In 1987, Augsburg Publishing House, the publishing arm of the American Lutheran Church which the following year would join with Fortress Press, the publisher of the Lutheran Church in America as part of the merger of the Lutheran bodies into the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, published a book entitled Television and Religion: The Shaping of Faith, Values and Culture. The release of such a book could hardly have been more timely – it went to print just as the various scandals surrounding Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were breaking. The author of the book was the Reverend William F. Fore, who was the acknowledged expert at the time on the matter of religious broadcasting. For the next couple of years he was a guest on pretty much every major radio and television talk show discussing the scandal and his book. Rev. Fore, who passed away last July, was a minister of the United Methodist Church, and served as the Executive Director of the Communications Department of the National Council of Churches in Christ for a quarter of a century, retiring from this position shortly after his aforementioned book came out. The fifth and sixth chapters of the book address the message and audience respectively of what he called “the electronic church”. He had already been sounding the alarm about this “electronic church” for over a decade.
Indeed, in August of 1978 Fore gave an address by that very
title – “The Electronic Church” – to a meeting of the Seventh Day Adventist
Broadcasters Council in Oxnard, California, which
was published in that denomination’s Ministry
Magazine in its January, 1979
issue. In that address he noted some
interesting statistics. Gallup had just
conducted a survey of the religious views of both the “churched” and the
“unchurched” in the United States.
“Surprisingly”, Fore commented, “religious beliefs and practices have
undergone remarkably little change during the past 25 years.” What made these findings surprising was that
while beliefs in doctrines like the deity of Jesus Christ and practices such as
daily prayer did not appear to be declining among Americans, even among the
“unchurched”, the self-evaluated importance of organized religion in their lives
was. Fore suggested that the
incongruity between these two things could be, at least partly, explained by
the growth of religious broadcasting and that this was cause for concern. He said:
What worries me is
whether this electronic church is in fact pulling people away from the local
church. Is it substituting an anonymous
(and therefore undemanding) commitment for the kind of person-to-person
involvement and group commitment that is the essence of the local church?
As we shall shortly see, this was a legitimate concern and
there is far more cause for alarm on this front today than there was back
then. First, it needs to be noted that there
was another, far more obvious, reason why steady belief in such basic Christian
truths as the deity of Jesus Christ might coincide with a decline in confidence
in organized religion – and a decline in church attendance, for when Fore was
speaking and writing about the danger of “the electronic church” we were
already several decades into a period of drastic decline in church attendance,
one which began shortly after the Second World War and which continues to this
day.
That reason was simply this – that in this same period of
time, a great many of the churches had stopped preaching and teaching the basic
Christian truths. For everyone who
could still truthfully recite everything in the Apostles’ Creed from “I believe
in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth” to “The Forgiveness of
sins; The Resurrection of the body, And the Life everlasting. Amen”, churches
whose ministers taught that Jesus was God’s Son only in the sense that He
exemplified the way in which we are all children of God and that He rose again
from the dead only in the sense that He lived on in the memory of His
disciples, and who similarly explained away everything else in the Creed so as
to make its opening “I believe” into an “I don’t believe”, were rapidly losing
their appeal. Nor did they have much of
an appeal to anybody else. Anybody out
there who actually wanted to hear a lecture every week about racial and gender
equity, recycling and reducing our carbon footprint, and other such trendy
codswallop had plenty of opportunity to do so that did not involve getting up
early on Sunday morning. Others have certainly
noticed the contribution of this factor to the decline in church attendance and
affiliation. Here in the Dominion of
Canada, where the decline had been much larger than in the United States, two Anglican priests, George R. Eves, Two Religions: One Church (1998) and
Marney Patterson, Suicide – The Decline
and Fall of the Anglican Church of Canada (1999), attempted, to little
avail, at least with regards to the upper echelons of the ecclesiastical
hierarchy, to warn the Anglican Church of Canada that this kind of liberalism
was killing the church. Others, such as
the eminent Canadian sociologist of religion Reginald W. Bibby, have addressed
this factor in a more detached manner.
Now, the United Methodist Church and the NCCC were both noted bastions
of liberalism. The late Dr. Thomas C.
