A few months ago I visited my grandma in the hospital. I tried to carry on a conversation with her, but my eyes kept being drawn away to something else that was happening in the room. A man was beating his pregnant wife, ignoring her pleas for mercy. Her shrieks pierced the air as I tried to focus on what we were talking about.

This wasn’t terribly unusual. Many of my memories of visiting my grandma are tinged with the recollection of other people doing things like undressing each other in another corner of the room. I inevitably had to struggle to keep my eyes from being arrested by the sight, and when I would look over at my siblings I often found them staring in the same stupor that I felt coming over me.

Never mind that there was a black box framing the events; never mind that the human beings I watched were “acting.” The effect on my soul was the same — horror, fascination, disgust, and an overall sense of moral queasiness. I had unwillingly imprinted my being, my memory, mind, soul, and emotions, with images and sounds that my subconscious will never fully erase.

The scene I happened upon during that hospital visit was part of a “classic,” an essential part of American culture (or so I’ve been told): My grandma was watching The Godfather.

Why is it that most people, Christians included, will watch a scene like the one I described above without looking away, as long as it is in a movie? Why is it that, if we were to accidentally open the wrong hotel room door and find a man and woman doing certain things together, we would feel everything from embarrassment to nausea — but when we see the same things on a TV in our own hotel room, we are transfixed with curiosity? Why is it that millions of Americans will flock to see Saving Private Ryan or Black Hawk Down for a simulation of the same experience that caused millions of war veterans post-traumatic shock and severe depression?

That word flock is a good clue. When the Bible refers to us as being like sheep, it’s not talking about soft, pure-white lambies frolicking through the hills. It’s talking about (pardon the insult — it applies to me, too) a group of animals who will literally all run off a cliff together if a few in the front decide to.

Alan Jacobs, an English professor at Wheaton College, writes skillfully about this in an essay entitled In on the Kill. He makes the following point in regards to our society’s fascination with predatory nature shows, but I think his comments can be applied to almost all television and movies: “People can justify participating in the most dreadful deeds if . . . they do not directly and physically carry out the acts themselves.

They then can understand themselves as being caught up in a chain of events over which they have no control, being neither initiators nor executioners. It seems to me that the modern display of what I call nature’s pornography is analogous: because we are neither the ones who kill nor the ones who film the killing, we are merely innocent bystanders with no moral stake in the events we watch. But I believe that by continuing to watch such programs we endorse, affirm, what happens in them. We come to bear a certain responsibility for them. We have not simply failed to turn off the TV; our sin is not merely one of omission. By watching we will the continuation of such shows and hence, inevitably, the acts represented in them.”

Don’t believe this is the case? Imagine how much money and influence the media corporations would lose if every Christian household in America threw out their television. Punching the remote’s “on” button doesn’t just have an effect on our souls, it has an effect on the networks: Our eyes are their lifeblood, and to deny them that is to strip them of their power.

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One of the first things I learned about my husband was that he didn’t have a TV, and my “potential mate” antennae were immediately on the alert. Lack of owning a television is quite a statement in our culture, and to me it signaled an unusual amount of wisdom and maturity on Sam’s part. In our first year of marriage, we had at least five offers for a free TV from people who felt sorry for us. I wish I could describe the looks people give us when we tell them we don’t have one and don’t plan to get one.

Some of our friends who have young children just threw out their television — literally stuck it out on the curb for the garbage man to pick up. They said their 3-year-old boy was just too influenced by it. I remember being at their house a few months ago as he sat in front of the set with wide eyes. “I wanna be a Fox kid!” he chanted and swayed along with the hyper-colorful cavorting youngsters on the commercial. Even after the TV was off, he hopped around the room proclaiming his desire to belong to the Fox network.

I know he didn’t realize what he was saying, but it’s a good example of how malleable human beings are. Television is an unprecedentedly powerful medium, combining rapid sight and sound in a way that has a tremendous psychological effect. Companies wouldn’t pay millions of dollars for a 30-second commercial during the Superbowl if this weren’t the case. Adults may not run around their living rooms chanting “I wanna drive an SUV!” but millions of them flock to car salesmen every year to purchase all-terrain vehicles half the price of my house that will never touch any terrain but pavement.

The screen is a strange thing. It takes our minds and turns them from active filters into passive absorbers. When the music swells, tears exit our ducts; when the characters say a funny line, we obligingly chuckle; when they begin to kiss or undress, our eyes widen and our pulses quicken. These are the logical human responses to such stimuli, and the producers not only know it—they make astronomically large amounts of money exploiting them.

I know people watch TV to “veg” out and relax, but I don’t think most realize what a truly vegetable state it puts you in. When Sam and I recently decided to watch the PBS show Frontier Valley, we were surprised at how drained and listless we felt afterwards. It had nothing to do with the show’s content, it was simply the effect of the screen experience on a human body. You don’t notice it until you’ve fasted from visual media for a good long while, but it is powerful. It’s a completely different feeling from finishing a book, or coming inside from gardening, or sitting around a table after a good meal. It fosters a laziness and dullness of being that I can’t imagine is healthy in large doses.

* * *

I recently flipped through a TV Guide and skimmed an interview with two actors from an ABC primetime show. The female lead described their first bed scene, and the male lead admitted that shooting it had been “a little uncomfortable.” When the interviewer asked them what their families thought on viewing it, he replied, “My sister says she literally covered her eyes. I talked to my mom, and she didn’t even mention it at first. Then she’s like, ‘Yeah, I saw your butt. That’s my boy.’”

And how about the female lead’s husband? “He laughed. I was a little ticked off about that.” Why? “He just thought it was weird. I said, ‘Honey, what’s so funny?’ He went, ‘There’s my wife.’ ”

I teared up when I read that last comment. I cannot fathom what it would feel like to see my spouse in somebody else’s embrace. No wonder so many Hollywood couples get divorced, I thought. They’re already committing on-screen adultery — as millions of people voyeuristically watch it happen. Granted, the interview was about raunchy primetime television. But a lot of movies that Christians have recommended to me (and many I’ve recommended in return) contain similar scenes.

We’ve all excused our participation in modern entertainment. Perhaps by calling it an art form (hey, it must be quality if the Academy nominated it for an award), or by saying that it’s only pretend (“They’re just acting”). But to call it simply acting is to slip into a form of dualism — a denial that what bodies do (no matter what the context) has no effect on the soul, of the actors or of those who watch them. We deny that viewing “pretend” sex or “pretend” violence affects us in the same way the “real” thing does, employing the same logic that the U.S. Supreme Court recently used in legalizing computer-simulated child pornography. (It’s not “real” children, therefore it isn’t harmful.) But the human soul is a sensitive instrument, and the basic impact of certain visual images on it remains constant, whether the images are real or fake, whether we acknowledge it or not.

Our underlying attitude seems to be that, because we’re Christians, we are immune to the seductions of pop culture. “I can handle it because I’m a discerning Christian,” we’re tempted to think. But, though we have been and are being redeemed by Christ, our sinful tendencies are not gone. If anything, Satan will target us more aggressively, the more Christ-like we become. We’re still going to be attracted to the things that we are instructed to guard our eyes from — and the “entertainment” being produced by our culture is generally designed to appeal to our more base nature. Rather than see how much we can watch while still remaining above sin, we ought to give the Evil One as few opportunities to attack us as possible.

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The most popular defense I’ve heard Christians give for movie consumption is that, like the Apostle Paul preaching on Mars Hill, it will enable us to better “speak the language” of our culture when evangelizing. (To give just one example: a couple years ago my husband heard an Easter sermon on how the longing in Madonna’s sexually explicit lyrics is fulfilled in the love of God.) Paul did speak using examples that his culture could understand, but he quoted the great Greek philosophers, not sordid entertainers. In his letters, Paul does not allude to the saga of the Emperor’s latest female conquest to illustrate Caesar’s “search for Everlasting Love,” nor does he speak of the temple prostitute’s “hunger for the Lord” revealed by the fornication she commits with Artemis’s pilgrims. Instead, Paul writes in Ephesians that “it is disgraceful even to speak of the things which are done by them in secret.”

Certain things are so corrupt we should stay as far away from them as possible, and a vast amount of our culture’s entertainment has probably reached that level. The less we watch, the better equipped we are to actually see those around us (including singers and movie stars) as images of God. Our patience, kindness, and compassion towards all human beings will grow as we distance ourselves from how they are portrayed on screen.

Most of the time I sense that Christians keep up on movies largely to be hip and accepted by the mainstream, like a junior high kid in a pack of high schoolers — “I think movies are cool, too!” I empathize with them — it is tiring and not much fun to always be the weird one out. I’ve succumbed plenty of times just for the sake of fitting in and not rocking the boat. It’s not enjoyable being a conscience; it’s not generally an uplifting experience to follow any conviction. In the case of movies and TV, to decline them is to invite words like extreme, reactionary, fundamentalist, uptight, judgmental, sheltered, etc.

Don’t think I consider myself to have reached a superior level of control in this area. The fact that, at age 14, I could watch an Adam Sandler movie without becoming physically ill is a humbling reminder of how human I am, and I know I could slip back into spiritual callousness without much effort. The farther away I’ve gotten from television and movies, the more remorse I’ve felt over the trash I’ve put into my head, and the more I see how much of a hold it still has on my attitudes and outlook.

“I will set before my eyes no evil thing,” writes David in the Psalms. “Religion that God our Father considers pure and faultless is this: . . . to keep oneself from being polluted by the world,” says the book of James. “Purify your hearts,” Jesus instructs us. How? By purifying our eyes — the two are inextricably connected.

Christianity is not a pair of glasses you put on to filter the world through. It is a complete change of your life itself, a rebirth of your very body, Christ in you — and when He’s competing with a constant influx of Hollywood, He will be limited in how much He can change you. That is the result of free will, and that is why He instructs us to repent and draw near to him. Carefully monitoring what we watch is one way of doing so. ‘The lamp of the body is the eye; if therefore your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.” (Matthew 6:22, 23a)