Kill Your Television
The Rev. Dr. Matthew Johnson-Doyle
Sunday, September 26, 2010


Reading #1 From a review of Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Ron Kaufman

… In 1977, Jerry Mander, a former advertising executive in San Francisco, published Four Arguments For The Elimination Of Television. …
Four Arguments talks about a lot more than just advertising. Mander attacks not only the contents of the television images, but the effects television has on the human mind and body. His discussion includes: The induction of alpha waves, a hypnotizing effect that a motionless mind enters. How viewers often regard what they see on television as real even though the programs are filled with quick camera switches, rapid image movement, computer generated objects, computer generated morphing and other technical events. The placement of artificial images into our mind's eye. And the effects that large amounts of television viewing have on children and the onset of attention deficit disorder.
However, at the heart of Mander's arguments, lies advertising. …
Sales, by definition, is the process of convincing someone to purchase what they don't need. …
"Perhaps there is a need for cleanliness. But that is not what advertisers sell," Mander explains. "Cleanliness can be obtained with water and a little bit of natural fiber, or solidified natural fat. Major world civilizations kept clean that way for millennia. What is advertised is whiteness, a value beyond cleanliness; sterility, the avoidance of all germs; sudsiness, a cosmetic factor; and brand, a surrogate community loyalty."
While watching television, the viewer is not seeing the world as it is. He or she is looking at a world created by advertising.
But what makes television different from other forms of advertising, is that the viewer has absolutely no control over the images. Sure you can change the channel, but you're really only watching more of the same. The images come at you at the pace of the advertiser; the viewer just watches passively. While reading the newspaper, you don't have to look at the ads, you can turn the page. ….You can read the first few lines of a billboard sign, then turn away.
However, when you watch television, the only way to escape the images is to turn the machine off. …
Television watching is not active, it is passive. Both the viewer's mind and body do not react, and cannot react. Mander calls television imagery a form of sleep teaching.
… "Television offers neither rest nor stimulation," Mander says. "Television inhibits your ability to think, but it does not lead to freedom of mind, relaxation or renewal. It leads to a more exhausted mind. You may have time out from prior obsessive thought patterns, but that's as far as television goes.
"The mind is never empty, the mind is filled. What's worse, it is filled with someone else's obsessive thoughts and images."
Why do you think they call it programming?

Reading # 2 “Inventing Sin” by George Ella Lyon

God signs to us
we cannot read
She shouts
and we take cover
She shrugs
and trains leave
the tracks
Our schedules! we moan
Our loved ones
God is fed up
All the oceans she gave us
All the fields
All the acres of steep seedful forests
And we did what
Invented the Great Chain
of Being and
the chain saw
Invented sin
God sees us now
gorging ourselves &
starving our neighbors
starving ourselves
and storing our grain
& She says
I've had it
you cast your trash
upon the waters-
it's rolling in
You stuck your fine fine finger
into the mystery of life
to find death
& you did
you learned how to end
the world
in nothing flat
Now you come crying
to your Mommy
Send us a miracle
Prove that you exist
Look at your hand, I say
Listen to your sacred heart
Do you have to haul the tide in
sweeten the berries on the vine
I set you down
a miracle upon miracles
You want more
It's your turn
You show me

Message: Kill Your Television

Note: The sermon is an oral event. This manuscript may not reflect the exact spoken words. If you want to hear what was actually said, you can listen to sermon visit our website at www.uurockford.org. © Matthew Johnson-Doyle, 2010.

Drew is a second grader in Pennsylvania.
I found a testimonial of sorts by him
on the webpage of the TV Turnoff Network.
Drew said this: I really didn't like TV-Turnoff Week
except I did notice that my grades went up
and I was in a good mood all week.

Here are some other things I found doing research on this topic.
The average American watches four hours of TV a day,
twenty-eight hours a week.
Over 65 years, the average person will spend nine years --
nine years of their wild and precious lives –
watching television.

Nowadays, I probably watch six to eight hours of TV a week –
and I’m being generous about what I count as TV,
I’ll get to that – but let’s call it an hour a day, on average.
I’ve been doing that for about four years now,
but I’ve still got a long way to go,
a long way to go to bring my lifetime average down
below that four hours a week.

