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Civil Sin: Evil and Purgation in the Media
By Quentin J. Schultze

"Today, we can say unequivocally that there are two major types of theology: (1) academic theology, which concerns itself with critically relating the meanings of sacred texts and traditions to a religious community, and (2) popular theology, which uncritically establishes, maintains, and changes the mythological assumptions of a people, especially through the mass media. Both theologies have cosmological implications and are shaped by anthropological assumptions.... It is increasingly clear in the modern world that popular theology has far more direct and immediate influence than academic theology on culture and society."

In his classic work Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann distinguished between the "world outside" and the "pictures in our heads." Writing in the early 1920s, before radio broadcasting and television, Lippmann saw clearly the growing role of the mass media in modern society. He argued cogently that the media were a "pseudo-environment"-a human creation inserted between human beings and the real world. This media environment was made up of "fictions":

By fictions I do not mean lies. I mean a representation of the environment which is in lesser or greater degree made by man himself. The range of fiction extends all the way from complete hallucination to the scientists' perfectly self-conscious use of a schematic model.... For the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance.... To traverse the world men must have maps of the world. Their persistent difficulty is to secure maps on which their own need, or someone else's need, has not sketched in the coast of Bohemia."¹

Nearly a half-century later, Jacques Ellul addressed the same theme, but with far more pessimism and with greater concern. For him, mass propaganda is not forced upon people but is actually a result of mass society's quest for certainty, security, and power. The media shape popular views of truth and reality, and the most effective propaganda simplifies the complex world for people and implicitly tells

Quentin J. Schultze is Professor of Communication at Calvin College. His recent books include Televangelism and American Culture: The Business of Popular Religion (1991) and Redeeming Television (1992).

¹ Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1922), pp. 15-16.

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them what to take for granted.² "Everyone takes it for granted," writes Ellul, "that fact and truth are one, and if God is no longer regarded as true in our day it is because He does not seem to be a fact. Now it is this kind of intimate conviction which constitutes the religion of the masses. To have a 'religion' there is no need of creeds and dogmas, ceremonies and rites: all that is necessary is that men in the mass should adhere to it in their hearts."³

These and other prophetic media critics have contributed to a paradigm of communication studies that has important implications for theology.⁴ Perhaps, the most important aspect of this paradigm for theologians is the way the media generate popular culture-culture that is not the product of particular traditions but is created commercially by no one in particular for everyone in general.⁵ Popular culture, as part of the pseudo-environment, continually challenges extant religions, ideologies, ethnicities, and nationalities. And it is certainly no respecter of religious truth, for it typically escapes critical reflection and rigorous theological scrutiny. Most important, popular culture masquerades as mere "entertainment" or "news," when in fact it is a major cultural as well as economic force around the world. The United States is clearly the largest producer of popular culture, leading one critic to conclude that "the media are American."⁶

In more distinctly theological terms, we might say that popular culture is one human response to God's "cultural mandate" (e.g., Gen. 1:28) for humans to take care of and develop the creation.⁷

² Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971).
³ Jacques Ellul, The Presence of the Kingdom (New York: The Seabury Press, 1948), pp. 37-38.
⁴ See especially Pierre Babin, The New Era in Religious Communication (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991).
⁵ There is an enormous literature on the nature of popular culture. I have tried to summarize some of the issues involved and to provide a critical perspective in Quentin J. Schultze, "Popular Culture and Life-Style Politics," The Journal of Communication Inquiry 6 (Winter 1981), pp. 87-96. For a more lengthy examination of popular culture see Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (New York: Basic Books, 1975).
⁶ Jeremy Tunstall, The Media are American: Anglo-American Media in the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).
⁷ The cultural mandate is stressed in Reformed theology. For a very traditional expression of its theological significance see Henry R. Van Til, The Calvinistic Concept of Culture (Philadelphia: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1974). For a more recent expression of this type of "reformational" perspective see Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985). In my view, Reformed theology erred by tending to equate "culture" with "civilization," thereby baptizing elitist culture and even particular strands of Western civilization as Christian. I use "culture" in a more anthropological sense to refer to the "way of life of a people," including fine art, folk culture, and popular culture. However, by focusing on creation, and not just the Great Commission (Matt. 28: 16-20), Reformed theology has helped keep alive the human responsibility to take care of and develop the creation. The importance of this in communication studies is discussed in Clifford G. Christians, "Redemptive Media as the Evangelical's Cultural Task," in American Evangelicals and the Mass Media edited by Quentin J. Schultze (Grand Rapids: Academie/Zondervan, 1990),pp.331-356.

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Popular culture is a crucial part of the "pictures in our heads," that shape our view of reality and lead us to act upon the creation in various ways. Popular culture greatly influences the everyday understanding of existence, including humankind's pictures of how to relate to God and to the creation. Elite art undoubtedly influences society as well, but in the contemporary world, popular culture's impact is much more immediate and direct. While fine art is more or less segregated for elites in society, popular culture has exploded among the masses. The industrial mechanisms of popular art, driven largely by commercial motivations, distribute American products practically everywhere around the globe and to virtually all social classes.

This social context is such a far cry from the "agricultural" metaphor of Genesis that we might overlook the connections between the biblical mandate and the popular culture produced for modern industrial life. However, economic and technological changes have conspired to transform the world's cultural landscape into a garden of popular as well as folk and fine art. Everywhere we look, the arts are exploding leisure activities. Nicholas Wolterstorff reminds us, "Art is not man's savior but a willing accomplice in his crimes." Fortunately, art can also play a role in the "renewal of human existence, so that man's creaturely vocation and fulfillment may be attained, already now and in the future."⁸

Today, we can say unequivocally that there are two major types of theology: (1) academic theology, which concerns itself with critically relating the meanings of sacred texts and traditions to a religious community, and (2) popular theology, which uncritically establishes, maintains, and changes the mythological assumptions of a people, especially through the mass media.⁹ Both theologies have cosmological implications and are shaped by anthropological assumptions. Academic theology tends to be more reflective and integrative, whereas popular theology generally takes its "findings" directly to the people, without the filters of prelates or scholars.¹⁰

Bronwen Hyman has suggested that images most reflect popular religion, while written sources reveal an "academic, intellectual

⁸ Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art in Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), p. 84.
⁹ This view of the quasi-religious function of popular culture is widely assumed in popular culture studies. It has been used within some religious studies as well. See John Wiley Nelson, Your God is Alive and Well and Appearing in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976), William F. Fore, Television and Religion: The Shaping of Faith, Values, and Culture (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1987), and Gregor T. Goethals, The Electronic Golden Calf: Images, Religion, and the Making of Meaning (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 1990).
¹⁰ In other words, popular theology has a populist rhetoric whereas academic theology has an elitist rhetoric. In fact, I believe that the elitist rhetoric often leads some popular revivalists and evangelists to characterize theology as pretentious and worldly. Of course, popular revivalists have their own implicit theology. I include in the term "academic theology" all types of theology done by academicians, including everything from systematic to pastoral or practical theology.

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understanding of religion."¹¹ Art historian Gregor Goethals puts it this way, "Today our friezes, the visual narratives of grandeur and perfection, may be found in popular art. Our mythological dramas, heroes and heroines, and ideological visions are produced through the contemporary forms of soap operas, sit-coms, commercials, news and sports."¹²

It is increasingly clear in the modern world that popular theology has far more direct and immediate influence than academic theology on culture and society. And it might be that popular theology is more influential than parish preaching and church education programs as well. Karl Menninger wrote in his famous book Whatever Became of Sin?, "Fluctuations in the authority and popularity of the church have tended to let the brightest torch of moral leadership pass to the press and television."¹³ In this sense, the media are the real theologians, conjuring up popular notions of God and God's relationship to the creation. Father Andrew Greeley devoted one of his books, appropriately titled God in Popular Culture, to this growing phenomenon, although in my judgment his findings are too sanguine. He wrote, "Having watched a couple score of tapes from Cosby, Family Ties, Growing Pains, Mr. Belvidere, and My Sister Sam in a few weeks, I am prepared to propose that anyone who can certify that they have viewed two of these programs during the preceding week can be dispensed, if not from Sunday church attendance, then at least from listening to the Sunday homily/sermon. They do it a lot better than we do it."¹⁴ I believe that Greeley is correct about the significance of such popular narratives, but too uncritical of their theological drift.

I

I argue as epistemological fact that the implicit theology of popular culture represents a threat to Christianity and other faiths. My argument is not elitist (I am not against popular culture per se, advocating only "high" culture), but practical. Popular notions of theology, without the restraints of tradition and without a community of critical religious discourse, are easily transformed into images and ideals that subvert the very religions their audiences practice. The "health-and-wealth" gospel in TV evangelism makes this abundantly clear for explicitly religious popular culture.¹⁵ But what about the theological assumptions in "secular" popular culture? I believe that it is crucial for contemporary academic theologians to understand the cultural contours of mass-mediated popular theology. To put it

¹¹ Bronwen Hyman, "Communication in Religious Art: The Personification of Good and Evil," Studies in Religion/Sciences 7 (1978), p. 69.
¹² Goethals, The Electronic Golden Calf p. 162.
¹³ Karl Menninger, Whatever Became of Sin? (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1973), p. 209.
¹⁴ Andrew M. Greeley, God in Popular Culture (Chicago: The Thomas More Press, 1988), p. 125.
¹⁵ Quentin J. Schultze, Televangelism and American Culture: The Business of Popular Religion (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1991), pp. 125-152.

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differently, academic theology must come to terms with the scope, impact, and significance of popular theology, which increasingly establishes the cultural context for the religious communities that academic theologians serve.¹⁶

Toward this end, I propose to address a small, but very important, part of this situation: the media's view of sin. I assume that to be commercially viable in a market system, and if unfettered by external constraints and unencumbered by ethical concerns, the mass media will normally propagandize audiences, that is, the media will likely tell people what the majority wants to value and believe, not what they should (theologically speaking) value and believe. As Robert Wood Lynn suggested decades ago, the media tend to take us as we are and to make us even more into that image.¹⁷ Obviously, there are dissenting voices and various minority opinions, especially in journals of comment and opinion, newspaper columns, explicitly religious periodicals and broadcasts, late-night radio, books, non-Hollywood cinema and specialized cable-TV fare. But the weight of public opinion and the scope of modern communications technologies tend to overcome the particularities of denominational practices, geographic regions, historical traditions, and catechetical doctrines. The result is a common and amazingly consistent view of sin in the media.

II

Probably the most memorable television program about sin in recent years was televangelist Jimmy Swaggart's confession sermon. When he returned to the TV pulpit in 1988 after a sex scandal that forced him off the air, Swaggart made no bones about his predicament: "I call it sin." The television news media loved it. They flashed sound bites of Swaggart's teary-eyed face across the continent. The most popular weekly American televangelist was apparently a hypocrite. Now that was sin-or so the TV stations and networks suggested rather self-righteously. But it was reported as sin only because Swaggart himself called it sin.

The concept of sin, as the religious contextualization of evil, has virtually disappeared from the popular media.¹⁸ It took the fall of a

¹⁶ I assume that theologians serve a broader community than the community of professional theologians. However, I also realize that in the contemporary world professionalism is marked by autonomy from society as much as by service to society. This, in my judgment, is a major social problem: how to de-professionalize professions so that they are concerned with more than their own power, prestige, and pay. If theologians cannot address the educated laity, then I think they have over-professionalized, making their own work increasingly irrelevant to the pastor and parish.
¹⁷ Robert Wood Lynn, "The Mass Media and the Kingdom of Evil," Religion in Life 21 (Spring 1952), pp. 229-240.
¹⁸ Since most religious broadcasting reaches a small number of people, I do not consider it "popular." Even the American Televangelists with the largest Sunday-morning audiences reach only about 1 or 2 million Americans, less than one percent of the population. By contrast, a prime-time TV series might reach 20 per cent, and the combined prime-time audience for secular fare is somewhere around 65 per cent of American homes every night.

