A Theology of Communication - Part 2:
A Christian view of Communication
By Rev. William F. Fore - Founder of
Religion Online
As communication is central to maintaining any culture, so mass
communication is essential to maintaining our highly technological culture. Mass
communication is integral to mass production and mass consumption. It is the
enabler of social communication. It acts as the nervous system of the social and
political body, bringing together the sensations, responses, orders, sanctions,
and repressions which are necessary for large accumulations of people to live
together in community. But the mass media are not mere carriers of messages.
They also confer power, they legitimate systems, and they provide ways of
looking at the world. They supply the context in which information is learned,
attitudes are formed, and decisions are made.
Christians living in our culture
find themselves at odds with the assumptions and values within it. But the mass
media echo and amplify these assumptions and values. Radio, television,
newspapers, magazines, and the rest of the media seek out and detect those
values and assumptions which appear to be acceptable in the culture. This is
done without regard for any moral or religious considerations, since the media
are a part of The Technique which is interested only in what works. The media
then re-project these "valueless" values and assumptions back to its citizens,
amplifying them in the process. Responses in the form of purchases, ratings,
audience research, and so on, are then returned once again, indicating
acceptance or rejection, and the media once more send back, and amplify, those
values and assumptions which are found to have especially strong acceptance.
This process is one of resonance. Just as an organ pipe or a plucked string
will vibrate to a particular frequency and amplify it naturally, so the mass
media respond to those values and assumptions which find ready acceptance among
the members of a particular culture and then amplify them. The question of
whether television creates values and attitudes, or merely reflects them, is
strictly a diversion, since the media, of course, do both. They reflect the
values in the culture, and they legitimate, circulate, and amplify them and
thus, in reality, "create" them as potent values, through the process of
resonance. By choosing to repeat and amplify only some of the myriad of possible
values, attitudes, and worldviews, and to not repeat or amplify others, the
media become a powerful process that helps to create, maintain, and change our
culture, while those who become expert at detecting and amplifying these
messages feel no moral responsibility for what is resonated, but only that it is
done well.
Thus a non-Christian view of life predominates in mass media, as it does in
the society as a whole. As Martin Marty has pointed out, the "proper" opinion
always dominates, and the Christian view is always the "improper" opinion.
Christians have a responsibility to speak out and act in response to their
convictions and in opposition to views they believe to be false. But since we
live in a pluralistic society, Christians must do so neither demanding nor even
expecting that their own view must prevail, but rather insisting only that it be
heard and taken seriously, in faith that it will find adherents, with varying
degrees of success, as it has throughout the past two millennia. This is the
call to be faithful, not triumphalist.
There are several Christian doctrines, derived from the witness of Scripture,
Christian tradition, and the reflection of Christians today, which bear directly
on the role of communication in society. They are: creation and stewardship; sin
and redemption; the newness of life; good news and proclamation; and Christian
witness.
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That God is creator of "all things visible and invisible" is a central
Christian doctrine. By this is meant that all things are interrelated, that
the eternal order of things is revealed in the historical order, and that we
human beings are not the creators but rather are bound together as part of
creation along with all other parts of creation, in mutuality. Creation
includes the techniques of social communication -- the telephone, radio,
television, movies, print, and so on. Without these technologies, humankind
simply would be unable to live in the complex social structures we now
enjoy.
Since all elements of social communication are first of all God’s creation,
and not our creation, they must be thought of as being held in trust by those
who use them. Stewardship is a necessary corollary of creation. The mass media
are especially powerful forces in the society, and the importance of exercising
stewardship in the use of them for good increases with the magnitude of their
power. The biblical record and Christian tradition are clear that human beings
are expected by their Creator to use the good things of the earth to accomplish
God’s will: the building of a just, peaceful, and loving community. The media of
social communication have enormous potential for aiding in this goal, and to use
these techniques purely for self aggrandizement and profit is completely ruled
out by the Christian understanding of creation and stewardship.
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Christians understand sin as the misuse of God’s gifts. Sin is taking
something that is a gift of God -- things, money, power, prestige -- and
treating it as if it were God. Sin is not something that people are thrust
into by events, but is the result of choice, a choice not to live up to
God’s expectations for the full potential of all human beings, but rather to
further the self at the expense of others. Humans constantly misuse the
power over creation that God has given them. Instead of using their unique
gifts to bring about harmony in all creation and its interrelatedness, they
misuse power for selfish purposes.
