Yesterday I interviewed Gene Edward Veith, Culture Editor at World magazine and author of God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life and Loving God With All Your Mind: Thinking as a Christian in the Postmodern World, for an upcoming New Man magazine article about how to make entertainment choices. Veith dropped a zinger of a caveat about our entertainment-saturated society:

Maybe even a bigger problem is the whole mentality that we need to be entertained all the time. That might be more harmful spiritually than any moral thing. A lot of people today in our culture want to be entertained all the time.

We go to church and we want to be entertained. If we’re not entertained we think there’s something wrong with our church, forgetting that the purpose of church is to hear the word of God and be built up. People want to be entertained at work. If we’re not enjoying ourselves at work we think there’s something wrong with our job. There’s a big problem at school because kids growing up in our entertainment culture, if they’re not entertained they won’t pay attention, they won’t work at it. So teachers think they have to be Big Bird and make everything so fun. There’s a lot of learning, challenging things like math education — it’s just plummeted; there’s a point where it’s hard, if you’re going to learn it, you have to work at it.

… There are other values in life that we need to hold up like work, duty, the ability to tough things out, to just do them. That’s what courage is, to persevere with something even in the face of something being unpleasant.

The whole entertaining mentality really creates a lot of weakness in our culture, and in our churches, and in a lot of us. We need to face up to that. It can breed boredom. People say they’re bored all the time. It’s because they come to the point that they have to be hyper-stimulated. It makes us insensitive. It makes us ineffective and discontented with things we shouldn’t be discontented.

The huge problem in the church is divorce. I think some men get it in their minds that they’re bored with their wives. Their marriage isn’t fun any more; it’s really a very childish, almost infantile way of looking at things. They need to grow up. Not just sit back and be passively entertained, but learn to take satisfaction in work and in overcoming problems, and in being active, not just passively thinking everything should be pleasurable. That’s a paralyzing condition when you get in that mind set.

His comments are a challenge to our very culture, everything from our celebrity obsession, the constant noise of TV and radio, to families scarfing dinner in front of the TV and even the booming blog explosion (which in some ways is nothing more than hyper-entertainment). Many of these ideas are discussed in more depth in a book Veith referred to, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death.

But it doesn’t all have to be depressing. Veith did offer a number of solutions, including turning off the TV, turning off the radio in your car, spending time with your family, playing games, reading aloud (he did think that reading in general is probably healthier than visual media), or at least using media to create a shared experience with your family by watching something together and talking about it. Simply learning to be by yourself with your thoughts and feelings can open the door to a deeper life.