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hellfire-and-brimstone preacher from Louisiana even to get the word "sin" on the nightly news. Day in and day out, the mass media act as if sin simply does not exist. And the reality is not just that the word "sin" is not uttered or written in the media but that the very concept of transgression against God has all but evaporated, except on distinctly religious TV. Moreover, TV is not open to the idea of sin as a state of existence, a perversity of human nature, or a condition of human alienation from God. Certainly, the biblical marks of sin exist on the tube (for example, jealousy, pride, sensuality, greed, and self-pity), but they are rarely put into a distinctly religious context.¹⁹ In other words, the classical formulations of sin in Christianity have no place in most of the popular media. The major exceptions in semi-popular media are world cinema and literature, such as the films of Claude Berri (for example Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring) and the novels of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Even in such exceptions, however, there is a tendency for the critics and audiences to overlook the significance of sin in the narratives. Sin is still largely an "improper opinion," to use Martin Marty's phrase.²⁰

However, the eclipse of sin has not reduced the amount of evil portrayed and reported in the popular media. It appears that evil, as a more publicly acceptable concept than sin, is doing more business than ever. News reporting and dramatic narratives are saturated with evil people and evil actions. These stories exist in everything from the nightly news to soap operas, prime-time drama, and movies. However, nearly all of this evil is disconnected from religious faith and from any sense of transcendence. This secular concept reduces evil to morally wrong or bad actions causing harm or pain to other human beings, perhaps resulting in misfortune. In my judgment, if anthropologists unearthed, in the year 2020, the remains of current North American popular culture, they would find very little evidence for the culture's belief in sin, but they would simultaneously be overwhelmed at evidence for moralistic belief in evil.²¹

III

Popular theology replaces religious sin with what I call "civil sin." This type of non-religious evil does not include the everyday moral

¹⁹ For historical insight into this phenomenon see Marvin Olasky, Prodigal Press: The Anti-Christian Bias of the American News Media (Westchester, Ill.: Crossway Books, 1988), pp. 17-30. The turning point seems to have been the early-to-mid-nineteenth century, when the periodicals of the day became market-driven enterprises catering to the masses. Also see Quentin J. Schultze, "The Media and a Public Faith," University of Detroit Law Review 65 (1988), pp. 619-641.
²⁰ Martin E. Marty, The Improper Opinion: Mass Media and the Christian Faith (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961).
²¹ I have not addressed the so-called "electronic church" as an expression of evil. S. Dennis Ford believes that religious broadcasters rely on an "aesthetic of evil" that denies the seriousness of evil by transforming genuine concern about evil into mere "titillation." I believe there is some truth to this for broadcasting overall, not just for explicitly religious broadcasting. See S. Dennis Ford, "The Electronic Church's Aesthetic of Evil," Christian Century 98 (October 28, 1981), pp. 1095-1097.

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improprieties found in the media-things such as white lies, rudeness, hostility, and anger. Nor does it necessarily include actions about which society lacks moral consensus, such as homosexual practices, abortion, fornication, gluttony, and drunkenness. These kinds of actions are outside of the scope of civil sin, and thus by media standards are not necessarily wrong.

Civil sin includes only the human practices that are evil by implicit media standards. Like civil religion, civil sin calls upon vaguely religious rhetoric, without reference to any distinctly religious values or beliefs. It takes the place of tradition, sacred text, or religious community as the popular paradigm for identifying real evil.

In civil sin, existing social mores operate as quasi-theological guides to normative judgments about human actions. Evil, in civil sin, is determined by a popular social contract expressed loosely in public opinion or public sentiment. It creates the public sense of shared moral values, enabling a nation of disparate groups and individuals to feel a sense of common moral will. Evil is momentarily identified in shared terms that do not challenge most minority points of view and appear to affirm particular religions' beliefs. Thus, there is a vague continuity between TV evil and the moral law of the Scriptures as interpreted in Christian tradition.

