I love football.
I come from earthy, Midwest stock, so it only stands to reason. My dad’s family is from Ohio, which has two football teams (although most people only claim one and spend all their extra energy hating the other).
My mom’s family is from Wisconsin. That’s Packer county, don’t cha know, and as far as I can tell, the Packers are the only reason anyone still lives in Wisconsin. I think pretty much all of the farmers would have packed things in and headed for California long ago if it wasn’t for the fact that they would never, ever give the 49ers the satisfaction.
They live for football in Wisconsin. People put up with those long, horrid winters just so they can mock the teams who show up in Green Bay wearing long sleeves and worrying about frostbite like a bunch of sissies. Packer people are so proud of that hard, inhospitable football land that if you type “Frozen Tundra” into Google you get a picture of Lambeau Field. No kidding.
I grew up watching football, even though I didn’t really appreciate it until I was married and in grad school and the only thing we could get on the three channels that came in clearly on our 19” TV was football or golf.
So when there’s nothing to watch but football, you kind of grow to like it. It’s basic survival. And it didn’t hurt that in the four years we lived in a sleepy little town just north of Boston, the Patriots won the Super Bowl three times. Three times.
Nothing wakes up a dormant football gene like blatant success. In those four years of sweet football victory, I discovered I am a screaming, raving, sit-down-I’m-trying-to-watch-the-game fan. I love the sport.
But in the last few years, I can count on my right hand the number of games I’ve watched. I still love football, I’m just not a fan of the game, the game that is selling football to the highest bidder even at the cost of morality, saturating the half-time shows and sideline acts with sex so men will watch (don’t men already watch football?), and including commercials that are definitely not approved for all audiences.
Besides, we got rid of our TV.
But last year, I sat in a room full of people while the Super Bowl played. I was there to watch the game. Those who didn’t care about the game were there to watch the commercials, so every single commercial played to a captive audience.
Steamy scenes from R-rated movies flashed up on the screen. Tank-topped Go Daddy models leaned into the camera and said “domain name” in a way that made me embarrassed to be a blogger. In place of witty writing, advertisers showed boobs. They kept things interesting by sprinkling in a little shocking violence, crude humor, and sexually-charged exchanges. I mean, I did not know Axe deodorant could do that.
I turned my face away and shielded my kids’ eyes and asked them how many birds they could see out the window. I stuffed them full of Doritos and relish tray offerings—anything to keep them distracted from the images on the screen. I watched my husband inspect his shoes and his fingernails and our host’s ceiling while other women vied for his attention right in front of me. But it wasn’t supposed to bother me because they were just actresses. It was just a commercial, after all. Just entertainment.
My stomach churned. It had been so long since we’d watched television that I guess I’d forgotten what it was like. I looked at the other faces in the room, searching for the outworkings of the rage I was feeling inside. After all, we were all Christians. We all said we believed the same things and we were all watching the same things so surely, surely, we were all equally disturbed.
I guess I had grown naive.
I saw smirks at the jokes, wide-eyes at the boobs, fathers watching the screen in front of their sons and mothers in front of daughters and no one—no one—said anything. No one changed the channel. It was just a normal Sunday, watching football.
Maybe a few years ago, I might have felt the same way.
But I had forgotten. I had forgotten we were supposed to be on entertainment mode, and in entertainment mode, it doesn’t matter if a media violates my so-called principles because it’s not real.
It only matters if the jokes are funny, the actors are hot, the music is brilliant, and the special effects blow my mind. It doesn’t matter if I don’t approve of the clothing, language, lifestyle, or choices in real life because entertainment is harmless.
Madonna can strip off her clothes during the half-time show and be fondled by a dozen young male dancers while our children watch and we can crunch our chips and say, “I can’t believe she can still dance at her age” because it’s just TV, and we want to be able to talk about it with our friends later.
We should be shocked. We should be outraged. We should not watch.
But we do because it’s so easy to become anesthetized to entertainment. We forget that it’s selling something, and we’re buying.
Only, I can’t do that anymore. Football just isn’t worth it. I want my morality to dictate my entertainment choices. I do not want to give that power to my culture, or to the National Football League, and certainly not to Hollywood.
