People Who Live Without TV

Clara Moskowitz writes today in Live Science about people who do not watch TV. Her findings, while interesting, should not be shocking. This passage was particularly striking:

"Non-viewers had a greater variety of things that they did with their free time than viewers did," Krcmar said. "It's not just that they were reading instead of watching TV. They were hiking and biking, and going to community meetings and visiting with friends. Overall, they tend to do more of everything."

My childhood was consumed with TV. Every day after school for hours. And, of course, that is habit for me now. I don't watch nearly as much as I used to, but when I do, I do so for the same reason: to escape. From hard work, from thinking too hard, from dealing with the harder things in life. Yes, for entertainment, but more deeply than that, to escape reality. And this has led to a decreased ability to concentrate, to comprehend and to work long stretches without getting distracted.

This, consequently, is now a front and center issue in our household since the baby came home. Can I properly raise her with a TV in the home? I am not sure. Boundaries can be set (e.g. only at certain times, no TV in bedrooms, etc.). But I fear even an hour a day could be detrimental. So the question I keep on coming back to is, What harm will it do by removing it from our lives completely? And more profoundly, does TV watching increase our love and affection for Christ, or does it lessen it? Listen to these words from John Piper from Pierced by the Word:

If all other variables are equal, your capacity to know God deeply will probably diminish in direct proportion to how much television you watch. There are several reasons for this. One is that television reflects American culture at its most trivial. And a steady diet of triviality shrinks the soul. You get used to it. It starts to seem normal. Silly becomes funny. And funny becomes pleasing. And pleasing becomes soul-satisfaction. And in the end, the soul that is made for God has shrunk to fit snugly around triteness. This may be unnoticed, because if all you’ve known is American culture, you can’t tell there is anything wrong. If you have only read comic books, it won’t be strange that there are no novels in your house. If you live where there are no seasons, you won’t miss the colors of fall. If you watch fifty TV ads each night, you may forget there is such a thing as wisdom. TV is mostly trivial. It seldom inspires great thoughts or great feelings with glimpses of great Truth. God is the great absolute, all-shaping Reality. If He gets any airtime, He is treated as an opinion. There is no reverence. No trembling. God and all that He thinks about the world is missing. Cut loose from God and everything goes down.

My sense is that insofar as TV is an escape from reality, it is also an escape from those things that should make us great. When we enter into fake reality, we are escaping from the difficulties of life: suffering, hardship, grief, pain, failure. But those, the scriptures say, are the things that would have made us the wisest, the holiest, the most compassionate, the happiest. Romans 5:3-5 "More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us."

So I suppose I could say use TV wisely. But I can't help but think the wisest move would be to throw the thing to the curb. I'll keep you posted.