MARTIN'S TBN WATCHby Martin Wagner, your smilin' A.E. cohost
MARTIN'S TBN WATCH
by Martin Wagner, your smilin' A.E. cohost
The other night on TBN I saw the strangest thing. So what?, you're saying. It's TBN, after all. True, true, but this was a Saturday night, you see, and the programming gets a little stranger than usual on Saturday nights. On this particular night, I switched over to the network in time to see a young, head-shaven African-American gentleman overcome by a fit of laughter while using salad tongs to try to extricate something from a toilet bowl. For reasons that were not immediately apparent both he and his friend were wearing pink bunny rabbit ears while doing this. Thinking at first that I may have tuned in to the middle of some underground gay film made in Denmark or something (IFC is, after all, the next channel over on the cable dial) curiosity got the better of me, and I soon found out that these fellows were members of a Christian hip-hop band called Set Free, and what they were doing was using the toilet bowl to color Easter eggs. Not very Compton, I know, but you have to admit this kind of content is a far cry from TBN's usual ultratacky Branson, Missouri approach to selling Christian fundamentalism. Welcome to TBN on Saturday nights, kids...when the network turns into MTV. No sex, no drugs, but plenty of rock-n-roll.
Christian pop music: yesterday's blasphemy is today's youth proselytization blitz
Back before his whoremongering brought him down like the flaming hulk of the Hindenburg, I recall watching a Jimmy Swaggart sermon in the '80's in which Jimmy was denouncing Christian rock as blasphemy. Not just mainstream, secular rock, mind you. Preachers have been intoning against that horrible Satanic tool of mind-warpage since the first time they saw Elvis (a profoundly religious chap, that) gyrate his then-slender hips. No, even Christian rock was pure blasphemy, said Jimmy, although he insisted upon pronouncing the word "blasphemny," which cracked me up so hard it's the reason I still remember the program to this day.
I guess Christian musicians breathed a collective sigh of relief at the subsequent Fall of Swaggart, because now, Christian rock, Christian pop, Christian contemporary music of virtually any stripe is an enormous business. There isn't a whole lot going on in Christian pop that is particularly innovative musically, but these bands certainly do go out of their way to stay up on the most current trends in music, because they know that if they want to convert the kids, they've gotta be offering stuff that's as now as anything in the Billboard Top 40. And when the competition is the likes of Eminem and Marilyn Manson, who screams on his current video about how he won't "be a slave to a God that doesn't exist," one can imagine Christian bands feeling like the heat is on. The results aren't always terribly successful, but the attempt is earnest. Which is why Saturday night is the closest thing TBN offers to watchable television in its whole lineup. When the advertising and proselytizing potential became clear, it's interesting how quickly Christianity embraced the Devil's music, hmm?
JC's in the house!
The first and most laudable thing about TBN's Saturday night youth-oriented music programming is that it's 100% Carman-free. It seems that somewhere at the House of Crouch is a programming director with a modicum of taste, and, presumably because stuffy old Paul and the lovably bubbleheaded Jan are home for the weekend, the decision has been made not to subject Christian kids to the ludicrous dilletantism (he's a cabaret singer..no, wait, he's like that Riverdance guy...no, wait, he's a rapper) of fundamentalism's very own David Hasselhoff. Yes, they'll fill kids' minds with all sorts of preposterous mythology, but for Pete's sake, keep them away from Carman! If I ever praise TBN for anything it does in my whole life, that's going to be it, folks. Savor the moment.
There are a number of music video shows lined up on TBN on Saturday night: G-Rock, 2 Worlds, FFWD. Another show, Real Videos, comes on Friday nights. And boy, you get a little bit of everything. Alterna-rock, rappers of both the black and white variety, catchy pop. It's interesting that one pop music trend Christianity hasn't cashed in on is the teenage heartthrob. You won't see the Christian equivalent of Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera or Backstreet Boys or Destiny's Child. This may have to do with the fact that these singers rely on sex appeal to carry a large part of their popularity, and Christian musicians just won't go there. So what you get with Christian music videos is a lot of stuff that is good musically, but is curiously lacking in charismatic stars to give the music a face. The point of these songs is delivering the Word, and a star singer upstaging the Word might defeat the purpose, I guess.
So sure, some of these songs sound good, but even the best stuff shows a lack of originality and freshness. Christian alterna-rockers hit all the notes that bands like Green Day or Oasis are hitting, but you know, that stuff is just so 1996. One gets the impression that most of these musicians, even the truly talented ones, are just paying attention to what's hot right now and then going and doing their own Christianized version of it, instead of following a muse all their own. There are of course exceptions. Five Iron Frenzy are a quintessential rowdy college party band with the unusual addition of a brass section; but then, they suck. There's a reason Matchbox 20 doesn't have a trombonist. One video I saw of a white rapper was particularly bizarre. The guy was playing the role of an ice cream man laying down his lyrics to a gang of pissed off looking kids to whom he was refusing to sell ice cream; the video ended ominously with a team of law enforcement heavies wearing gear labelled "ATI" hauling him off. Weird. I spent a few seconds scratching my head over the possible message of that one before moving on to the more intellectually rewarding exercise of cleaning dirt from my thumbnail. Whatever Eminem has that makes white rap credible this guy utterly lacked. The ice cream suit couldn't have helped.
Personally, I think it's cool for Christian kids to have Christian rock to listen to. As to the music's effectiveness as a proselytizing tool, naturally, I'm dubious. For one thing, it just isn't popular enough; Christians put a great deal of creative and merchandising effort into their entertainment and yet they never break out into a mass secular audience in spite of it. Another factor is that many kids just don't listen to the lyrics of their favorite pop songs; even if they memorize them for the purposes of singing along they rarely seem to absorb their favorite songs' lyrical messages, a fact supported by a study done in 1985 by those critical of the claims of Tipper Gore and the infamous PMRC that nasty song lyrics were corrupting millions of young and pliable minds. I can attest to the truth of the assertion as well; as one of those odd, geeky kids who actually did listen to lyrics, I remember a girl in my high school being genuinely surprised when I told her that "Every Breath You Take" by the Police was a desperately sad song. She sang along to it all the time but didn't get it.
But hey, as long as there are Christian musicians out there at least trying to do something more interesting than what you normally think of as religious music, I say, hey, rock on, guys. Anything's better than Carman.
Towering feats of strength and mind-boggling stupidity!
Music ain't the only thing TBN offers the impressionable
youth of America on Saturday nights. For those rare and lucky kids whose
parents allow them to still be up at 3 AM, you get--ta-daaah!--the
Power Team! Woo-hoooo!
This show, more than any, is where TBN pushes the envelope, although why anyone would think that this particular envelope needs to be pushed is a mystery. The Power Team are a gang of chunky powerlifters who have decided that the most effective way to convert kids to Christianity is to smash cement blocks and three foot tall stacks of solid ice with their craniums. (Their own craniums, that is, not the kids'.) If I tried to do something like that I'd probably see Jesus too. In one fell swoop, TBN has come up with television programming more ridiculous than wrestling and about as socially responsible as Springer. It's hard to make out what's more objectionable about the Power Team, their colossally dangerous stunts (professional bodybuilders generally deplore this kind of thing) or the subsequent high pressure proselytizing, against which no child could possibly defend himself, especially after having been subjected to such intimidating feats of strength. And it's always the some old stuff. I used to get drunk, I used to get high, blah blah blah, but now I've found Jesus, and look--I can demolish solid concrete with my bare hands! Sure, when I'm sixty I'll barely be able to walk, but look what I can do now by the power of Jesus! Where this assumption that every non-Christian kid is a crazed substance abuser comes from I'll never know (the Christian kids in my high school got more fucked up than anyone), but taking a troubled kid who is hooked on something and turning him into a religious fanatic isn't exactly an effective way of dealing with the problem of addiction. All you've done is given him a new drug.
Atheist parents who want their children to be freethinkers probably don't make TBN-watching a typical home activity, but one must always be diligent of the way Christianity tries to hook kids through pop culture and recreation. Time and again we have heard callers on the Atheist Experience relate stories of how churches are so incredibly adept at organizing highly enjoyable youth actviities (I have very pleasant memories to this day of stuff I was involved in in my church while in junior high) and then turning up the conversion pressure right at the moment when they know it will be impossible for any child, unskilled in critical thinking in the first place, to resist. Using fun to instill a religious belief based on fear is uniquely insidious.
Next month's column will be posted 4/29/01, so I'll see you all again then. And don't forget to watch Jeff Dee and myself on The Atheist Experience every Sunday afternoon at 5 PM on TimeWarner Cable Channel 16 in Austin!
Go without gods,
Martin Wagner
© 2001
martinwagner66@excite.com