I can’t keep myself or my family from seeing any kind of filth, nor do I want to live in a bubble, but when things come on the screen that are not consistent with what I say I believe, I want my kids to see me turn away, not drink it in. I want them to know that their mom and dad are willing to change the channel, even if it means we miss something good.
If it comes to the point that a football game is so surrounded by sex, explicit language, and violence that I am unable to avoid it, then even my recently-adopted Seahawks are going to have to play without me.
I love football.
But I’m not willing to play that game.
When I was growing up my parents were not fans of most fictional “entertainment” such as TV sitcoms/dramas and movies. They always impressed upon me the big difference between how a fictional character is going to behave on a TV show such as a sitcom versus how a real person is expected to behave in the real world. A real person is expected to behave with high standards in their behavior while a fictional character on a TV show is usually going to behave with much lower standards of behavior. Fictional “entertainment” often has fictional characters behaving in foolish and outrageous behavior for the purpose of “entertainment”, which is something that is largely overvalued in our society. I believe in the garbage in=garbage out concept and that the very fine line between the “entertainment” world and the real world can become blurred, and the moment that the foolish behavior of the fictional character starts influencing the behavior of an impressionable person, that person is going to embarrass themselves and if they are not careful they are going to cause damage to their life. Along these lines, the concern is that those children who are not acquiring their values from caring parents or other caring adults, may end up acquiring their values from TV shows and “popular” culture.
Thank You For Sharing
I Support You
I Love Football
I Play football
Here is a Super Bowl commercial you should watch. This year was interesting. Only two ads were sexual. The uproar this year is for a completely different reason.
http://youtu.be/A8iM73E6JP8
Here is the other one that I loved:
http://youtu.be/UGXvSV_CJL0
My Seahawks..
…I confess I will be watching. It will be my husband and myself. I will be commenting about the commercials on fb with Mashable.This will change only if God deems otherwise during my quiet times with Him. This does not mean I do not agree with you. If I had small children around I might feel differently. Btw, I live in north Jersey an have been a Seahawks fan for a vety long time.
I AM CLAPPING SO LOUD! Can you hear me? Can the WORLD HEAR ME??? THIS WAS BRILLIANT writing! I am going to share you on facebook – all my friends have to read this. We are Christians and we should not stand for that kind of junk to come into our homes and into our minds. BRAVO!!!! I LOVE YOU!!!!! Your children and husband will really thank you one day but I want to thank you TODAY!
Thank you! We don’t have a TV either, but I really needed this.
I don’t know about you, but I haven’t missed it!
Kristen,
Thank you so much for your post. No game is worth sacrificing our children’s or our innocence and purity. All the guys in my house turn away when we pass the billboards or the magazines in the grocery store. I’m so glad my men (husband and 3 sons) are constantly on guard. If guarding our eyes makes us sheltered, then shelter me! The world, as well as some Christians, will tell us we’re overreacting, but what a gift to give our children, a lack of images and sound bites burned into their brains which they will have to fight for the rest of their lives! Thank you for the encouragement and reminding me we’re not alone in this quest.
It makes me so happy when I see fathers teaching their sons to look away. We can’t avoid seeing things, but we can avoid looking at them, and we can avoid looking where we know we’ll find it. Way to go!
Posting yet again because your post brought to my mind this article I was given many, many long years ago. I’m sad to say I have shared it with folks who have found it ridiculous, but I think it makes excellent points, some of them the same as you have made.
THE STRANGER
Author unknown
A few months before I was born, my dad met a stranger who was new to our small town. From the beginning, Dad was fascinated with this enchanting newcomer, and soon invited him to live with our family.
The stranger was quickly accepted and was around to welcome me into the world a few months later. As I grew up, I never questioned his place in our family. Mom taught me to love the Word of God, and Dad taught me to obey it. But the stranger was our storyteller. He could weave the most fascinating tales ..adventures, mysteries, and comedies were daily conversations. He could hold our whole family spellbound for hours each evening. He was like a friend to the whole family.
