Buying millstones

A few weeks ago the Barna Group released a survey of Christian parents that should give pause during the Christmas shopping frenzy. Twenty-six percent of Christians who bought a DVD for their children in the past year were uncomfortable with its content. A third of parents who bought CDs for their children were troubled by what they were buying, but made the purchase anyway. Similar percentages held for video games and magazines. Barna estimates that Christians will spend $1 billion this year on media items for their children under 18, yet a significant portion of these purchases will occur despite pangs of conscience. Indeed, a pastor could do worse than cite these results each Sunday of Advent, accompanied by Christ's warning:

"It is inevitable that stumbling blocks come, but woe to him through whom they come!" (Luke 17:1b)

Not surprisingly, those self-identified Christians who report less active faith weren't as concerned about their purchases, nor were single mothers, perhaps because they don't have as much time to monitor what comes into their homes. Of course it's also possible that they were buying less objectionable material in the first place, and this is why they had fewer qualms.

Someone should tell anti-immigrant congressman Tom Tancredo (grandson of Italian immigrants), meanwhile, that Hispanics, along with fathers in general, were the least likely to buy media for their children when they found its content questionable. Perhaps not every failure to culturally assimilate is bad.

While many consider scrutiny of children's media, rightly, a matter of protecting them from filth, I think there's a deeper imperative, which is the importance of cultivating their taste. I know families who do this well; their children are literate and literary, and they play musical instruments. These parents could give their children credit cards and uninhibited access to Amazon.com, and remain highly confident that the resulting purchases would violate neither their high standards of decency nor intelligence. They don't do so, however, because young minds still need guidance. But those young minds are being trained in the right direction, toward thinking lives. They are being equipped to seek truth and beauty, and therefore to abhor falsehood and ugliness, whether guised as pornography, or bad philosophy.

If we think our job is simply to vet media for sex, drugs, and profanity, we are not building anything. At best, we are keeping a clean slate, at least until our children have left us. Absent an ability to appreciate truth and beauty, however, they are consigned to battling flesh without the pleasure -- created, I believe, by the ultimate author of truth and beauty -- of art. The soft-porn magazine Maxim, in other words, becomes less interesting when one is capable of enjoying The Atlantic. Handel (for you classical buffs) or Sufjan Stevens (for indie fans) probably hold more appeal, likewise, for the musically-trained than does Beyoncé. Those who can appreciate Chekhov can't help but laugh out loud when they consider Danielle Steele.

A thriving industry has sprouted to cater to Christians concerned about evil entertainment, spawning everything from soft rock to romance novels, in an effort to displace their more worldly counterparts. Much of it is abhorrent art, however, and therefore neither true nor honoring to the author of creation. Perhaps this spiritual rearguard action would be less necessary if we could do the harder work, in our homes and schools, of cultivating taste. Then perhaps fewer parents would be tempted into the wickedness of giving things to their children that they believe might lead them to sin.