You did not arrive at most of your instincts in an argument. You absorbed them in a chair, at night, with the lights off.
Ask a believing man what he thinks about marriage and he will give you a decent answer. Ask him where his instincts come from — what he feels a man should do when he has been wronged, what a successful life actually looks like when he pictures it, when leaving is understandable and when it is cowardice — and the honest answer is not a sermon he heard. It is a thousand hours of story he never once evaluated.
He would say he was just watching.
The one defense that cannot survive daylight
“It is just entertainment. It does not affect me.”
That sentence is the single most confidently repeated claim in Christian life, and it is refuted every day by an entire global industry built on its opposite. Companies do not spend fortunes placing a product inside a story because stories are inert. They spend it because a thing you see a character love, in a moment you cared about, becomes a thing you want — and you will never be able to trace why. That is not paranoia. That is the published business model.
If thirty seconds inside a story can move a man’s wallet, it is not a stretch to say six seasons inside one can move his conscience.
Story does not argue. It rehearses.
Here is the mechanism, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.
An argument comes at you through the front door. You hear a claim, you weigh it, you agree or you push back. Your defenses are up because you know you are being persuaded.
A story does not knock. Good writing can put you on the side of almost anyone in about twelve minutes — show his childhood, give him one act of kindness, make the person opposing him smug, and you will be rooting for a man whose behavior you would condemn in a stranger. Nobody debated you into it. You were not persuaded of a proposition. You were given six hours of hoping it works out for him, and hope is a habit of the affections, not a conclusion of the mind.
That is why you can hold an orthodox position on a sin and feel a small disappointment when the character finally gets caught. The doctrine is in your head. The rehearsal is in your chest. And in the moment of actual temptation, the chest is faster.
A king’s policy, not a nervous scruple
David writes a psalm about how he intends to govern. It is a policy document — how he will run his house, who gets access to his table, what he will tolerate in his administration. Right in the middle of it:
I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes: I hate the work of them that turn aside; it shall not cleave to me. (Psalm 101:3, KJV)
Two things there are worth slowing down on. First, “I will set” — it is active. Nobody set it before him; he set it before himself, which is exactly what a man does at eleven at night with a remote in his hand. Second, “it shall not cleave to me.” Cleave is the sticking word, the same root used for a man cleaving to his wife. David is not worried that a bad image will offend him. He is worried that it will bond to him. That it will stop being something he watched and start being something he is.
Jesus says the same thing with different furniture:
The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. (Matthew 6:22–23, KJV)
The eye is not a window that things pass through and vanish. It is a door into the whole man. What comes in does not stay in the room it entered.
You are being pressed into a shape either way
Paul puts the whole matter in two passive verbs, and the passive voice is the point:
And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. (Romans 12:2, KJV)
Be not conformed. Be ye transformed. In neither case are you the one doing the shaping. Something is always pressing on you. The only live question is which mold you are sitting in, and for how many hours a week.
A man who gives three hours a night to a world where God is absent, consequences are cosmetic, and the highest good is being true to yourself, and then gives eleven minutes in the morning to a devotional he half reads, has not struck a balance. He has an intake problem with a rounding error attached to it. He will then be genuinely puzzled about why obedience feels theoretical and sin feels reasonable.
Two wrong exits
The first wrong exit is the bunker. Throw out the television, ban the novels, publish the rules, and feel clean. This never works for long, and it never works deeply, because it treats the eye as the problem when Christ located the problem one level down — “out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh” (Luke 6:45, KJV). A man can take every screen out of his house and still run the same film in his head at will.
The second wrong exit is the shrug. Christian liberty is real, most stories are not tracts, and a believer who cannot sit through a hard film without a panic attack has a thin faith. All true. But liberty was never given to you as an anesthetic against thinking. “All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient” (1 Corinthians 6:12, KJV) — and Paul finishes that sentence with the real issue: “but I will not be brought under the power of any.”
The question was never am I allowed to watch this. The question is what is this rehearsing me to want.
How to watch awake
- Name last week. Write down what you actually watched — not what you would tell your small group. Beside each one, in a single sentence, write what it was arguing for. Not its rating. Its argument. Every story has one.
- Say it out loud while it plays. “They are making me like him.” “This is framing the wife as the obstacle.” Narration breaks the trance. You cannot be quietly formed by something you are openly describing.
- Check the ratio, not just the content. Count the hours of story you took in this week. Count the hours in the Word. You do not have to like the number, but you do have to know it.
- Apply the test of Philippians 4:8. “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure” (KJV) — Paul does not hand you a rating system, he hands you a direction for the mind. Ask of a thing not “is it clean” but “does dwelling here move me toward those words or away from them.”
- Let some things simply go. Not everything requires a principled framework. Some things you already know. The one you are thinking of right now while you read this — that one goes.
You become what you behold
Here is the mercy in it. The law of formation that convicts you is the same law that saves you. You are shaped by what you look at — that is not a curse, it is how God made you, and He made it that way so that looking at Him would change you.
But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord. (2 Corinthians 3:18, KJV)
Beholding — and changed. Same mechanism, opposite direction. The man who has spent a thousand hours absorbing a world without God is not doomed; he is simply pointed the wrong way. Turn the gaze and the same machinery begins running toward glory.
Christ did not come to make you a better critic of your entertainment. He came to give you a new heart, and then to renovate the mind attached to it — slowly, by repetition, by what you set before your eyes on a Tuesday night when nobody is grading you.
Nobody is just watching. You are being made into something every single night. Decide what.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist