“Violence in media does not affect me.”
I cannot tell you how many times I have heard someone say this. Often, I am forced to suppress my response.
Yes, violence does affect you. Otherwise, that is like eating a tub of ice cream and saying, “It does not affect me.”
Your metabolism may be high. You may have a higher lactose tolerance than others. Or maybe you’ve eaten ice cream so often that you’ve become numb to its effects.
The bottom line is that what you consume affects you.
Most ad companies understand this. Red Crow Marketing suggests that the average American sees 4,000-10,000 ads every day.
In 2018, ad companies in the U.S. spent 223.7 million dollars on advertising (Statista.com). Why put so many resources into annoying little icons on web browsers? Advertisers understand that where your attention goes, often your values, habits and money follow.
I’d like to argue that if followers of Jesus take His call to discipleship seriously, we must learn to moderate the content we take in. We become like what we consume. We should consume content that makes us more like the people we were created to be.
The question often raised about content consumption in Christian subcultures usually sounds like: “How much (sex/violence/vulgarity/etc.) is too much?” The problem with this question lies in its hidden assumptions: if life and fulfillment could be found in consuming as much of that forbidden content as possible without actually “sinning”! The difference between sin and righteousness does not lie on a boundary marker. This question treats sin like a threshold that can be crossed rather than an attitude of the heart.
Sin is a distraction, misplaced attention. Sin literally means “to miss the mark.” When our questions and, by extension, our lives are preoccupied with the job of avoiding sin rather than pursuing what is righteous, we fail to aim at the right target. Our lives should not be defined by what we abstain from but rather by who we are. For the disciple of Jesus, all of our decisions should flow from our identity in Christ. Some better questions to guide our content consumption should be: “Does this content help me know God more?” or “Does this content help me love my neighbor?” These questions demonstrate a life committed to knowing God.
Most major content producers are not concerned with the long-term repercussions of the gratuitous media they produce. Instead, they are focused on immediate profits. In an information economy primarily shaped by popular opinion trends rather than truth, we cannot depend on Hollywood/Twitter/YouTube to steward our attention in our pursuit of Christlikeness. Instead, we have a responsibility to self-monitor the content we consume. To begin such a practice, we must reckon with attention as a spiritually formative instrument.
Attention is a powerful force. When we give something our attention, we give it our lives. Say I began to obsess over a particular new vehicle. I start watching car prices daily. My spending habits change — I work more, save my money, and cut all unessential costs. This might also begin to influence my relationships. I become less generous or only hang out with people who agree with my choices. Slowly that car reconstructs my very identity. The Bible has a term for misplaced attention like this: “idolatry.”
God hates idolatry for many reasons. One is that distracted motivations reap evil actions. If my ultimate goal is to obtain a dream car, I will find a way to obtain it even if I must hurt others. When we give our attention to worthless things, we live trivial lives. In Psalm 115, the psalmist writes about idols, saying: “Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them” (NIV). His claim is key: we become like what we worship, whether it is good or evil. If this is true, then the capacity of what we love most will define our potential. Ironically, serving money and other material possessions cheapens the substance of our lives.
At our very core, human beings are imitators. We must ask ourselves, then, what is worth imitating? Whatever we ought to direct our attention toward will shape us, our habits, values, and relationships into its own image. The Scriptures teach us that there is only one being worthy of our undivided attention: God. God is the loving union of all things that are good, true, and beautiful. And who is like God? There are none worthier than Him. When we seek Him, every facet of our lives is liberated to chase after our true potential.
