Evangelicals were on the front page of the Sunday New York Times again. The story — about how “hundreds of ministers and pastors desperate to reach young congregants” are using the massively popular, hugely entertaining and quite violent video game Halo 3 as a recruiting technique — is well-rounded, gives a paragraph to theological issues and quotes a nice variety of people. But something about this story seemed so unfresh, especially when it compared this trend to bingo games in churches during the 1960s:
The latest iteration of the immensely popular space epic, Halo 3, was released nearly two weeks ago by Microsoft and has already passed $300 million in sales.
Those buying it must be 17 years old, given it is rated M for mature audiences. But that has not prevented leaders at churches and youth centers across Protestant denominations, including evangelical churches that have cautioned against violent entertainment, from holding heavily attended Halo nights and stocking their centers with multiple game consoles so dozens of teenagers can flock around big-screen televisions and shoot it out.
The alliance of popular culture and evangelism is challenging churches much as bingo games did in the 1960s. And the question fits into a rich debate about how far churches should go to reach young people.
I think if the NYT did a little research it would find that violence and the big screen have gone hand in hand with many evangelical Protestant church groups. And the justifications are the same for churches showing films like Braveheart and Gladiator (feel free to help fill in this list for me, readers). Church leaders want to attract young men, the films portray good versus evil in a way that we like and, hey, what’s wrong with a little violence anyway?
“If you want to connect with young teenage boys and drag them into church, free alcohol and pornographic movies would do it,” said James Tonkowich, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a nonprofit group that assesses denominational policies. “My own take is you can do better than that.”
Daniel R. Heimbach, a professor of Christian ethics at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, believes that churches should reject Halo, in part because it associates thrill and arousal with killing.
“To justify whatever killing is involved by saying that it’s just pixels involved is an illusion,” he said.
Focus on the Family, a large evangelical organization, said it was trying to balance the game’s violent nature with its popularity and the fact that churches are using it anyway. “Internally, we’re still trying to figure out what is our official view on it,” said Lisa Anderson, a spokeswoman for the group.
As for that one paragraph on theology, I hope I didn’t get your hopes up too high:
Mr. [Kedrick] Kenerly [founder of Christian Gamers Online] said the idea that Halo is inappropriately violent too strictly interpreted the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” “I’m not walking up to someone with a pistol and shooting them,” he said. “I’m shooting pixels on a screen.”
As for the NYT’s surprise that evangelicals are trying to engage popular culture, it shouldn’t be all that shocked. Evangelicals are the ones who are still up in arms over the National Football League’s efforts to shut down church Super Bowl parties that violated the league’s rules. The issue of church support of professional football on the Lord’s Holy Day hardly came up.
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Comments (21) |
October 8, 2007, at 11:57 am
Come on, now - if Christians can’t support master chief, in his effort to defend humanity from the alien onslaught, than we really have lost all moral vision. If ever there was a just war, this is it!
October 8, 2007, at 12:13 pm
Bingo games and desperate youth workers! What is the world coming to? The kids at our church have to settle for playing Guitar Hero.
It’s a bit surprising that the Times appears not to have talked to the folks at Bungie, the company that designed Halo.
October 8, 2007, at 12:52 pm
Really. If I didn’t take up where Captain Nathan Hale left off in “Resistance: Fall of Man,” not only would I regard myself as less of a man, but I’d also wonder where my love of neighbor had gone. After all, if I’m not willing to take up arms against the Chimeran onslaught, how can I claim to love my neighbor?
October 8, 2007, at 12:55 pm
As my son, David, and I will tell you: you never “settle” for playing “Guitar Hero.” Any day you can play “Cowboys from Hell” (or as David calls it “Cowboys from Heck”) by Insane Clown Posse is a good day.
October 8, 2007, at 1:29 pm
One thing I liked about the article is that the writer could have easily taken some cheap shots at these youth leaders (I would have been tempted to), but he pretty much let them speak for themselves. From my perspective, he let them hang themselves.
But to the founder of Christian Games Online, who is quoted as saying that players are only “shooting pixels on a screen,” I would have wanted his answer to this question: “What if the object of the game were to bed a virtual voluptuous beauty?”
Even though sort of activity may not be entirely new, I found the story disturbing. Anything else I would say would end up being a cheap shot against some people who are probably well-intentioned, so I’ll just leave it at that.
October 8, 2007, at 2:49 pm
The question is not merely violence, but the kind of violence, the victim of violence, and the way that violence is portrayed.
I don’t mean to excuse Halo in particular—I’ve never played this or any other iterations of the game—but I want to point out that the issue is a little more complicated than a simple juxtaposition of violence vs. non-violence. Violence, of course, is not always unjustified, according to most Christian views. And violence against an imagined space-alien race that seeks to destroy humankind, in a situation where one has no choice, is quite different from violence against a real and innocent human being. You do not, for example, hear of churches having Grand Theft Auto parties, and the kids who play Halo are generally not the kids we have to worry about.
I actually appreciate the integrity of the Focus on the Family response, that says that these are complicated issues, with competing interests, and we’re still trying to come to a reasonable viewpoint.
October 8, 2007, at 3:38 pm
G.K. Chesterton famously pointed out that no one drank “alcohol,” they drank beer, wine, etc. I recall a piece in First Things that took Chesterton’s quote and applied it to “violence” to make a point that was similar to yours: “violence” is a vague term. It can mean any use of force — it covers a range of scenarios from a policeman disarming an attacker to homicide. Context matters.
October 8, 2007, at 4:31 pm
One notable movie to help fill in your list - The Passion of the Christ Talk about violence, brutality, and gore.
