the reel truth

chapter one

the great storyteller, and the two ditches

Before we talk about how to handle the world’s stories, you must first be persuaded of something you may never have stopped to consider: that stories are not idle things, and that taking them in is never a neutral act. We speak of entertainment as though it were a way of switching the mind off, a harmless rest. But nothing is doing more to form you, day by day, than the stories you let in.

This is not a suspicious or a fearful idea. It is simply how God made us. We are creatures shaped by story. It is no accident that a great deal of the Bible comes to us not as bare lists of rules but as narrative, the account of a people, a history, a drama of fall and rescue, and that when the Lord Jesus wished to lodge a truth deep in a heart, He so often did it with a story. A parable slips past the guard that a lecture would raise. You can argue with a proposition, fold your arms against it, but a story gets in under the arms and works on you from the inside, shaping what you love, what you assume, what you take to be normal and good, all beneath the level of where you are paying attention.

Now turn that truth toward the screen, and feel the weight of it. The average soul in our day takes in hours of story every day, far more preaching, if we are honest, than he will ever hear from any pulpit. And nearly all of it is written by people who do not believe what we believe, who hold a different idea of what is true and good and real, and who are, whether they intend it or not, teaching that idea to everyone who watches. The screen is a pulpit. The song is a sermon. They are forming the loves and assumptions of all who sit under them, hour upon hour, year upon year.

The screen is a pulpit. The song is a sermon.

I do not say this to frighten you back behind the curtains; we shall see that the answer is not retreat. I say it so that you will take the whole matter seriously, and stop imagining that what you watch and what you hear is doing nothing to you. It is doing a great deal to you. The only question is whether you will be passive under it, formed without your consent, or whether you will learn to take it in awake. Everything that follows is about learning to do the second thing.

And you will remember that the road of the stranger in Babylon runs between two ditches, and that a soul can pitch off into either one. It is no different here, on the narrower ground of what we watch and hear. There are two ways to get this wrong, and most Christians have fallen into one or the other, often without ever knowing there was a road between them.

The first ditch is the ditch of swallowing it whole. This is the believer who consumes whatever is put in front of him and never once asks who made it, or what it is preaching, or what it is quietly teaching him to love. He watches as the world watches, laughs as the world laughs, absorbs as the world absorbs, and never brings a moment of it before the Lord or under the light of the Word. He is being discipled by Babylon every evening and would be astonished to hear it called that. He thinks he is merely relaxing. In truth he is sitting, night after night, under a pulpit that hates his God, and taking the sermon in without resistance.

The second ditch is the opposite, and it catches the more earnest sort of believer, which is exactly why it is so deceptive. It is the ditch of banning it all. This is the soul who, rightly seeing that the world’s entertainment can corrupt, draws the wrong conclusion and flees the whole of it, sealing himself and his family inside a bubble where nothing the world has made is permitted to enter. It feels like holiness. It looks like devotion. But it is the retreat we already named in the first booklet, the lamp hidden under the basket, and it forfeits both the genuine goods that even a fallen world can produce and the very engagement we were left in the world to practice. A believer who has fled all contact with the culture’s stories has not conquered the danger. He has only run from the field.

And between the two ditches runs the narrow road, which is the whole subject of this booklet: to engage with the eyes open. Not to swallow blindly, and not to flee in fear, but to take in the world’s stories awake and discerning, accountable for what we plant in our minds, able to receive what is true and good even from an unbelieving hand while naming and refusing the lie woven in beside it. That is the road. Let us learn to walk it.

chapter two

no wicked thing before mine eyes

Before we can walk the road, we must lay a foundation, and that means doing some honest work with two passages of Scripture that are forever being waved about in these conversations, usually as slogans, and seldom understood. For the believer is indeed accountable for what he sets before his eyes and pours into his mind, and we dare not pretend otherwise. But we must know what the Word actually says, and not merely what the bumper sticker version of it says.

The first is a line of David’s that you will hear quoted to end every discussion before it begins.

Now this is a magnificent resolve, and we should take it to heart. But notice what it is and what it is not. Read the whole of the psalm and you find that David is speaking as a king, setting down the manner in which he will govern his house and his reign; he is resolving what he will approve, what he will allow to cleave to him, what conduct he will set before himself and honor. It is a vow about the bent of his life and the company he will keep, not a flat rule that a believer may never let his eyes fall upon anything dark in all the world. We know it cannot mean that, for the Scripture itself sets a great deal of darkness before our eyes, murder and adultery and treachery and the cruelty of men, told plainly so that we might see sin for what it is and learn. The verse is about what you embrace and approve, what you let cleave to you, not about whether a wicked thing may ever appear within your sight. That is a different matter entirely, and the slogan flattens it.

