A Christian's View of Censorship
An abused woman flees to her parents. Her estranged husband follows, to become her father’s honoured guest. While dragging her home, a mob surrounds a guesthouse demanding to pack-rape him. Their host says, “Rape his wife and my virgin daughter instead,” and throws them outside. The next morning, her husband hacks her to pieces and sends messengers to parade her throughout the country.”
Should such a story be censored? Read the biblical account in Judges 19 and decide for yourself.
The censorship debate perpetually smoulders at the fringes of consciousness, to periodically ignite with no negligible difference being made. Last year, the New South Wales Education Department excised a book from the Higher School Certificate curriculum because of its objectionable passages and the classification system that had previously applied only to movies, was extended to music. Now younger teenagers need proof of age to buy some CDs.
The church has often been the spearhead for calls for censorship, offering two broad categories of arguments.
Scripture prohibits violence and restricts sexuality to marriage. The material in many books, movies and plays is indecent and immoral. When immorality is portrayed favourably, as it usually is in M-rated movies, Christians rightly protest. But this draws the simplistic counter-argument of: “Then don’t watch what you don’t approve of.” In our free society, we watch what we please, civil libertarians assert, and we should let others do likewise. Accordingly, in the 1980s, the regulators’ role changed from a role of censorship to that of classification.
Rather than censorship, they add vague and misleading adenda to promotional material for movies. For instance, regarding the hit comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral, they wrote: “Mature. Medium-level coarse language.” From this one is apparently supposed to deduce that half the script’s lines begin with expletives and that its humour is built on blatant and socially unacceptable depictions of grooms sleeping with bridesmaids. But in its defence, the system does acknowledge the need to shield children from violent or pornographic material.
But are they really shielded? Certainly not from the temptations. Nobody can avoid almost pornographic billboard depictions exploiting women as sex objects. Such pale in contrast to the Internet, which is impossible to censor. Youth and Pornography in Australia, a study by the Australia Institute in March 2003, found that 84 per cent of boys and 60 per cent of girls aged 16 or 17 have discovered sexual and violent sites on the Internet by accident. The sites frequently contained simple links from low-level pornography to photographs, stories and live video of “almost any sexual practice imaginable,” including rape, incest and bestiality. According to Institute director Clive Hamilton, “Material that would be given an X-classification if it were on video is easy to get on the Internet by children.”
While finding that 73 per cent of boys and 11 per cent of girls have watched X-rated videos, it says that the material on the Internet is far more degrading to women and violent than is any film.
Nevertheless, there is increasing violence and sexuality in movies, and this is being promoted to children. M-rated films such as Hulk, Spiderman and Batman also have extensive ranges of merchandise—including clothing, toys and fast-food meals for children—advertised during children’s viewing time on television. Trailers for films appear on screens in the foyers of cinemas, depicting violence, swearing and sex.
In professing to prevent children from viewing, proponents of pornography admit it’s a moral hazard. There are well documented cases of films inspiring horrific crimes, but more commonly, viewing changes a viewer’s attitudes.
A study in Developmental Psychology (March, 2003) reveals that men who had most identified with violent television characters as children committed three times as many crimes and were 88 per cent more likely to bash their wives, regardless of their aggression level as children, social status, parents’ aggressiveness or parenting style. Adults, not children, commit sex crimes, murder and other violent acts; when children are culprits, it is almost invariably because their families condoned porn and violence around the home.
This second category of arguments against censorship—that it is detrimental to society—is subtly different from the feminist argument that pornography is detrimental to women. Feminists applaud the TV show Sex in the City for its assertive women who instigate sex; some Christians call it pornographic. This demonstrates the problem with prohibiting pornography—defining it.
Successful lobbying against pornography requires unity, not just of the church, but of all anti-pornography groups. C E Cottle’s research in 1989 identified three categories of attitudes to pornography: religious–conservative, liberal, and anti-pornography feminist. After comparing their “logical and ethical structures . . . and their political and legal implications,” it concluded, the viewpoints are too incompatible to sustain stable and effective political alignments.” In 1988, J Money warned against “adhering” to such viewpoints “as if they were apolitically indisputable” when they are “dangerously political.” Finding a legal definition of obscenity, then, seems almost impossible.
There are, however, some guidelines available. Recent studies at the University of Michigan found that violent television has the most impact on children when: violent characters are of the same sex as the child; the child can sympathise with violent characters; the show is realistic and presents violence as a part of life; and violence was rewarded (that is, depicting “good” police shooting people who “deserve” it is more dangerous than depicting violent criminals who find justice). The important factor, then, is the author’s or playwright’s intent.
Some works portray depravity to revel in it; others underscore a moral point by describing a society that ignores it. The Bible does the latter. The last five chapters of Judges are as essential to Scripture as is Psalm 23. They hold a “mirror” before Jews of the 11th century BC, reflecting their society: “In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit” (Judges 21:25). Is there a place for such “mirrors” nowadays? If so, how can the law distinguish revelry from prophecy?
I suggest the legal yardstick of “prevailing community standards” be used to persuade. There’s no need to campaign for legislative changes, only to declare that the “prevailing community standard” is higher than the mass media assumes. If Christians and others with moral or social concern were to familiarise themselves with the complaint procedures of their appropriate national authority, and to tell them how the prevailing standards they’re aware of contrast with what they see, hear and read, things might change.
To quote researchers Eysenck and Nias, “Pornography and violence in the media are only symptoms of a much more widespread disease, namely a general loss of values, Christian, moral or social.” Redressing this loss of values might involve crying like the prophets of ancient Israel. It might also involve producing unsavoury “mirrors,” the modem equivalents of Judges 19.
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