An English College is trying to attract adults back into education by offering a course on BB - yep, Big Brother. The cultural impact, the significance of celebrity, the nature of vicariously enjoying other people's fear, aggression, verbal wrangling, psychological warfare, alliance making, mickey taking, the whole package of what is ironically called Reality TV. Put that term into a search engine and you will come up with scores of articles from Time, New Yorker, a whole cluster of respectable broadsheets, offering serious social and cultural comment on one of the most powerful media developments in years. And now you can do the course.
The attraction of Reality TV, Big Brother, Temptation, Pop Idol, I'm a Celebrity etc, is explained by cultural commentators in various ways. Fascination with the psychology of trust and betrayal, a voyeuristic interest in other people's problems, desire for status and fame being nurtured by watching unknowns suddenly become famous, or infamous - depending on the article, and the vested interests of the writers, you takes your choice.
Made me wonder though, what does a church that believes in the reality of Jesus, have to say to a culture and its people, saturated in manufactured experience, fascinated by lives not their own, absorbed into the world of cctv video-gossip and relationships driven by the desire for audience approval? Would it be possible to win BB without being selfish? Could you survive if you acted in the best interests of others? Is truthfulness and sincerity an assett or a liability? How far does big brother dehumanise relationships by pushing contestants to forms of rivalry that require calculated alliances and personal betrayals? And what is taking place when BB creates a context of proximity to others and invasive spying from the outside - for one thing a worldview in which every 'other' is a rival for the prize.
Maybe the first thing the church is able to offer our culture is an unembarrassed sense of moral realism (NOT MORALISM) - all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. Why be surprised by the relatively mild form of sinfulness that can be exposed by Reality TV? Maybe sin is one of the few truths that reality TV does accurately portray. Our original sin of putting self at the centre of the universe; the sin of Cain, jealous of his brother; the human capacity to dehumanise others who are a threat to our purposes and ambitions; our love of approval, even if it is bought by fundamental dishonesty....... and so on.
But a second offering from church to our culture is evidence of communities where we seriously resist all that makes Reality TV so precisely accurate in its portrayal of post-modern self absorption. Yes, I know, post-modernity is resistant to any concept of the self - but in reality, the less sure we are that we have a self, the more frantically we go searching for who then we really are.
Whatever else the cross of Jesus means to the Christian, it is the place where we truly discover who we are, who God is. And there we discover too, that the reality of God and the reality of our sin, are taken into the deep purposeful love of God and we are given back the self God made us ( and is making us) to be, in Christ.
For freedom Christ has set you free - stand fast therefore in the liberty of Christ! In that freedom, there is created space for love, capacity for compassion, energy for peaceable peacemaking conversation, commitment to forgiveness, joy in the other's blessing, celebration of the other's gifts, defence of the other's worth - now that is reality. But whether it would make peak viewing........?
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