“He was basically a secular Jew, and I am basically a conservative Christian, but he taught me more than almost any Christian I can think of (C. S. Lewis?).”

—Dr. T. David Gordon in an online post of recollections of Neil Postman

Dr. Gordon’s comment reveals the admiration many Christians had for Neil Postman, who passed away in 2003. To rank the media and technology critic with Lewis is no small matter for an educator like Gordon, who teaches courses in Greek, religion, and media ecology at Grove City College (Grove City, Pa.).

Academics and theologians holding to a Reformed perspective especially quoted Postman. His ideas are reiterated in books such as Postmodern Times, Reading Between the Lines, Modern Fascism (Gene Veith), Fat Bodies, Fat Minds (Os Guinness), and All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes (Kenneth Myers).

Postman’s greatest contribution was helping us see what we otherwise might not have seen by ourselves. He was like Toto in The Wizard of Oz. He got our attention and then pulled back the curtain to reveal the man in the machine.

An educator, philosopher, and rhetorician, Postman insisted that if we must go into the future then both eyes should remain wide open. Jay Rosen, of salon.com, lauded him as “a civilized man in a century of barbarism.”

If one could boil down Postman’s ideas on media, technology, and culture into three basic motifs, it might be stated something like this: Your TV is not neutral. We need stories to give meaning to our lives. Education should be thermostatic.

These ideas have profound implications for Christians.

Your TV is not neutral

If you want to understand Postman’s ideas, you must first understand his greatest inspiration, Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan was that crazy media guru from Canada who flared up in the ’60s and ’70s, telling anybody who would listen that our technologies are actually extensions of our bodies, that electronic media are making us wear our nervous systems outside our skulls, that television is a cool medium, that we are now living in a global village, that we are seeing the reemergence of tribal man, that democracy is finished, and that the medium is the message. It was wild stuff. Even Henry Gibson of the Laugh-In show was prompted to ask, “Marshall McLuhan, What yuh doin?” Professor McLuhan was passed off by fellow academics as eccentric, misguided, and a bringer of doom.

While not uncritically accepting everything McLuhan said, Postman took McLuhan very seriously. McLuhan taught the former that no communication medium is neutral. We shape our technologies, and then our technologies shape us. Both McLuhan and Postman saw how the alphabet, printing press, telegraph, and television came to us with built-in biases—medium bias, not just content bias.

For example, the printing press has been credited with fostering biblicism, nationalism, democracy, exploration, modern science, and higher scholarship. Television, on the other hand, is not subject to rational discourse, neither can it be, for as a fast-moving visual medium that primarily seeks to entertain, most of its content naturally conforms to a song-and-dance routine.

In Postman’s best-known book, Amusing Ourselves to Death (the one with the cover depiction of a family sitting around the TV set with their heads cut off), he argued that our most important cultural institutions—politics, religion, and education—have been transformed into “congenial adjuncts of show business.”

Postman would have pointed out that even if every television show was written by a Christian, produced by a Christian, directed by a Christian, and acted out by Christians, medium bias would still be a problem. VeggieTales is wonderfully humorous, but it is show business or “hurling catapults of slime and loads of silliness” as its own advertisements admit. Yet most of us feel little remorse in having our three-year-old watch the antics of Duke and company on a regular basis. Postman was astute in suggesting that programs like Sesame Street do not so much teach children to love school as teach them to love television.

If one is weaned on television, then how can one not help but love it? For many children, television is their mother. Therefore, we should not think it strange that professional wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura or actor Arnold “The Terminator” Schwarzenegger are elected to state governorships.

From Postman’s perspective, there is a reasonable explanation behind many churches patterning their worship after The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Again, we shape our technologies, and our technologies shape us. Families that choose to make the TV set the nucleus of their home should understand that they are not only creating a certain kind of environment within their own walls but are also transforming the culture.

We need stories to give meaning to our lives.

Stories become crucial for us as we slip further down into the great garbage pit of information glut. “Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” Postman said, “we are awash in information, without even a broom to help us get rid of it.” By “stories” Postman had in mind those transcendent narratives that provide moral guidance, social purpose, and intellectual coherence—in other words, a worldview.