This type of civil sin, as a moral contextualization of human action, usually emerges when public opinion turns to outrage. Suddenly, there is a common, moralistic impulse in response to seemingly wicked actions. Examples include media responses to extremists' takeover of the American embassy in Iran, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, and Jeffrey Dahmer's mass murders in Milwaukee. Movies and television drama also create civil sin in the defining moments of audience outrage, when the audience feels that the criminals or psychopaths have crossed the line of civility ("normal" evil) and have entered a special realm of unambiguously evil action.

An illustration from the news might be helpful. During the Christmas holidays of 1992, one of Chicago's major stories concerned the arrest of a married couple at O'Hare Airport for child abandonment. Police and news media discovered that the couple had gone to Acapulco for a week's winter vacation, leaving at home alone their two children, the oldest of whom was only nine. If the story was accurate, the couple clearly acted irresponsibly. In fact, public sentiment was quickly formed around the outrage, leading prosecuting attorneys and the judge to act decisively on behalf of the interests of the state; the couple was arrested at the airport, booked on child abandonment charges, and saddled with a large bond. Within a day, the story was attracting national attention and was dubbed the "home alone" case, based on the popular movie of the same name.

The fact that the story broke during the Christmas holidays certainly gave it special moral weight, like house fires and indigent stories, which are more heart-rending when many people are thinking about families

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and homes. The outrageousness of the parents' actions was contrasted effectively with the pitiful situation of the children, who had been found alone, barefoot, crying in their yard after a smoke detector went off in their house. In effect, much of the ongoing public frustration about child neglect was projected symbolically on one unusual case of a selfish couple that relaxed on Mexican beaches while their children had to cope with the anxiety of being home alone. News reports both created and reinforced a sense of public outrage-a sense that, to quote from the film Network, "We're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it any more." As public outrage coalesced around media reports of the case, civil sin emerged from the everyday moral ambiguity of the news.

In this example of civil sin, the news media came as close as they ever do to the recognition of religious sin. Nevertheless, it was still a tale of civil sin. In the first place, I found no evidence of the story being defined specifically in terms of sin, as transgression against God or God's moral law. Even the obvious selfishness and self-centeredness of the parents did not lead to any religious contextualization of their actions. Second, there were few attempts (National Public Radio made one) to put the story in a broader moral context regarding the overall responsibilities of parents to their children. It was generally treated as a freak tale, not as an example of the fallenness of adults, including parents. The reports focused repeatedly on the outrageousness of the particular parental actions, thereby eclipsing the likelihood that the story might reflect universal lessons about humankind. In other words, the news tales were typically blind to the story's possible parabolic significance. Third, and this is crucial, the news reports repeatedly expressed the idea that the parents' actions were so outrageous as to be nothing more than inexplicable. Again and again, I heard and read reports that asked, in purely human terms, why this happened. Public sentiment, as reflected in news propaganda, would not extend even to the possibility that there was something wrong with the parents that reflected more than just the idiosyncratic mistreatment of children.

I have often pondered why even the worst evil actions seem unable to penetrate the facade of civil sin in the media. Why do popular media discussions of the Holocaust stop short of the label of sin? Why do news stories, docudramas, and movies about serial killers only go so far as to speculate about "what went wrong" in the killer's childhood, what "made him break?" Why are psychological and pathological explanations acceptable but distinctly religious ones unacceptable? Almost every time this ritual of public interrogation takes place, the focus is on the idiosyncracies of the "civil sinner," not on the reality of sin. Surely the overreliance on medical and scientific experts partly explains this phenomenon; rarely are theologians or even parish clergy asked for their explanations. But there is something far deeper at work: a tendency to focus on civil sinners as victims.

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IV

Probably partly because of the public's appetite for non-religious interpretations of evil, the popular media tend to see evildoers as victims. This is very subtle, but enormously powerful, propaganda, which affirms civil sin. The theology is something like this: Individuals would not do evil except for the immediate circumstances that cause or lead them to do so. In other words, evil actions beget further evil actions. This approach to the popular portrayal of evil implicitly rejects its transcendent character (its possible religious contextualization) and seeks to explain evil phenomena on the basis of immanent causes. In the news story about the abandoned children, reports shifted in several days to the question of what went wrong in the parents' background to cause them to abandon their own children.

