I enjoyed watching ‘The Monastery’ on BBC2 in recent weeks. It challenged a few of my prejudices, principally that TV can only be a purveyor of nonsense. I tend to see TV as entertaining (and therefore useful at the end of a long day), but it remains nonsense, by and large.

I’m influenced by Neil Postman’s book ‘Amusing ourselves to death’, in which he says that the medium (television, print, oral traditions etc) can determine the message (the content of what is said). For example, it is impossible to use smoke signals to discuss philosophy. The medium inhibits or prevents the transmission of certain forms of understanding.

Postman argues that the form of television is essentially passive, and that the logic of it as a medium tends to the novel and the visually stimulating, in other words that TV is good as a source of amusement, but very bad as a vehicle for serious ideas. And so, as TV has replaced the printed word as the primary vehicle for society’s conversation about itself, so the society has become characterised by a loss of seriousness, a shallowness, a cultural impoverishment. Hence we are ‘amusing ourselves to death’ – for a shallow culture does not develop the resources with which to sustain itself. Postman thinks that Huxley was the more accurate prophet, rather than Orwell, and that TV is the ‘soma’ which pacifies the populace, whilst those in power indulge their schemes, whilst any potential for democratic oversight has been removed, simply because a people reared on a diet of TV no longer have the capacity to seriously attend to difficult issues.

In passing, Postman remarks that Christianity is a serious and demanding religion, and he points out how the values of TV will necessarily corrupt a community and culture which has historically been built around oral and written traditions. This is what leads to the demand for interesting ‘spectacle’ in church services, and the complaint that church is ‘boring’. What that means is that a person whose taste has been formed by television finds a traditional church service profoundly alien. What the church is called to do is to educate itself as to what it is doing. For Scripture and the liturgy cannot be replaced by forms that have been constructed by a televisual culture. The message itself is lost, and the church, rather than standing over against the wider society, simply becomes another niche market competing against all the other lifestyle options. Living as a Christian reduces to a matter of purchasing the right CD or car sticker.

The real role of liturgy, our common worship, is the formation of character. Christ replaced one form of service with another, the temple was cast down and rebuilt in three days in his body. So the character that we are called to form is eucharistic – the practice of sharing a meal together, in his memory, in thanksgiving, this is what makes us who we are. The Eucharist makes the church. And this is difficult. It will be experienced as alien, and possibly as oppressive. But we cannot make it any easier without undoing ourselves, without abandoning our faith, without becoming ashamed of the gospel.

“The Monastery” worked, I feel, because it told the human story of people caught up in the world, who are then immersed in precisely that traditional, liturgical culture. And it changed all of them. But what most struck me was a comment made by the Abbot at the end; that it had restored some of the self-confidence of the community. Even in the strongholds of liturgical worship, the technologically amplified voice of the culture shouts so loudly that the faithful quiver, and begin to doubt.

But the tide has turned, and the world knows that it has lost something precious. What we must do is hold fast to what we have received. Mt 10.22