He took Dad, my brother, and me to our first major league baseball game. He was always encouraging us to see the movies and he even made arrangements to introduce us to several movie stars.
The stranger was an incessant talker. Dad didn’t seem to mind, but sometimes Mom would quietly get up – while the rest of us were enthralled with one of his stories of faraway places-go to her room, read the Bible, and pray. I wonder now if she ever prayed that the stranger would leave.
You see, my Dad ruled our household with certain moral convictions. But this stranger never felt an obligation to honor them. Profanity, for example, was not allowed in our house – not from us, from our friends, or from adults.
Our long-time visitor, however, used occasional four letter words that burned my ears and made Dad squirm.
To my knowledge, neither of my parents ever confronted the stranger.
My Dad was a teetotaler who didn’t permit alcohol in his home – not even for cooking. But the stranger felt like we needed exposure and enlightened us to other ways of life. He offered us beer and other alcoholic beverages often. He made cigarettes look tasty, cigars manly, and pipes distinguished. He talked
freely about sex. His comments were sometimes blatant, sometimes suggestive, and generally embarrassing.
I know now that the stranger influenced my early concepts of the man/woman relationship. As I look back, I believe it was the grace of God that the stranger did not influence us more. Time after time, he opposed the values of parents, yet my father seldom rebuked him and never asked him to
leave.
More than thirty years have passed since the stranger moved in with us. But if I were to walk into my parent’s home today, I would still see him sitting there waiting for someone to listen to his stories and watch him draw his pictures.
His name?
We always just called him………………TV
We love in a sex centered culture, then we are shocked when our teens get pregnant. If you’re going to show your children: half naked women on tv all day, half naked women on every magazine cover in the checkout lane, and then let them play video games with half women, why are you surprised that they wanted to see a fully naked woman? Why are you surprised that your daughter thought stripping for a camera and then putting it in the internet was okay. Isn’t that what all of the women we watch do??
Couldn’t agree more. My husband and I have just talked about that recently. In fact, he just did a blog post yesterday “We have become Sodom and Gomorrah” (http://truthfromtrent.com/2014/01/27/we-have-become-sodom-and-gomorrah/) in reference to what allegedly happened on the Grammys (we didn’t watch). We are grieved.
I am grieved too. I am grieved for all the little ways we’ve failed to prevent it from happening, and for all the ways I don’t even realize I’m contributing to the problem. I think the more we know of God’s holiness, the less we can tolerate the things that are not good, pleasing, and perfect. If I begin to approve of things that sinful, it’s because I have a sin problem. I need Jesus, every day. So does our world.
My husband was done with TV several years ago when he was watching the news and a underwear commercial popped up that contained mostly naked women making out with vegetables. Every time we go to a restaurant, our children are transfixed by the carnality on the Tvs on the the walls, so we try to pick a seat where they can’t easily see it. You are so right. The longer you’re away from the stupidity, the more you see it for what it is. It’s so very sad to see how many women have degraded themselves to “boobs and a butt”. They think they’re expressing their freedom, but really their self-respect is tanking lower every time they take their clothes off for a camera. It’s sad. Especially when you think of how each of those women should have been protected, rather than taken advantage of, by the men around them. If they had been lovingly taught the things I was taught by my Daddy as a teenager, they’d know that their sexuality is special, and only ONE of their many God-given virtues.
This is right on, same thing that we have been going through as a family. Unfortunately, we have a hard time visiting close family these days for long periods of time, because they have Fox NEWS on 18 hours a day…news covering Paris Hilton, Brittany Spears, and such in the same breath as politics. I have become so disgusted with it! I don’t say this in a self-righteous way, as you did not, either. It is just hard and shocking to see when you do not watch television!
Your article brought to mind 2 Timothy 3:1-5: “But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, LOVERS OF PLEASURE RATHER THAN LOVERS OF GOD, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.” It sounds harsh, and I have had to confess my own failings in this list, but maybe if we as Christians would teach our children not to be lovers of pleasure, but lovers of God and what pleases him, the world would see true pleasure.
Thanks for speaking out!!