I saw immanent contextualization in the CBS docudrama "Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story." This made-for-TV film was based on the life of the first convicted female serial killer. The premise of the story was that Wuornos was a victim of child abuse by a man, later turning to prostitution and murdering male clients. Frankly, it was a sickening tale that I would not have watched except for my interest in how popular docudramas interpret history, especially biography. Wuornos was obviously portrayed not only as a murderer but also as a victim. In fact, Court TV, a cable channel, which earlier covered the trial of Florida v. Wuornos, planned to present a two-hour condensation of the trial titled, "Aileen Wuornos: Serial Killer or Victim?"

I certainly do not want to minimize the likely impact of Ms. Wuornos tragic childhood on her adult view of men. Even a cursory examination of her life would suggest an important psychological connection between her childhood victimization and her adult actions against the men she killed in Florida. Nevertheless, the point must still be made that the popular tendency to make evildoers into mere victims is to rob the crimes of their full character as sin and, thereby, to civilize the evil in human terms. When victimization establishes the moral context for action, transcendent considerations, including theological contexts, are largely irrelevant. Evil is, then, only a matter of human cause and effect, not a more egregious matter of willful disobedience of God.

The concept of causality, evident in the popular victimization motif in public media, is clearly at odds with much theological thought on the topic of sin. Human causality is, in one sense, biblical. Sin exists in social institutions, including the family, and is passed down from generation to generation. Certainly the Old Testament, in the voices of the prophets, appears to affirm the existence of cross-generational evil, which is indeed transmitted from individual to individual. However, the theological contextualization of this causality challenges the victimization motif in popular theology. Popular theology attempts to locate evil merely in the actions of victimized people, not in human-

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kind itself and, certainly, not in any inherent human disposition toward sin. The media mythology regarding civil sinners as victims cannot easily accept any universal fallenness, any cross-humankind tendency toward evil, or any root human imperfection.

V

The media "solve" the problem of civil sin by sacrificing victims on the altars of popular narrative. If sin is not entirely universal (common to all of humankind) and if it is essentially individualistic (limited to the individual person and not characteristic of groups, societies, and organizations), then the obvious solution to the public problem of evil is the elimination of civil sinners. Both the problem and the solution rest in human hands. Sin is merely an issue of immanence requiring no transcendent action. Humans cause it, and humans can eliminate it. The cause-effect link can thus be broken and shalom ushered in. All that is needed is a continuous supply of hard-core evildoers, who can be sacrificed on behalf of all righteous people for the good of society. The only problem for the purveyors of this popular theology is correctly anticipating public sentiment about the level of evil it will take to sacrifice sinners justly.

Popular dramas, especially television series, are probably the best illustrations of how civil sinners become sacrificial victims. As Father Greeley and others have suggested, television drama is much like the medieval morality play. However, the tube's allegorical narratives are not so easily related to classical virtues and vices, in part probably because of greater moral ambiguity surrounding human action in today's world. While contemporary commercial media have to affirm what audiences value and believe, they are also the source of most people's information about other cultures. This implicit cultural relativism makes it unlikely that members of any modern culture will assume that their civilization has all of the "right" answers for all of life's perplexities.

Popular media respond to this dilemma by producing symbolically unambiguous tales that evade difficult questions and paradoxes, largely staying clear of relating civil sin to currently divisive social issues such as abortion and homosexuality. Popular theology requires clearly identifiable good guys and bad guys for the morality plays to work their symbolic magic. The bad guys can murder and rape, for instance, but adultery and lying may be too morally ambiguous, unless they are part of a pattern indicating someone's evil character. "J. R." of Dallas, for instance, represented "unmitigated, unabashed, pure evil" behind the "disguise of virtue."²² He was the kind of person the audience loved to hate.

So, in westerns, detective shows, action series, and the like, the public is treated to a fairly limited assemblage of stock characters who

²² Harold Ficket, "'Who Killed JR': Images of Evil Brought Back Into Focus," Christianity Today 24 (October 24, 1980), p. 52.

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represent good and evil.²³ Because this essay discusses the media's depiction of sin, it makes sense to concentrate on the characters in the black hats, the ones who are wicked enough to be socially unredeemable. Over the years, these television evildoers have included scalp-hunters, psychopaths, mobster bosses, hired killers, and rapists. Some ethnic and racial groups have been represented more than others, undoubtedly reflecting various stereotypes.

Apparently, the key to creating truly evil characters, whether in drama or the news, is establishing enough wickedness that the characters seem to merit nothing good and to deserve stiff justice, including death. These villains thereby "get their due" and, through their "sacrifice," help make the world safer for the rest of us righteous souls. Obviously, this type of sacrifice is not particularly allegorical to either the gospel or Old Testament animal sacrifice, since in both cases it was the innocent who were killed for the guilty. TV criminals are brought to justice as a means of affirming the popular theology that evil resides principally in evil people, not generically in the human race. Their death is society's gain-a means of purging humankind of undesirable, dangerous, and even savage people. As Theodor Adorno once wrote, "Detective fictions regularly distort or unmask the world so that asociality and crime become the everyday norm, but which at the same time charm away the seductive and ominous challenge through the inevitable triumph of order."²⁴

The two most significant television genres in this popular theology of evil have been westerns and detective shows. Gunsmoke and Wagon Train used, principally, gunslingers, Indians, bank robbers, cattle thieves, and desperados. Occasionally a "good man" would turn bad, but normally, the savage characters were easily contrasted with the civilized townspeople trying to live righteous lives. Detective programs, which largely replaced westerns on North American television in the 1970s, shifted the battle from the frontier to the city.²⁵ It can easily be argued that detective series were urban westerns with new savages: mobsters, hired killers, drug kingpins, and the like. Cities thus became new "frontiers," where good and evil characters battled for control of society.²⁶ Only the Lord knows how many cattle rustlers and hired killers were sacrificed on thousands of these programs.

²³ I do not believe that situation comedies, as a form of public amusement, normally depict much real evil. They are based more on complication and confusion than on immoral or unethical conduct as conflict. Consequently, they do not offer many real villains. Moreover, as Ficket has suggested, sitcoms are largely a "humanist suburb where the characters have been abandoned by heaven and hell to their psychotherapists. In these cramped dwellings of the human spirit Good and Evil have been replaced by Self-esteem and Desire...." Ibid.
²⁴ Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), p. 32.
²⁵ I cover this in greater detail in Quentin Schultze, Television: Manna from Hollywood? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986), pp. 82-113.
²⁶ One of the most interesting books recently published on this topic is Richard Sparks, Television and the Drama of Crime: Moral Tales and the Place of Crime in Public Life (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992).

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The major difference between early westerns and their detective-series successors was the degree of morality required of heroes. Western heroes tended to be remarkably righteous (Matt Dillon would not take advantage of Kitty and repeatedly risked his life by refusing to bushwack hardened criminals). Detectives were much more likely to use ethically questionable means to accomplish justice; they often lied, for instance, to get information about criminals. The likely explanation for this shift in American popular culture during the 1970s was the nation's own public criticism of established authority. If evil rested in real heroes, including the president of the United States, who faced impeachment proceedings in the Watergate scandal, then the public needed hard-boiled heroes who might have to use uncivil means to secure justice and stop evil. The sitcom M*A*S*H, also popular during the period, reflected similarly ambivalent sentiments about the prospects for eliminating evil; the show institutionalized evil in a way that is rarely present in such a popular medium.

In spite of these infrequent exceptions to the rules of popular theology, it is fair to say that the morality plays of the media continue to invest tremendous hope in humankind's ability to eliminate civil sin by ridding itself of evil individuals. Media reinforce this doctrine with an endless stream of new tales that are usually nothing more than variations on old ones. Most of the stories are fictional drama, but certainly the news and docudramas play their parts in this purgation myth with every story about captured criminals. An outsider to Western culture might be perplexed by this whole scenario: How can these consumers of popular theology maintain their faith when evil reappears again and again, day after day?

