Faithful Citizenship H arold D ean T r u lear
Where’s the Beef? “Would you like fries with that?” I half expect to hear that at the end of each political ad or news report concerning the upcoming presidential election. No matter how substantive a candidate’s position may be, we never hear the whole. Rather the candidate’s words are served up in sound bites—just enough to give us a tantalizing taste or bring on a hint of indigestion. Either way, thoughtful Christians are frustrated by the intentional tease. When it comes to contemporary politics, without serious research, prayer, and reflection, we never get to enjoy a full meal. Neil Postman warned Americans some 25 years ago about the impact of television on the nation’s attention span. In his groundbreaking 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, he cited the boob tube’s ability to capture and focus attention in short bursts, but without depth. He saw the danger in reducing complex ideas to simple sound bites for easy viewer consumption. He even fretted over the church’s growing dependence on televangelism, not out of concern for prosperity theology, but rather for the desanctification of truth through an entertainment medium. Postman pressed the example of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 as proof of the decrease of the American appetite for true deliberation and exchange of ideas. Those multi-hour affairs would not fly in Postman’s 1980s America. We have not been socialized to listen that long, follow a reasoned argument, and make an informed judgment. (Incidentally, Postman also doubted that many modern Christians would be able to sit through a Jonathan Edwards sermon.) No, this is
the era of the hard-hitting verbal morsel—shock and awe in the negative, pacify and placate in the positive. And that is why 99 percent of those who heard Dr. Jeremiah’s Wright’s sermon snippets this past spring never bothered to listen to the entire sermon, check the context in which they were made, or reflect on his reasoning. Playing sermon excerpts fed right into America’s current capacity to digest ideas—small, pungent, fast-food politics, with no time for discussion. Were Wright’s words offensive? I prefer a different question: Is being offensive a sin? If so, Jesus paid dearly for it, as he was one of the most offensive preachers the world has ever seen.Wright deserved to be heard in full context with rigorous debate on his full ideas, a referendum on his corpus of work that includes his church’s prophetic stands on issues as diverse as the war in Iraq and domestic violence. But that won’t do in contemporary America, where public figures are judged more for 20-second phrases than for 20 years of hard work in the public sphere— just ask Obama, whose off-the-cuff comment about economically depressed, small-town Pennsylvanians being “bitter” and clinging “to guns or religion” effectively eclipsed his decades of community organizing around the very issues that plague those folks—job loss. Public debate today has become a hate-seeking missile in our adolescent cultural food fights. We may live in a “Supersize Me” culture, but in politics, no one wants a big meal— it’s speed and barb-trading that count when appealing to a crass self-interest that has been nurtured in a TV culture designed to make the viewer the center of the universe. Christians should beware any attempt to reduce ideas to sound bites and debates to one-liners. Essentially this means that Christians should be resistant to the use of contemporary media as a means to understand the positions espoused by
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today’s candidates, whether they run for president or for recorder of deeds. When the media control the debate, the audience is captive to a for-profit market institution that cannot survive apart from the commoditization of ideas. This requires the ability to microwave complex arguments into instant ideas for ready consumption.Would you like fries with that? I mentioned in an earlier column Jacque Ellul’s warning about Christians trusting media to bring them ideas rather than doing their homework to see what issues are truly at stake. Similar depth is required to understand a candidate’s platforms, policy initiatives, and the statecraft requisite to turn ideas into policy. The Bible warns against being carried to and fro with every wave of doctrine. Just as theological truth suffers in a sound-bite era, political reality groans under the weight of our insatiable appetite for the small. An appeal to self-interest here, a fear-inducing commercial there, a news report with clipped dialogue to boot, and we are supposed to have enough information to make an intelligent decision. This does not project to an informed citizenry. As Christians, our civic participation should not be formed by McNuggets of information. Rather we should read carefully, pray diligently, and apply our values to the vast number of positions within a candidate’s platform. We should recognize that character counts. And, of great importance, we should avoid voting the base self-interest to which much of politicking appeals and ask the question “How does this affect my neighbor?” (If you have to ask, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus has a story for you…) n Harold Dean Trulear is associate professor of applied theology at Howard University School of Divinity in Washington, DC, and consultant for the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Faith and Families Portfolio.