Oden had been well within the mainstream of the United Methodist Church prior to his journey back from theological
liberalism and political radicalism to “paleo-orthodoxy” through a study of the
great theologians of the Christian tradition beginning with the Church Fathers
prompted by a challenge from his Drew University colleague, Will Herberg, who
had had to make a similar return to the roots of his own Jewish tradition in
the Talmud and Midrash after his own break with his early radicalism. The National Council of Churches in Christ is
the American organized expression of ecumenism which, as
Joseph Pearce has recently observed, “appears to be the willingness to
dilute or delete doctrine in pursuit of a perceived unity among disparate
groups of believers (irrespective of what they actually believe)” and thus the
opposite of what it originally meant when applied in the early centuries to the
General Councils that defined orthodoxy and excluded heresy for the entire
church throughout the “whole inhabited world”. My point in bringing this up is not to cast
aspersions on the personal orthodoxy of the late William F. Fore but to show
that for someone in his position, unless he wished to make waves, he had strong
personal reasons to turn a blind eye to the connection between liberalism and
declining church attendance and to tie the latter to religious broadcasters
who, whatever else they might be legitimately accused of - aggressive and dishonest fundraising, the
sacrilege of reducing religion to popular entertainment, etc. – were seldom if
ever liberals.
All of that having been said, Fore’s concern that for many
people “the electronic church” was taking the place of local churches was a
legitimate and valid one. In his
address to the Seventh Day Adventists in 1978 he said the following:
Radio and TV –
especially TV – tend to produce a substitute for reality that eventually can
begin to take the place of reality itself.
He illustrated this point by referring to an article in Broadcasting Magazine that described a
television program entitled “Summer Camp” that purported to give kids the
“summer camp” experience “without leaving home”, a particularly poignant
example as it is difficult to conceive of an experience further removed from
that of watching television than summer camp or a greater exercise in missing
the point than trying to translate that experience into the television
medium. He went on to say:
My point is that
exposure to the media tends to separate us from the world of reality, creating
for us, in fact, a new reality…The situation, I predict, is going to get worse.
Before we take a look at just how true that prediction has
become, let us consider the contrast he drew between the local and the
electronic church. He said:
[The purveyors of the
electronic church] are building huge audiences that bring them fame, wealth, and
power, but which in doing so substitute a phantom, a non-people, an electronic
church, for the church of real people, with real needs and real gospel to share
in the midst of their real lives.
It is no accident that
the local church, the koinonia or
community of believers, is such a central part of our Christian faith and
life. This is where we find Christ; this
is where we confess our sins and find forgiveness and regeneration; this is
where we act out our faith and where we shore up one another when we slide back
in the faith.
The years since 1978 and now have seen an explosion in the
development of electronic communications technology. Personal computers and cellular phones have
become more compact and affordable and therefore ubiquitous and, indeed, have
now merged into smart phones that place the internet, which itself has evolved
rapidly and exponentially in this period, at one’s fingertips wherever one
happens to be. The “electronic church” has
evolved along with these media and in 2021 the “online church” – services viewed
over the internet either while they are occurring through livestream or later
if, as is usually the case, recordings of the stream remain available – has
become a much larger part of it than the services broadcast on radio and
television forty years ago. Indeed, for
almost a year now, the “online church” has been the only “church” available
throughout most of the world as governments everywhere have used the pretext of
the spread of a coronavirus notable more for its novelty than its severity to
throw off the shackles of constitutional restraints and protected rights and
liberties and conduct an insane social experiment in which they forbade
in-person social interaction in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to contain
the spread of the virus. The leaders of
the churches have, for the most part, opted to obey man rather than God and
support this vile experiment by closing their doors and making services
available to their parishioners only via the internet. Thus, for the last year, the “electronic
church” has more fully and completely replaced the real church, than Rev. Fore
would have imagined possible in his worst nightmares back in the eighties.