VI

The answer to this question is fundamental to our understanding of the popular theology of evil. It is one thing to exegete the "texts" of popular culture, but it is entirely appropriate to question how such exegesis positions the audience with respect to the popular text. In other words, what does the mass audience bring to the media text? We must be careful, or else we might deconstruct a popular text, thereby rendering its shared meanings as illusory, academic, or simply meaningless. Even so, how can we explain the naivete' of TV viewers and newspaper readers? Do they really believe in civil sin and the purgation myth?

At this juncture of academic and popular opinion, it is time to face one of the difficult tasks ahead for some theologians, namely, to relate their academic understandings of theology to popular theology. This will require a careful exegesis of popular theology through the lens of academic theology. To put it differently, it is not only necessary but absolutely essential that theologians bring their academic and religious perspectives to the interpretation of popular culture. Of course, their interpretations of popular theology should be carefully considered and

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debated within and without the theological community. Mistakes will be made. Many hermeneutical problems exist. Ridiculous interpretations of the media world will sometimes be offered by well-intentioned theologians. Nevertheless, the task must be undertaken because, in order to maintain its own relevance, theology must be related to contemporary culture. Theologians have an excellent opportunity to gaze critically at the intersection of popular and academic theology, thereby learning more about each one, testing their academic understandings of humankind while holding humankind accountable for its understanding of itself.

As I considered this theological challenge in the context of the media's view of sin, I was struck by a number of provocative conclusions. First, it appears that popular culture, as a market-driven enterprise, gives a fallen people the messages they wish to hear in their fallen state. Popular theology becomes almost an invisible form of propaganda that affirms desirable worldviews. Sin is principally someone else's problem, confined largely to highly evil people, and best eliminated through ridding society of such people.

What are the implications of this theology, assuming I have exegeted the popular texts correctly? Could it be that this popular theology of evil has shaped significantly our society's approach to incarcerating rather than truly rehabilitating criminals? Could it also be that this popular theology has contributed to the fact that lay persons in many churches find theology to be largely irrelevant in their personal and communal lives?

Second, I was struck by the implications of objectifying evil in the "other" rather than seeing it as part of the fallen self. Does this not produce a desired personal pride and comfort, as well as reflect such a view of the civil self? Might this help explain why preaching about sin typically falls on deaf ears, except for people who already feel convicted about their sin? Could it be that this objectification of evil in others has contributed to the decline in linguistic civility in public life? Why is there no rhetorical counterforce, such as a strong sense of public contrition and humility? If sin belongs only to thugs and murderers, just about everyone can cast the first stone. William Willimon writes, "It is the problem of being human and not being able to do one blessed thing about it except to lynch, kill, blame, accuse, lie, and suffer, trapped in our own stupid B-grade movie of a tragedy that we have seen enacted a hundred times before, more victims than villains, caged animals, dying every day, wishing to God it were not so but it is, oh, it is."²⁷

I conclude, then, that popular culture is essentially in the business of civilly aiding and abetting our fallen selves by promoting (and affirming) a self-satisfying view of sin that minimizes our own culpability before the face of God. Of course, it is not the job of popular culture

²⁷ William Willimon, Sighing for Eden: Sin, Evil & the Christian Faith (Nashville:Abingdon Press, 1985), p. 27.

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to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, the pure immanence of evil in popular theology establishes the context in which preachers must preach and theologians must theologize to themselves and their students. Therefore, I believe it is entirely appropriate to hold the media accountable for contributing to the cultural blinders that prohibit fallen human beings from recognizing their own fallenness. I would also hold theologians accountable for not helping all of us to see this more clearly and cogently. As Ellul wrote, "In order to participate truly in this preservation of the world, the Christian ought to place himself at the point of contact between two currents: the will of the Lord and the will of the world."²⁸

²⁸ Ellul, The Presence of the Kingdom, p. 27.