Postman insisted that some stories are better than others, and that many stories of the last 200 years were unhelpful, even harmful. The narratives of Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche offered little comfort to us, since they each denied God. Neither is inductive science a very helpful god, said Postman. Science has its place but cannot answer the core questions: “How did it all begin?” “How will it all end?” “Why are we here?” and “What is right and what is wrong?”

However, Postman believed the most competitive god of our age, at least in America, was technology. He called this god “Technopoly,” an ideology whereby a culture comes to assume that technical progress is humanity’s supreme achievement.

Sometime during the last century, we stopped being tool users and started being used by our tools. Technopoly is the child of the science-god. It constitutes a worldview whereby all problems demand a technological solution. It is technology with a capital T—a god that inundates us with endless information, stripping us of our humanity, morphing us into machines, changing the polis into a market. It is a god that rolls over Old World sensibilities.

Postman wrote that our culture now seeks psychotherapy over confession, pursues immediate gratification rather than restraint, and prefers penicillin to prayer. While Postman never recommended any particular religious tradition in his writings, he once told Orthodox Presbyterian Church minister Gregory Reynolds, “I am uncertain as to whether God has spoken, but I am going to live life as if God spoke, in part because if I don’t believe this, I will lose my way.”

In Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century, Postman spoke of the “depressing” fact that the “structure and authority of the family have been severely weakened as parents have lost control over the information environment of the young.” Keep in mind, this is not a homeschool advocate or Christian fundamentalist making this observation.

Under a digital deluge it becomes increasingly difficult to hold up the traditional concept of knowledge as that of a tree with roots, trunk, and branches. The replacement metaphor for knowledge becomes one of a dense, knotted jungle with vines suspended from both floor and canopy. How can parents and schools compete, let alone cut through, this entanglement to reach the hearts and minds of children? Here the idea of worldview is essential. Postman knew the sticking power of stories, and Christians are at an advantage because we do have a story—the story.

Education should be thermostatic.

Postman held that schools should serve to regulate changes in the cultural environment that would overwhelm us. If the room is too cold you turn up the heat, and if it is too hot you turn on the air conditioning. When the brakes on the train of technological progress falter, or when visual images begin to supplant the written word in public discourse, or when no one seems to know what kind of knowledge is appropriate to pass on to our children anymore, then teaching should shift to a conserving activity, preserving what is necessary for a civilized society.

While it was Marshall McLuhan who first coined the term media ecology, Postman gave it a formal, institutional base when he founded the graduate media ecology program at New York University in 1972. Just as biological ecology is the science of understanding and regulating the relationships between living organisms and their environments, media ecology considers how human interaction with technology facilitates or impedes human survival. Postman believed media ecology is a sane response to technological progress with no clearly stated telos (end). He believed more people should be pointing out the down sides of our new technologies, not just celebrating the breakthroughs.

Of course, in saying that education should be thermostatic, Postman was evoking Aristotle’s virtue ethics, which sees moderation as the middle ground between the vices of extremes. Even though Christian teaching is not entirely compatible with this philosophy (the Bible tells us what is vice and what is not), the principle of homeostasis is not alien to Scripture. After all, we are commanded to be a temperate people and to let our moderation be known unto all men. Christians also know that the church and home are, by nature, preserving institutions to any culture (Matt. 5:13-16).

But what will we do if the salt loses its preserving power? Last April, World magazine reported that 53 percent of men attending Promise Keepers visit porn sites every week. If this group of enthusiastic husbands and fathers constitutes some kind of earth-shaking movement, then we have a big problem on our hands.

Camille Paglia nailed the predicament squarely when she quipped, “[W]ith the eruption of sex and violence into every corner of the ubiquitous mass media, Judeo-Christianity is facing its most serious challenge since Europe’s confrontation with Islam in the Middle Ages.”

In pondering Postman’s legacy, media ecology seems to be an appropriate instrument to keep in our toolbox as Christians confront the wiles of modernity. Like Postman, we should not be afraid to be counted among those who raise their voices, as he said, “to a near-hysterical pitch, inviting the charge that they are everything from wimps to public nuisances to Jeremiahs. But they do this because what they want others to see appears benign, when it is not invisible altogether.”