What is most troubling about this, apart from the whole
submitting to godless totalitarianism aspect of it, is that whereas forty years
ago, church leaders whether orthodox or liberal, would have largely shared Fore’s
concern that for many people the “electronic church” was becoming a substitute
for actual churches in which real people meet and worship and fellowship
together and would have agreed with him that this was not a good thing, today,
the church leaders who are saying “Amen” to the government officials who insist
that we must sacrifice the mental and social wellbeing of all members of our
communities, and the economic wellbeing of all except the most wealthy, in
order to prevent people who are already at the end of their natural lifespans
from dying a natural death a very short time earlier than would otherwise be
the case, are now developing theological arguments for why the “electronic
church” is a real church after all. While the idea of a spiritual fellowship existing
between all believers in different places is neither new nor unsound – this is
a part of the meaning of “the communion of the saints” in the Creed – it is a
different matter entirely to treat the act of praying and singing along, from
your own home, while you watch a service that is taking place elsewhere through
your computer screen, as if you and those actually participating in the service
were somehow together in some virtual “place” that the internet has generated. Doing the latter is far closer to living in the
kind of artificial “reality” from which in the movies a “red pill” is required
in order to escape than it is to the orthodox doctrine of the “communion of the
saints”.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Russia a year after the
Bolsheviks, a murderous gang of criminal revolutionaries, fanatically devoted
to building what they believed would be an ideal society based upon collective
ownership, materialism, science, and atheism regardless of whatever cost in
human lives and suffering had to be paid in order to bring this about, seized
control of that country, murdered the Tsar and the rest of the royal family,
and began its long, but mercifully unsuccessful, war of extirpation against the
Russian Orthodox Church. His mother
raised him, as best she could, in the Orthodox faith, while the Bolshevik state
did its worst to indoctrinate him in its ideology. Ultimately, after Solzhenistyn was arrested while
serving in the Red Army in World War II for criticism of Stalin, and sentenced
by a secret tribunal of the NKVD to the work camps administered by GULAG, his
Orthodox rearing won out, and in his writings he became a fierce critic of the
oppression of the Soviet system. While
his writings were initially well-received in his home country while Khrushchev
was repudiating the legacy of Stalin, when he turned his pen against the
Communist system and underlying ideology as a whole, he became persona non
grata, and soon his writings had to be published by samizdat in Russian, or
smuggled out and published in translation in the West where they helped remove
the blinders from the eyes of many who still thought of the Soviet experiment
in romantic, idealistic, terms. Eventually,
the Soviet regime tired of him and on the twelfth of February, 1974, he was
arrested again and sent into exile.
On the day of his arrest he released a notable essay,
advising that in the face of a violent, oppressive, totalitarian ideology such
as that which then ruled in Russia, the least that people could do was refuse
to participate in the lies by which the totalitarian ideology of the state
covered its violence.
“And this is the way”, Solzhenitsyn wrote, “to break out of
the imaginary encirclement of our inertness, the easiest way for us and the
most devastating for the lies. For when
people renounce lies, lies simply cease to exist”.
The title of Solzhenitsyn’s essay, “Live not by Lies”, was
borrowed last year by Rod Dreher, for a book advising Christians about how to
live in the face of a new soft totalitarianism. While Dreher admirably strained out many of
the totalitarian gnats of “woke” ideology, he swallowed in its entirety the
camel of masks and lockdowns and public health orders.
We can and must do better than that.
Sadly, I expect that very few of our church leaders will be
willing to show the same faith and obedience to God rather than man as Pastor
James Coates of GraceLife Church in Edmonton, Alberta, who was arrested by the
RCMP last week for holding regular church services and remains in police
custody as of the time of this writing, or Pastor Tim Stephens of Fairview Baptist
Church in Calgary, who held a service last weekend in solidarity with Pastor
Coates. While Coates’ arrest
demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that I have been right in everything I
have been saying since last March about how these public health orders are the
latest manifestation of the anti-Christian, anti-freedom, atheistic and materialistic,
spirit of Communist oppression and are utterly out of place in a Commonwealth Realm in which the basic rights and freedoms these orders treat as inconsequential are supposed to be the guaranteed Common Law property of citizens as Her Majesty's free subjects, this is not really my point here. If most Christian leaders can’t find the
balls to do what Pastors Coates and Stephens have done, a rather predictable
consequence of the widespread ordination of women due to a previous generation’s
departure from the clear teachings of the Scriptures and church tradition on
that subject, then the least they can do, to borrow Solzhenitsyn’s language, is
to refuse to participate in the lies covering up the totalitarian violence and
oppression of the lockdown measures.
Specifically, they can reject the lie that the “electronic church” of
today is somehow different and better than the “electronic church” of forty
years ago, because it is online rather than on television. This lie rests upon the underlying notion that
the internet is an actual space where people can really meet and actively
participate in something together rather than the mere passive viewing which is
all that the voyeurism of television makes available. I am inclined to say that this notion, too,
is a lie, although it contains the element of truth that the internet has an interactional
element that was not there in television.
Along with that element of truth, however, it contains the assumption that
this is an improvement rather than something that moves us closer to the
dystopia of the Matrix. That assumption,
I would say, is at the very least, highly dubious.
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