The second passage is the great positive standard, and it is the better grid by far for weighing what we take in.

There is your measure. Not a list of forbidden titles, but a standard to hold a thing against. The mind is a garden, and you are the gardener, and you will answer for what you plant in it. Paul does not hand you a rule; he hands you a question to put to everything that asks for entrance: what is this thing doing in the garden of my mind? Is it sowing what is true and honest and lovely, or is it sowing weeds? That question, asked honestly and often, will do more to guard you than any list of banned things ever could, because it teaches you to weigh rather than merely to obey, and a soul that has learned to weigh can be trusted in a world that will never hand it a tidy list.

The mind is a garden, and you are the gardener, and you will answer for what you plant in it.

chapter three

eating meat from a pagan market

Here is the heart of how a believer may handle the work of unbelieving hands, and the wonder of it is that Scripture has already given us a nearly perfect model for the whole question, though it speaks of meat rather than movies. The early church faced a problem that looks, at first, like nothing to do with us, and proves, on a closer look, to be almost exactly our situation.

In the city of Corinth, much of the meat sold in the markets had first been offered in sacrifice to idols, passed through a pagan temple before it ever reached the butcher’s stall. And the believers were troubled. Could a Christian eat such meat, meat that had come through the hands of idol worship? Paul’s answer is a marvel of balance, and worth our close attention.

Do you see what he says? The idol is nothing. The meat is just meat. It passed through a pagan rite, yes, but that rite was empty, for the idol behind it is not real, and so the meat itself is not defiled in any way that need trouble a believer with knowledge. He may eat it with thanksgiving and go on his way. And here is the application that should make you sit up: a story made by an unbeliever is very like that meat. It has passed through a source that does not honor God, but the craft of it, the truth and the beauty that may genuinely be in it, are not thereby poisoned beyond all use. The believer with discernment may take it in, give thanks for what is good in it, and not be harmed.

But Paul does not stop there, and neither may we, for he adds the limit that love requires. That same meat which one believer may eat freely, another cannot, because his conscience is weak, or because the thing genuinely trips him, and Paul says plainly that the strong must not let his liberty become a stumbling block to the weak. The freedom is real, but it is bounded by love, and bounded by conscience. What one may take in with a clear heart, another must leave alone, and the strong does not flaunt his liberty in a way that wounds his brother. Hold that, for it governs everything that follows. The meat is just meat. But love still limits the eating.

The meat is just meat. But love still limits the eating.

chapter four

see it for what it is

We arrive now at the very heart of this little booklet, My Friend, the single skill on which all the rest depends, and I will state it as plainly as I know how. The whole of discernment, in this matter, comes down to seeing a thing for exactly what it is. Not optimistically. Not pessimistically. Accurately. Whatever it is, a movie, a song, a show, a story, you must learn to look straight at it and name truly what it actually is, neither calling a dark thing clean nor calling a clean thing dark. That is the skill. Everything else is detail.

Let me tell you a story that taught me this, and taught me by way of its absurdity. There was a season of my college years that I spent at a Bible college, and I remember a conversation among some of us young people there. Something had come up about the occult, about dark things, and somewhere in it I made an offhand remark that a certain beloved film, the one people watch at both Halloween and Christmas, the stop-motion one with the skeleton and the ragdoll, was, after all, a little dark. And the others rounded on me. It is not dark, they said, quite adamant. Not dark at all. And I confess I was taken aback, for I had meant no condemnation by it. I said, I am not telling you it is a sin to watch it. Why, I love the old cartoon with the talking dog and the meddling teenagers in the van, the whole franchise of it, and watch it happily as a grown woman, and that show is shot through with the occult, with witches and ghosts and monsters at every turn. I am perfectly fine watching it. But let us at least be honest that there is darkness in the thing.

And they would not have it. It is not dark, they insisted, it is not, and I remember thinking, with as much charity as I could manage, that the position was simply absurd. Plainly, flatly wrong. And here lies the whole rub for the Christian, and the reason I tell you so foolish a little tale. The error of those earnest young people was not that they watched these things. I watch them too. Their error was the refusal to see the thing for what it is. They had decided that because they enjoyed it, and because it was harmless to enjoy, it must therefore not be dark, as though admitting the darkness would have condemned the watching. But those are two entirely different questions. You may enjoy a thing and watch it freely, and at the very same time see clearly and admit honestly exactly what is in it. Indeed, that is the only safe way to enjoy anything the world makes. The danger is never in seeing the darkness plainly. The danger is in pretending it is not there.

The danger is never in seeing the darkness plainly. The danger is in pretending it is not there.