For there have been times in my life
when I watched a lot of TV. A lot.
I’d watch Law and Order and Star Trek reruns during the day,
when I wasn’t working or in class.
I’d watch a little prime time TV.
Then I’d stay up late and watch news, Letterman, Conan.
Some days, I watched 10 hours or more of TV. Easy.

About four years ago, I got some advice from a colleague:
Stop. Turn it off. He issued a challenge:
go one month without TV. Four weeks.

I said, that’s crazy.
How about I just cut back?
He said, no, turn it all the way off.
Four weeks.
I tried to bargain with him:
OK, I’ll give up TV expect for The West Wing.
Just that one show.
No, he said, you’ve got to give it all up.
Just a month.
After that, if you want to watch a particular show, that’s fine.

So I did it.
Things were different after that.
I didn’t go back to the West Wing, even, at least not as a habit.
I read at night and got a lot more sleep.
I kept the TV off during the day and got a lot more done.
I was happier, healthier, and a better husband and a better minister.

We cancelled our cable and draped a blanket over the TV.
The blanket looked like a shroud.

After that month without,
I began to notice TV’s
in places I hadn’t noticed them before.
Not that they weren’t there – they were always there
but I began to notice the way they inserted themselves into a space.
We would feel a craving for buffalo chicken wings, say,
and go to a bar and grill where the TV – TVs, actually –
would be in the corner – and their light, their sound,
it is like a fishing line, hooked into our brains.
I’d catch myself losing the thread of the conversation I was having,
staring at a baseball game – not knowing, let alone caring,
who was playing, the score, or the standings.
I didn’t want to be watching TV, I wanted to be eating wings.

But what really struck me about television,
about how it invades our lives,
happened about a year later –
when I would go down to the cafeteria at the Hospital
while we were there before and after the birth of our daughter.
There were six or so TV’s in that room, blaring away.

And then there was what happened
in the recovery room on our last night there.
We got a roommate – we hadn’t had one the first two nights –
and within minutes of her arrival, the TV was on.
Not loud.
But the light from it, and a bit of the sound,
drifted across the curtains.
She wasn’t rude about it, and we didn’t feel like we could say,
turn it off,
without being rude ourselves.
The phone would ring, people would visit her, and the TV stayed on the whole time.
It stayed on all night and into the next day.
It was still on when we checked out.

In the years since that month-long experiment,
I’ve developed new habits.
I’ve tried to figure out how to balance this part of my life.
I’m not perfect about it.
When my family’s out of town for the weekend,
and the sermon is finished for Sunday,
I can waste a whole Saturday,
sitting on the couch, eating chips and salsa
and watching old episodes of Bones, Top Chef, etc.
Last time they were gone, I lost a whole afternoon
to the new version of Dr. Who.

But I have a few rules.
Unless I’m joining someone else for a show “already in progress,”
I almost never watch TV on the TV.
We don’t have cable, so this is pretty easy.
I watch online, or on DVD’s we get in the mail,
or a digital recording.
So no commercials, and no interruption of the rest of my life.
On my schedule.
Like me when I was little –
and I’ve very grateful to my parents for this –
my three-year old only sees PBS, and only a little at a time.

TV isn’t always bad. There are some good shows,
interesting, well-done. I grant that.
TV produces some catchy tunes, as we were reminded this morning.
This is about balance.
This is about whether you are in charge of your life,
or whether the idiot box is.

I told the story, about the TV in the hospital recovery room,
in the church I served in Colorado,
and a congregant there lent me an old book of his -
“Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television”;
The book was written in the late seventies.
I can only imagine what the author would say about today.

The book confirmed some of my suspicions
about what is troubling about this medium.

Here, then, are my arguments for the elimination,
or at least the dramatic reduction of television.
They are similar too, but different than, the ones from the book.
They are, let us say, more theological.
More spiritual.

I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.

Television is a prison –
it locks us into its world,
where news of a tragedy somewhere is made simple,
is followed by a commercial for some drug,
then a bit of gossip to make us all feel better.

It is a prison, which keeps us from being free.
It is addictive – that is not a metaphor.

I ran across this notation in my research:
Millions of Americans are so hooked on television that they fit the criteria for substance abuse . . . Heavy TV viewers exhibit [at least] five dependency symptoms--two more than necessary to arrive at a clinical diagnosis of substance abuse. These include: 1) using TV as a sedative; 2) indiscriminate viewing; 3) feeling loss of control while viewing; 4) feeling angry with oneself for watching too much; 5) inability to stop watching; and 6) feeling miserable when kept from watching.