October 8, 2007, at 4:55 pm
I guess “Ned Flander’s Old Testament” video games is just not what draws them in these days. Old Testament smiting is sadly dated in the 21st century.
October 8, 2007, at 7:15 pm
Rod Dreher is mucho amused and NOT amused at the same time.
Check out his reax to this story:
http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2007/10/halo-and-church.html
October 9, 2007, at 9:23 am
Terry,
Rod Dreher used an interesting phrase to summarize this story: “hundreds of Protestant churches are using the ultraviolent videogame Halo to lure teenage boys into church”
When I was a teenager, back in the 1980s, our youth group played football, held a haunted house, went bowling, took an all day bike excursion on Cape Cod, watched Celtics games, and went to the movies and concerts and amusement parks together. None were particularly Christian activities.
Though we invited friends, none of these events were viewed as recruiting events to “lure” kids into church. All were ways for kids in the church to hang out together and have an enjoyable time, under the watchful eyes of youth group counselors.
Does this story reflect a new reality? Have youth groups changed, so they are viewed primarily as recruitment tools? Or does this story imply that everything churches do is view with a skeptical eye?
October 9, 2007, at 12:02 pm
Viewed by whom?
Viewed by whom?
In the broad sense, youth groups haven’t changed. They still are about building relationships with youth. To build relationships with youth, you must enter the world of youth culture. While bike trips and football still work great for some youth, for others they are irrelevant, and Halo is where it’s at. In short, the job of youth leader is one of the toughest jobs out there, and it keeps getting more challenging.
October 9, 2007, at 12:09 pm
Eric G. wrote:
Ahh Eric, if you only you could have asked that question! A story that compares the acceptance of violent images to the rejection of sexual ones would really be interesting. It’s even doubly weird to me because it was evident in my home growing up. My parents - good, conservative, Assem. of God’ers - were totally ok with Schwarzenegger (Predator, etc.), but were adamantly opposed to anything with even the HINT of sexual imagery.
October 9, 2007, at 12:14 pm
I’ll bet that Tonkowich and Dreher don’t visit the churchformen.com Web site regularly. Just a hunch.
October 9, 2007, at 9:47 pm
[…] Christianity and Halo 3 9 10 2007 Daniel Pulliam has posted on a recent New York Times article about the efforts of many churches to reach young people (and in particular, young men) by sponsoring events featuring violent video games, such as the recent Halo 3. I’d encourage you to read both articles and think about the question the Times article raises - how far should churches go to reach young people? In other words, at what point do we risk undermining our beliefs in the pursuit of trying to invite others to come? No doubt violent video games are popular. Halo 3 was off the charts in terms of pre-release sales for video games and therefore, it makes good sense to go where the people seem to be drawn. But what does Halo have to do with the cross? At what point does the gospel lead us as Christians to stop bowing down to the idols of this culture? Or do we not consider things which either lead people to glorify or minimize violence (”it’s only pixels”) or minimize our responsibility for how we use our time as idols? Or am I just sounding like a grumpy old man? […]
October 10, 2007, at 2:46 am
Braveheart and Gladiator? Why?
For real values in movies nothing beats 1995’s Rob Roy. It had much better sword play than Braveheart, too. But I wouldn’t show it to a bunch of teenagers. The subtlty would be lost on them.
October 10, 2007, at 9:01 am
[…] OLD NEWS: Evangelicals engage in violent pop culture …. (getreligion) […]
October 10, 2007, at 1:39 pm
Here’s another one: The Lord of the Rings movies. Shortly before leaving my old church, an evangelical megachurch, we watched one of the trilogy movies (can’t remember which one) in the SANCTUARY. It was wasn’t during church, but it was shown during the poor excuse for confirmation classes that I used to help lead.
October 10, 2007, at 3:00 pm
Horrors! That sure beats my experience with Catechism classes in the 1970s, where we never once cracked open Luther’s Catechism…in a Lutheran Church. Instead, we dutifully read our feel-good, Me Generation Catechism book for two years, when we weren’t nodding off.
During the 30-Hour Famine at my church last year, the youth and the pastor watched “Napoleon Dynamite” in the SANCTUARY. Maybe we should be reported.
October 10, 2007, at 4:51 pm
I’m surprised at how little discussion there has been about the religious elements in Halo itself, instead of the generic discussion about violent video games and their relationship with Christianity. Unlike the vast majority of games the Halo trilogy is filled with overt religious and biblical references. The NYT article dismisses this issue in a couple of paragraphs but I don’t think that’s possible for anybody who’s actually played the games.
(Quick Halo plot summary: long ago the Flood threatened to consume the galaxy so to save the galaxy the Halo rings were used to destroy the Flood, along with the rest of the galaxy. Now the Master Chief and his buddy the Arbiter must not only stop the Covenant from activating the rings but also defeat the returned Flood.)
On the surface Halo appears rather anti-religious. The religious Covenant are depicted in an unflinchingly negative light in contrast with the non-religious humans and the heretical Elites. The leaders of the Covenant (the Prophets) were modeled by Bungie to resemble “space popes”, and they give their ships names like “Truth and Reconciliation”. Perhaps Evangelicals see in the Covenant a reference to the Catholic church, making this element more palatable.
There are even more religious references in the alien Flood. The Gravemind (the sentient “mind” of the Flood) repeatedly refers to himself as punishment for the “father’s sins”.
Ultimately however Halo is a game about soldiers fighting a war to protect others so in that sense it’s not so different from LotR.
October 12, 2007, at 11:49 am
Here’s the bio of the author of the NYT article:
Matt Richtel covers venture capital, Silicon Valley business and cultural trends, the video game industry. Based in San Francisco, he sometimes writes stories about telecommunications, personal computing, and the Internet gambling and pornography industries.