If your power problem is like mine, here’s the start of a solution
Late in the 1980s I was one member of a national committee whose concern was the eroding standards of decency in broadcast television. The group was put together by Donald Wildmon, executive director of the American Family Association (AFA), and included executives from several denominations as well as Billy Melvin, director of the National Association of Evangelicals. I participated as editor of The Lookout magazine, whose circulation was somewhere around 150,000 or 175,000, the most widely distributed periodical at that time to members of the independent Christian churches and churches of Christ.
I traveled with committee members to New York City, where we had booked meetings with the decency and standards representatives at ABC, CBS, and NBC. We told them we would call a national boycott of at least one network advertiser if the networks did not promise to clean up their act. They gave no ground, insisting their programming only reflected the culture but wasn’t trying to lead it. We called our effort CLeaR-TV, Christian Leaders for Responsible Television. (My largest contribution was suggesting the name for our coalition.) After giving them fair warning, the committee did mount an effort among Christians nationwide to boycott the products from one prominent advertiser. I don’t remember which one now, but it was deemed to be the largest advertiser of programs that included sex, violence, and profanity. AFA had a complicated formula for tabulating these offenses.
It seems kind of quaint all these years later, doesn’t it? Since those days, streaming and cable options have multiplied exponentially. Many of them offer us a steady diet of material far more offensive than the worst that concerned us then. (Even the Hallmark channel is portraying gay weddings.) Meanwhile, back at the broadcast networks, the language and sex today are often far beyond the list of objections we carried to New York three decades ago. What good was a campaign to force broadcasters to alter their course? Our effort, at least for the long run, failed.
First fallback
I tell you this story not to launch into a sermon about the decline of the culture, but to make a larger point. The CLeaR-TV boycotts (and, in time there were more than one), are the perfect example of the wrong way to influence society for good. “You can’t legislate morality” may be a cliché, but like most clichés, it’s accurate. A corollary might be, “You can’t strong-arm a television executive to offer the programming you prefer.”
The issue is power. Power is all too often our first fallback when we’re confronted with something that should change. Not only do we seek power, but often we panic when we see ourselves losing it. And so we grasp for it with ever more passion, shouting louder and scheming or manipulating or compromising to protect it.
One place for discussion of power is in the analysis of attitudes toward politics. Timothy Keller addresses this masterfully in his little gem, Counterfeit Gods. “It is the settled tendency of human societies to turn good political causes into counterfeit gods,” he wrote. “One of the signs that an object is functioning as an idol is that fear becomes one of the chief characteristics of life,” he wrote, and a “sign of idolatry in our politics is that opponents are not considered to be simply mistaken, but to be evil.” He published the book in 2009, and since then the politics-as-power problem has only magnified in America.
But let’s not dwell there. Politics is only one arena to observe our power problem. Keller spoke of the pervasive human need to have power in every circumstance, citing a trail of evidence that extends back to the Garden of Eden. There the temptation “was to resent the limits God had put on us . . . and to seek to be ‘as God’ by taking power over our own destiny.” Keller concluded, “We desperately seek ways to assure ourselves that we still have power over our own lives.”
Tiny quotient
That’s the tendency I’m considering this week, the persistent personal instinct to seek power in every area of my life. How much attention do I give to maintaining power—over my finances, my image, my ability to choose regardless of the needs around me? How threatened do I feel when someone tells me I’m not right, and how compelled do I feel to prove them wrong? (I once heard a Christian executive say he answered some critical letters with a note saying simply, “You may be right.” Why can’t I muster those words?) How do I pray and what do I say when disease or disaster or some other disappointment proves that I really have so very little control of anything? When will I finally be at peace with my tiny quotient of power?
An essay posted this week by Christianity Today CEO Timothy Dalrymple contrasted Jesus with Peter in the garden before Jesus’ crucifixion. Jesus submitted humbly to the band of soldiers coming to take him. Peter tried to prevent the seizure by cutting off a soldier’s ear. Hear Dalyrymple’s point:
The kingdom of heaven is elusive. It comes not with a sword but a sacrifice, not a crown of iron but a crown of thorns. It arrives not through the powers of the world but through the inverted power of the cross, which is to say the power of powerlessness. Peter swung the blade. Jesus drank the cup.
“The power of powerlessness.” Nothing could say it better. I’ve never fully seen my problem so simply and so clearly. But I know I must. True power comes from God, it looks different than what the world expects, and its reward may not be fully realized in this earthbound life. It’s discovered only from submission to God’s will. And that’s the choice—in a way it’s the only choice—where the power is all mine.
Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash