What follows will read like a rant. I’m sorry about that. Try not to traffic in rants. So, let me ask that you take it as a plea—a plea from the heart of a pastor who is concerned for your spiritual well-being.
If you watch more than an hour or so of some 24-hour cable news network each day, you are doing yourself harm. You should stop doing it. It is my firm belief that one of the great threats to the spiritual health of Christian people in our time is the rise of twenty-four-hour cable news networks. They are the tools of the devil, all of them—NewsMax and MSNBC, Fox and CNN, all of them, every last one of them. They are spiritually dangerous. It doesn’t matter whether they come from the political Right or the political Left. It is not simply the content that they purvey that makes them dangerous. It is the fact that they have to keep viewers watching 24 hours a day, 7 days a week that makes them spiritually dangerous.
Let’s be very clear about 24/7 cable “news” networks. They all have the same overriding goal. On this one point, they are all the same. Their top priority is to make money. Not one of them is a public service. Every one of them is a profit-making operation whose guiding, top priority is to make money. They will champion a cause but only if they think they can make money by doing it.
In order to make money, they have to find ways to keep your eyes on their product, so that they can get top dollar from advertisers. They have all learned that the best way to keep your eyes on their “news” programs is by making you angry and afraid. But I ask you, are fear and anger things that should be guiding the life of a follower of Jesus?
In my pastoring days, visiting homebound members to provide pastoral care was one of the tasks that filled a few of my days each week. It isn’t the most glamorous aspect of pastoral ministry, but a shepherd who doesn’t take care of the most frail of his or her flock isn’t much of a shepherd in God’s eyes.
Anyway, in a few of those home visits, I knew I would face one particularly annoying challenge: the television. I knew it would be a certainty in a few of those homes that regardless of the time of day I arrived, I would find the television blaring away. And it would be some 24/7 cable news network that would be blaring. Sometimes I would actually have to ask them to turn it off or at least mute it. All day long that television would be stirring up dread and outrage in the hearts of my flock. “How,” I ask myself, “can people live like that—with a constant stream of fear and anger flooding their lives?”
Nostalgia is almost always a bad thing. I try not to indulge in it. But sometimes our world does take a bad turn, and 24/7 cable news networks represent a bad turn. In my youth, we all believed that it was possible to be adequately informed about our world by reading a daily local newspaper and watching maybe half an hour of local news and half an hour of national news. Were we wrong?
If you are a follower of Jesus, let me ask you this: which gets more of your time—some cable news network or prayer and worship, Bible reading and humbly serving the needs of others? No cable news network is going to shape your heart after the heart of Jesus. Every cable news network is going to shape your heart in whatever way will keep you watching their fear-mongering, anger-mongering programs, and, more important, their commercials.
No cable news network wants you to focus on loving God and loving your neighbors. In fact, they want you not to love your neighbors. They want you to be angry with your neighbors and afraid of them, at least those neighbors who think differently from you. Cable news networks specialize in convincing you of how terrible some of your neighbors are.
Cable news networks specialize in divisiveness. They achieve their goal of making you angry and afraid by trying to impress upon you how dangerous “those people” are. For cable news networks “us vs. them” is their meat and potatoes. Hour after hour they will assure you that you and all their loyal viewers are the “good guys” and those others out there are the “bad guys”. Division and hostility are central to the cable news industry’s business model.
And because of that the Church in America is being poisoned. Now, we find churches where loyal Christian viewers of Fox can no longer worship and fellowship with loyal Christian viewers MSNBC. And the Holy Spirit weeps.
So, as I said at the beginning, this piece is the plea of a pastor’s heart. Stop watching cable news networks. Take a moment and check your spiritual temperature. Do you find yourself often angry and afraid? Do you find yourself thinking in terms of “us and them”? You are probably consuming far too much “news” (which is almost always just opinion masquerading information), and you are probably spending too little time in prayer, worship, Bible reading, and humble service to your neighbors (not just your “us” neighbors but also your “them” neighbors).
Love Jesus more than your preferred cable “news” network. Love your neighbors (all of them) more than you love some set of political pundits. Turn down the fear and anger. Turn up the humble, neighbor-serving love.
© Gary A. Chorpenning 2024
Photos by GAC
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