I am saddened by the way the news has become sensationalistic and graphic. There is no need to show the kinds of things they show, and no way to justify it by calling it “news.” I don’t care if you claim to be conservative or liberal–the media you use on your program betrays you as being a cheap substitute for real news and information, and that is not worth watching.
I heard a story about a father-in-law who sat watching t.v. with his daughter’s family. He became increasingly uncomfortable with what was on the t.v. and asked if his son-in-law wasn’t going to change the channel. His son-in-law responded that it wasn’t that bad. The father-in-law turned to him and asked him, “If someone walked into your house saying those things and doing those things, what would you do?” “Well, I’d escort them to the door. ” was the answer. “But you’ve whole-heartedly accepted such behavior into your family through that box.” Point taken. And sometimes that’s how I judge the show I’m watching. And it’s not just football anymore, it’s all day, prime time, during movies. Haven’t seen football recently so maybe that’s worse than what I remember.
The last Super bowl I watched was about 7 years or so ago. We went to the neighbors to watch as an *outreach* kind of activity. We hadn’t had a tv for a few years… I was appalled by the blatant nearly pornographic commercials. Our experience was much the same as yours. That was well before I ever started blogging. When I did start blogging and then a few years later went to self-hosting I refused to even register my domain name with *that* company because of those commercials. I used Hosting Truth to register my domain when I signed up with their hosting service. I happily paid a bit more so that even my registered name isn’t associated with debauched behavior.
Here’s what I wrote on my FB page after linking to this post:
“Kristen NAILED it.
I am SO grateful it so happens we no longer have any tv other than dvd’s.
Sports (and most programs) are unwatchable, because they are apparently funded by disrespect, sin, and soft porn! -streamed straight into the entire family’s eyes, minds, and hearts.
No way is that worth it.
The first SuperBowl i saw after I became a mother that i remember was when Janet Jackson showed her boob. I don’t mind boobs when used appropriately, but i do mind porn-the “dancing” aka simulated sex acts that’s everywhere (Grammys last night??? SO glad I don’t have TV), the “cute” disrespectful smart-mouthed children, the worthless & stupid parents, the glorification of every sin and unhelpful attribute humans can possess. Advertising and the shows they support have truly sold out, and sold their souls.”
Thank you. You touched on many of the reasons why we ditched our TV–even if the shows weren’t blatantly offensive, the way most TV shows portray family life, the role of fathers, the attitudes of children, etc. are not what we want mirrored in our home. I often tell my kids, “We don’t pretend in a way that is not right to live.” I certainly do not want to watch “pretend” shows that do not reflect the way I want to live.
I can’t tell you how strongly I agree. Even though my husband went through college on a football scholarship, he has little interest in football. I enjoy it more than he does, BUT I never watch it live. I will DVR it so I can fast-forward through the commercials. I have had people tell me, more than once, that I have lived a “sheltered life” because I choose not to be entertained by sex or profanity. I have been told that if I was just “around it” like they are, it would cease to bother me. I do not want it to seize to bother me. I do not want to become immune to it. I was bothered today by reading about parents complaining about their not being able to watch the Grammy Awards last night with their children because of one or two acts. I sat here wondering why they would ever choose to watch the show at all, much less with their children. I heard Andy Stanley on the radio, probably twenty-five years ago, speaking at a youth service. He made the point that God doesn’t have a problem with our being entertained, but that there is a fine line for Christians when it comes to entertainment. He further asked how we know when we cross that line. His answer was excellent. He said that when we find ourselves being entertained by a sin for which Christ died, we have crossed that line. I am rambling, but I just wanted to say how much I appreciate your addressing this and doing so in such an eloquent way.
Looking for an edit button here. 🙂 Just saw my post pop up. I must have been “seized” with emotion when I wrote “I do not want it to ‘seize’ to bother me.” Cease to bother me, cease to bother me. Next time, I need to proofread before I post. 🙂
We actually love listening to the game! The announcer here is UH-MAY-ZING and is way better than the guys on TV anyway. But we do watch it online which means we have a bit more control over the commercials (we minimize the browser) and we don’t get any of the halftime stuff. GO HAWKS! 😉