The communication media have become a major source of power and potential in
the technological era. Because men and women depend upon them for information
about their world, the media have become keys to many other forms of power:
economic, social, and political. And precisely because of their intense
concentration of power, they inevitably become a primary locus of sin. The
primary manifestation of sin in the mass media is their treating persons as
objects of manipulation and turning them into consumers of media rather than
into participants through media. Historically, Christianity has understood that
a major role of government is the regulation of the misuse of power. A
fundamental task of government is to protect the weak and defenceless against
the powerful and the predator. It is only through the power of the whole state,
acting on behalf of its citizens, by establishing limits to untrammelled
exercise of power by the strong at the expense of the weak, that society can
remain civil and community can remain intact. Thus Christians recognize the
necessity for governmental regulation of those aspects of communication which
allow it to become a monopoly of the few at the expense of the many.
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Christian doctrine takes seriously the concept that God makes all things
new, that novelty and creativity are essential elements of God’s world.
Therefore, Christians resist any attempts to restrict communication so that
persons are restricted in their choices. New ideas, new values, new
understandings are essential to growth and to human potential. Any policy or
regulation which would restrict opportunities for persons to discover new
meanings is theologically unsupportable.
Censorship of communication is itself a sin, since it allows one person or
group to dominate the information intake of all others. Christian belief insists
on remaining open to newness, and rejects attempts to restrain the way newness
comes into the world. It also rejects top-down, one-way flows of communication.
It remains open, not only to novelty, but also to that which is not yet
completely understood, since God works in mysterious ways, and can never be
fully grasped, predicted, or controlled.
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Christians testify to the fact of the good news that Christ came to set
us free, that is, to set persons free from personal sin, from corporate
bondage, and from all kinds of oppression -- spiritual, mental, social,
physical, economic, political. The good news is for every person, regardless
of location or station in life. But since the good news is news of
liberation, it has a definite bias toward those who are most in need of
liberation – the poor, the weak, and the defenceless. For Christians, a
primary role of communication therefore is to aid in the process of
liberation.
The good news requires that communication in the community takes into account
all persons, and the whole person, and that it deal with them as sons and
daughters of God. Communication that does otherwise, that treats persons as
objects, is in fact oppressing them. Christians therefore have an advocacy role,
to proclaim the good news and to work toward the fulfilment of its promise in
the media of our times.
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Finally, Christian doctrine challenges falsehood. Christianity is not
"even-handed." It has a bias toward what it perceives to be real and true.
The fact that we live in a pluralistic society means that as Christians we
must be a witness for the truth as we perceive it while at the same time
being open to hear the truth as perceived by others.
The social media communicate not only "messages." They also establish a way
of looking at everything. In this sense, they set the agenda as to what in
society will be discussed and what will be ignored. Therefore, it is incumbent
on Christians to challenge the media’s view of the world if they believe it to
be false. Christians support the political concept of pluralism, because it is
an environment in which all persons may be heard. They have a responsibility to
bring to bear their own vision and to attempt to influence the worldview of the
media, while at the same time rejecting any temptation politically to enforce
their views upon others.
The Nature and Content of Christian Communication
Communication in daily life is far less a cosmic process than that described
at the beginning of this chapter, and much more personal than the view of social
communication just discussed. What we are dealing with here are the interactions
between ordinary Christian people in everyday life. It involves such things as
testimony, witness, evangelism, and telling the way one perceives the world,
faith, and God.
In this context, communication is the sharing of something experienced, by
means of commonly understood relationships. Reduced to its minimum, this kind of
communication can be pictured as a process involving
source-encoding-signal-decoding-destination. But in actuality, personal
communication is a never-ending process which connects the "I" to other persons
in continually developing feedback loops within a complicated field of
relationships within culture, space, and time.
Each new generation has the task of taking the new technology of its age and
rediscovering religious truths and making them meaningful in the light of
cultural changes. This has always been a religious task. Each new cultural
situation, shaped by the communication media of its time, reformulates the
question: What does it mean to be human?
The answer to this question is being radically changed by the new media of
communication. For example, we tend to think of two basic modes of communication
-- face-to-face and mass media. But between these two poles lie whole new
combinations of communications processes which require us to redefine what is
community and, therefore, what is human. By way of illustration: if I spend 30
minutes every day "with" my TV network newscaster, and I spend no time at all
with the apartment dweller who lives next door, who then is my neighbour? What
does it mean to be "with"? What does "neighbour" mean? And if several people
watch a TV evangelist each day and regularly discuss their experiences together,
is this the church? What is "church"? What is "community"?
The following are some middle axioms for consideration. They are neither
basic theological principles, nor specific proposals for action, but rather come
between principle and practice -- they are middle axioms. The purpose is to
state the axioms and then consider their implications for Christian living.
These middle axioms are clustered around four aspects of Christian life:
Christianity as communication; revelation as communication; the church as
communication; and distortions of communication