For every story preaches. There is no neutral story, because there is no neutral storyteller; every one of them holds some view of what is good and real and worth living for, and every story carries that view in its bones. So the believer’s task is not to stop watching, but to watch awake, asking always: what is this trying to teach me? What does it hold up as good? What does it call love, and is it? What does it say the world is for? And by the grace of God we may then do what the saints have always done with the world’s offerings, take what is true and beautiful, for an unbelieving hand can still produce real truth and real beauty by common grace, and refuse the lie folded in beside it. We eat the meat and leave the bones. But mark this well: you can only spit out the bones if you can see them. The whole art is in the seeing.

chapter five

your conscience, and your brother’s

If every story must be seen for what it is, it still does not follow that every believer will draw his lines in the very same place, and we must speak honestly about that, for it is where a great deal of needless strife arises. Scripture gives us a whole chapter on the matter, in Romans, where Paul deals with believers who disagreed over disputable things, and his counsel there governs much of what we are discussing. On the genuinely disputable, the strong and the weak are not to despise or judge one another, but each to be fully persuaded in his own mind, and none to violate his own conscience nor to bind his brother’s where the Word has not bound it.

Let me make it personal, My Friend, for I am the best example I have. For years I watched the darker sort of horror, the paranormal-investigator pictures built on so-called real case files and the ones about the family whose child is taken into the spirit world, and I will tell you plainly that my conscience did not trouble me in the least. I watched them, and I was fine. I was pastored by a faithful man’s radio teaching straight through the whole Bible, and I studied the Word, nary a care in the world of my watching habits. And then one day, and I can put no other name to it than the Holy Spirit, I began to feel a deep discomfort in watching them, a check I had never felt before. And so I stopped. I have not watched one to this day, and that has been years now. Mark what that means and what it does not. It does not mean such films are a sin for every soul on earth; it means the Lord drew a line for me, personally, in His own time, that He had not drawn before. And the proof that it was personal and not a blanket rule against all such things is simple: I still happily watch other frightening films. The ones with the ghost-faced mask and the telephone call are a particular favorite of mine, some of the most purely fun scary movies I know. So the line the Spirit drew was not around all horror. It was specific, and it was mine, and it came in its season.

And here I must add a thing that will keep you honest, for not every line we draw is a matter of conscience at all, and we do ourselves no favors by dressing up a mere preference as a conviction. Calling back to my earlier example, I do not watch that Halloween-and-Christmas film. But I want to be perfectly clear that this has nothing whatever to do with morality or conscience. It is simply that claymation and stop-motion unsettle me, genuinely; there is an uncanny quality to the way the figures move, a not-quite-rightness, that has bothered me since I was a child, when even the beloved old claymation Christmas specials gave me uneasy dreams, and unsettles me still. Stop-motion fear, I have since learned, is a real and common thing, a version of what students of these matters call the uncanny valley.¹ I can still watch stop-motion or scary stories each on their own, but the pairing, absolutely not. So I avoid that film, but let me never pretend I am avoiding it out of holiness. I am avoiding it because it gives me the shivers. That is a preference, not a conviction, and a believer who has learned to tell the difference between the two has learned something genuinely valuable, for half the quarrels in the church over these things are really preferences wearing the costume of convictions.

Half the quarrels in the church over these things are really preferences wearing the costume of convictions.

So know your own conscience, and know your own weak places, for what one believer may take in freely will trip another flat on his face, and neither is to judge the other. Do not violate your conscience; the Spirit who checked me on those films may check you on something I watch without a thought, and you must obey Him and not me. And do not bind your brother where God has left him free. Hold your own lines firmly, hold them humbly, and extend to the brother who draws his elsewhere the very charity you would want extended to you.

chapter six

three layers, and knowing which you are in

And now I must draw the most important distinction in the whole of this booklet, for everything we have said so far concerns matters of conscience and discernment, and there is a kind of thing to which conscience and discernment do not apply at all, because God has already closed the question. We must not lump it in with the rest. So let me lay out three layers, and beg you to learn which one you are standing in at any given moment, for the gravest errors come from confusing them.

The first layer is the broad one, and it is fully a matter of conscience: the ordinary stories that depict things, including dark things, a witch as a character, a crime, a haunting, a villain. The cartoon dog and the meddling teenagers, the masked killer and the telephone call, the sparkling vampires, which I confess I have loved myself. These are weighed by conscience, by discernment, and by age, as we have already discussed. They show darkness; they do not instruct you to practice it.

The second layer is murkier, still a matter of conscience but darker and more demanding of care: stories built more substantially around the actual mechanics of the dark arts, real spellcasting, incantations, the procedures themselves rather than mere depiction. Here I would place the tale of the boy wizard and his school, which is, after all, largely about the casting of spells, or the great dice-and-dungeon game, which dabbles in the same. I do not call these a sin; I will say it plainly, it is not a sin to enjoy them, and I am no friend of the old panic over such things that gripped a certain corner of the church a few decades back.² But they sit in a grayer place than the first layer, and they call for more prayer, more care, more attention to what they actually are and to who is taking them in. And you will notice some things sit between the layers: the paranormal-investigator pictures and their kind are not quite the second layer, for they do not teach you to work an incantation, yet they carry more darkness than the first layer comfortably holds. That in-between is exactly where my own conscience was stirred, and where yours may be too. These first two layers, and the ground between them, are the prayerful, Spirit-led, personal country of conscience.

But the third layer is something else entirely, and here the conversation about conscience simply ends, because it was never a matter of conscience to begin with. The third layer is not the depiction of dark things but the actual practice of them: the real attempt to reach into the hidden realm. I mean the whole family of divination and the occult, fortune-telling in all its dress, the gypsy fortuneteller and the palm reader and the crystal ball, the psychic and the psychic hotline, astrology and the daily horoscope, the tarot cards, the Ouija board, the medium and the séance. These are not stories about a thing. They are the thing. And on these the Word of God is not the least bit unclear.

There is no debate to be had. Divination, the reading of the signs, the consulting of spirits, the attempt to pull knowledge or guidance from any source but God, the Lord names it by its many names and calls the whole of it an abomination, the very thing for which He drove the nations out of the land. The astrologer who reads the heavens as though they ruled your fate, the medium who claims to summon the dead, the Ouija board which is nothing less than an open invitation to whatever will answer; these are not weighed on the scale of conscience. They are simply forbidden, and the believer does not touch them.

And do not be fooled by how harmless, how charming, how pleasant they are made to seem, the fortuneteller’s tent and the party game and the horoscope read for a laugh over coffee. That pleasant surface is precisely the danger. For the enemy himself is transformed into an angel of light, the Scripture says, and so of course he makes the dark thing alluring; why on earth would he dress it as what it is? He whispers come closer, come closer, and it is moths to a flame. The very allure is the lure, the bait laid over the hook. A thing being charming has never once made it safe.

The very allure is the lure, the bait laid over the hook.

So learn your layers, and above all, learn which one you are standing in. For the careless soul treats a third-layer abomination as though it were a first-layer story and walks through a forbidden door calling it harmless fun; and the fearful soul treats a first-layer story as though it were a third-layer abomination and burns a child’s cartoon as witchcraft. Both have failed at the one needful thing, which is to see the matter for exactly what it is.

chapter seven

the off switch

And I would be a poor and a dishonest guide if I let you close these pages thinking that discernment means you may take in anything at all so long as you are clever enough about it. For there is a lie that creeps in right here, at the very end, and it is this: that so long as I am watching critically, so long as I tell myself I am engaging it with discernment, I may consume anything whatever. That is self-deception, and a dangerous one. The plain truth is that some things should simply be put down. There is media that no amount of clever critical watching can redeem, that is doing nothing in you but feeding the flesh, stoking what ought to be starved, and the honest believer knows the difference between weighing a thing and simply wallowing in it. Discernment, real discernment, sometimes wears the humble face of the off switch. Not the off switch of fear, which flees everything; the off switch of wisdom, which knows itself, knows its own weak places, and is honest enough to say, this one I will not watch, not because no one may, but because I know what it does to me.

Discernment, real discernment, sometimes wears the humble face of the off switch.

That, after all, was the lesson of my own conscience. The Spirit did not ask me to mount an argument for why such films are universally wrong. He simply checked me, and the obedient thing, the discerning thing, was to turn it off and keep it off. Self-knowledge of that kind is not the enemy of liberty; it is the mature exercise of it. The free believer is not the one who can stomach anything. He is the one who knows when to watch with thanksgiving and when, for his own soul’s sake, to reach over and turn the thing off, and is not too proud to do either.

I will add one curious note in closing, for I do not mean to turn this into a study. You will remember the strange account of King Saul and the witch of Endor, who seemed to bring up the prophet Samuel from the dead at Saul’s asking. Good and faithful teachers have landed in different camps on what truly happened there, whether it was Samuel himself or no, and I do not think it a hill to die upon.³ For my own part, I stand with those who reason that God does not work His purposes through the dark arts the enemy uses, and so I suspect it was not Samuel at all but some spirit made to wear his likeness. And I confess, with a smile, that I have always had to wonder whether the witch herself was the most startled soul in the room, whether she did not cry out in something like alarm precisely because she had never in her life seen the thing actually work, and was as frightened as anyone at what answered her. We are not told. But one does wonder. Take it as a small light moment, and take the larger point in earnest: that third layer is a closed door, and we leave it shut.