I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.

Freedom is a word we use a lot
but we get confused about what it means.
Some people seem to act as if freedom was the freedom
to choose between McDonald’s and Burger King.
A lot of people seem to think that freedom means
that they get do whatever they want.
That no one gets to tell them what to do.
We’re like a bunch of 13 year olds.
You’re not the boss of me!

But spiritually, freedom is something else altogether.
Freedom means the freedom
not to do what you want
but to do what you must.
Freedom to follow your conscience,
to follow the spirit of life wherever it may lead.
When we are following the instructions of the box,
we are not following our souls or the holy.
I’ve had a lot of deeply spiritual experiences in my life.
Some happened while watching plays.
A few happened while watching a movie.
Most happened in conversations with people,
or in the world outside.
Only one, so far as I recall, ever happened while watching TV.
(Yes, it was the West Wing – the story about the man and the flood
and the radio and the lifeboat and the helicopter)
That’s a pretty poor ratio of hours spent to wonder experienced.

Our freedom is also put at risk
by most television news – almost all of it, really.
It’s confrontational, it draws us into sides,
it misses depth, background, understanding.
It’s killing our politics, destroying our ability to solve difficult problems.
If you do one thing in response to this sermon,
please do this: turn off cable news. Even the stuff you agree with.
Especially the stuff you agree with.

I wish I could live like I’m longing to live –
how many of us have longed to live lives of more awareness,
more wonder, more energy, more dignity.
To live lives with less television.
But we keep watching.

We can free ourselves from this chain,
from these bonds of consumerism and superficiality
just by finding other ways to spend our time.
If you are feeling like TV is control of you,
instead of the other way ‘round,
then try it:
four weeks without.
But, you say, it’s premiere week!
Good, you won’t get hooked if you stop now.
Before it’s too late.
You can do it.

Freedom is the first spiritual argument for less (even no) television.
Community is the second.

In the same place that I found the testimonial from the 2nd grader –
how he hated TV turnoff week except he was in a better mood –
I also found this gem from T.S. Eliot:
The remarkable thing about television is that it permits several million people to laugh at the same joke and still feel lonely.

Loneliness is the great spiritual malady of our time.
We are separated from one another.
We get in our cars, usually by ourselves.
We occupy our own cubicle.
Our families and friends might live on the other side of the country.
We might think we are together when we are watching television,
but we are still alone.
Guess how many American families
usually watch television while eating dinner?
Two-thirds.
I saw a letter in the paper the other day,
someone was complaining about all the commercials for
erectile dysfunction medication
during the family dinner hour.
And I thought, well, turn off the TV.
Have dinner together!
Or how about these two numbers:
Number of minutes per week that parents spend in meaningful
conversation with their children: 3.5
Number of minutes per week that the average child watches television: 1,680.

Sometimes – I know from personal experience –
television feels like the salve for loneliness.
But in truth, I have come to believe, TV is one of its causes.
Television isn’t real.
Crimes aren’t solved in an hour.
Family drama doesn’t resolve in 30 minutes,
everyone having a good laugh.
Real community is a lot more complicated.
It remains always unfinished.
The season never really ends.
Sometimes nothing seems to be happening.
But that “dead air” is often the most important time of all.

When we expect our communities, our families,
to function like TV shows,
we are disappointed.
Relationships are real, important, complicated.
They require our full attention.

I fear that, when it comes to the virtues of community,
of strong families,
reality TV is the most corrosive of all.
When we see people be overly dramatic,
fight all the time,
scheme and plot,
we think this is what life is supposed to be like.
But it isn’t. It really isn’t.

Look, properly contextualized and managed,
a good show can be an instrument of community.
When I was in seminary, we’d get together each Sunday night
with two other couples,
have dinner together,
chat, laugh, complain about our coursework,
and then watch X-files together.
My wife and I have something like that now, too,
and as much as we enjoy the show we watch with our friends,
the company is the point.
Community is the point.

Community is the second reason we should watch less TV.
Awe and wonder is the third.
To me, the most important.

