evangelical Protestant radio station just because it stays “on message” about salvation and damnation and tells truths we don’t often hear from Catholic pulpits anymore.

As Baudelaire so truly said, “Satan’s cleverest wile is to make us think he doesn’t exist.” But he’s subtle about it; there are many avowed atheists who will argue earnestly that God doesn’t exist. But very few people are “adiabolists” who argue against Satan’s existence in the same way; and I think Satan prefers not being thought about at all rather than being taken seriously. He does very well as long as we reduce him to an amusing cartoon.
 
Pity the Young

Whereas it’s “insensitive” to shock certain minority groups, it’s now considered cool to shock Christians; this isn’t insensitivity, which liberals frown on, but “irreverence,” which they find refreshing.

“Pious,” which used to signify a sense of proportion about the universe, has likewise become a term of ridicule.

What a world! The thing I most pity the younger generation for is that they can’t even remember when it was relatively sane. At least we old-timers can remember better times. Imagine having to grow up in an age with no sense of normality.


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Joseph Sobran