The Tao Te Ching says of the Tao, the sacred way, this:

14.1 Looked at but not seen, listened to but not heard,
grasped for but not held, formless, soundless, intangible:
14.2 the Tao resists analysis and defies comprehension.
14.3 Its rising is not about light, its setting not a matter of darkness.
Unnameable, unending, emerging continually,
and continually pouring back into nothingness,
14.4 It is formless form, unseeable image, elusive, evasive unimaginable mystery. Confront it, and you won't see its face.
Follow it and you can't find an end.
14.5 Perceive its ancient subtle heart, however, and you become master of the moment. Know what came before time, and the beginning of wisdom is yours.

In other words, you can’t get the Tao through TV.
Looked at by not seen; unseeable image.
TV is one of the ways – perhaps the strongest way –
in which we distract ourselves from everyday life;
but since the holy, the awesome, and the wondrous
lives in the everyday, when we turn on the tube,
we miss the holy too.

In George Ella Lyon’s poem,
she speaks for God:
I gave you the fields and the forests
and she (God) says “I’ve had it”
You throw trash on the waters
play with death
And now you come crying to Mommy
to fix it.
But we are a miracle among miracles
and now its our turn.

George Ella Lyon has god
remind us of the prime virtues:
gratitude, service, wonder.
I’m not going to solve your problems for you, she says.
I got you started.
It’s time for you to grow up and take charge of your own life.

Behind the house I grew up in
there was a ravine.
On afternoons after school and on weekends and all summer long,
I’d scramble down the dirt path
to the creek bed.
A trickle in August,
a few inches high in the spring and the fall.
There was a clay cave,
and a little patch of grass,
huge trees of every sort,
the water would dance and bubble over the rocks.

It was quiet and majestic and my imagination would run wild –
I’d think of dinosaurs around the next bend
and old miner’s cabins
(there weren’t any, but there could have been)
and experience the flow of time.
It was here that I felt connected to all that is.
Why my Unitarian Universalist ministers
and religious education teachers
would talk about the sacred, the holy,
the god that makes an acorn into an oak tree,
I would think of this ravine.
Today, when I’m in one of those meditation experiences
where you are supposed to imagine a safe place,
this is where I go.

And this place became important to me in part because
my parents said,
“turn off the TV and go play outside.”

This is what Lyon’s mother-God is saying to us all:
you want me to fix things for you?
No way.
Turn off your selfishness, your isolation, your arrogance,
and go outside.
Miracles abound.
But how will you see them
if you can’t stop staring at the light box?

For the sake of freedom
for the sake of relationship and community
for the sake of awe and wonder
I hope you will take up the challenge
that my colleague once gave to me:
turn off your television for a month.
See how it feels.

In this sermon, television is not a metaphor.
I really mean to speak of TV.
But at the same time television does stand for
and embody a lot of modern culture.

Television isn’t the only thing that keeps us captivated and unfree,
not the only thing that distracts us from each other
and real human community,
not the only thing that cheapens life
and blinds us to wonder and awe.
The way we shop, and eat, and travel all do this too.
If it isn’t TV for you, what is the thing that does this in your life?
Can you go without for a month?
I bet you could.

“Four arguments for the elimination of television”
was written decades before the internet,
and I think it has yet to be determined
how that technology will interact
with the spiritual values of freedom, community, and awe.
So far, the evidence is mixed,
but more hopeful than the boob tube.
There is more interactivity.
But its quality is occasionally questionable.
My wife, a librarian, has a cartoon above our sink which reads:
“If the television is a babysitter,
the internet is a drunk librarian that won’t shut up.”

I’m fairly sure that the TV isn’t going to move us very far forward
on our journey to wholeness.
In fact, I think it might move us backwards.
It does me, anyway.
This is the question I want you to interrogate
all the parts of modern life with:
does this activity, this technology, this way of being
make my life more free, more connected, more wondrous?
If not – stop.
If not – stop.
And do something else.

I pray for us all
courage to take the unconventional path
wisdom to put aside temptations and addictions
love to reach out to real people and keep reaching out
joy and real laughter every day
compassion and respect for others
and for ourselves.

Look at your hand, I say
Listen to your sacred heart
Do you have to haul the tide in
sweeten the berries on the vine

You are set down
a miracle upon miracles
You want more
It's your turn
You show me
Amen. Blessed Be.