The Lost Art of Discernment

Several years ago, I was at a radio conference and I got the chance to sit in on a focus group for new music. For about an hour, we heard a succession of 20-second clips that we had to judge—20 seconds and then move on to the next one. I quickly realized the purpose of this activity was to find songs that would be least likely to cause us to change the channel. It makes complete sense from a business perspective, but it also explains why a lot of what’s on the radio tends to be bland, innocuous, mostly designed to be ignored.

For years, what we listened to was primarily determined by a handful of record and radio and then MTV executives that selected what would be broadcast. Now, it’s possible to discover music through the radio or a blog or Pandora or Facebook. You can listen to every subgenre of music from chill wave to witch house. Every single day in my office we get a bin of new CDs and I get more emails with links to mp3s than I could possibly listen to.

There’s just a tremendous amount of music out there. Plus a library of movies on demand and more TV networks than there are decent shows. Sadly for me, the only scarcity is among print magazines.

So what does any of this have to do with any of us as Christians. The Bible obviously doesn’t give us instructions on whether we should listen to rock or hip-hop. Documentaries or narrative films. Mad Men or Jersey Shore. As we look at discernment with regards to the good, the true and the beautiful, it’s easier to find Bible verses pointing towards the importance of the first two.

Philippians 1:9-10 ESV
And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ…

Hebrews 5:14 ESV
But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.

We’re to test the spirits and distinguish the good from the bad. And the best educational institutions aim to teach you how to discern truth for yourself. And while it may not be as important as discernment of goodness and truth, there’s also real value in being able to discern excellence and beauty in the world around us.

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Eight years ago, I launched an entertainment magazine with two friends. Our goal was pretty nebulous—we wanted to highlight the stuff we loved. Rolling Stone and Blender, the two biggest players at the time, seemed be swapping Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera back and forth. We felt like there was better music out there that was getting ignored. In the same way, there were movies, books and TV shows that affected me in ways that felt good for my soul. We wanted to share these experiences with others and provide a place for people to discover arts & entertainment that seemed to dig a little deeper or somehow just make culture better. We simply called these things “Signs of Life in Music & Culture.”

We believed that art wasn’t neutral, that some things were more worthy of people’s time and energy than others. And we believed that no matter how subjective and messy that scale of beauty and truth and goodness might be, it was a worthwhile endeavor to try to find the good stuff.

Jeffrey Overstreet speaks of this in his book on appreciating film, Through a Screen Darkly: “If I do the difficult thing and pull myself away from art that is merely entertaining and start searching for those currents of truth that reside within beauty and mystery, I will be drawn off the path of familiarity and comfort. The reality of God is not bound to a particular earthly language, country or style. His Spirit can speak through anything. But He is far more likely to be encountered in those things that are excellent rather than shoddy, particular rather than general, authentic rather than derivative.”

For me, I can think of films like The Bicycle Thief, Life Is Beautiful, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and City of God, how they stayed with me for days forcing me to reconcile my preconceptions with new ideas and perspectives. I can think of music from artists like Sufjan Stevens, Arcade Fire, The Avett Brothers and Sigur Rós that lift my soul every time I listen. Even TV shows like Dexter or The Wire force me to consider my understanding of the world.

Art is a gift from God.  It’s part of God’s universal grace given not just to believers but to all humanity.  It allows us to express the inexpressible, the truths that we see only dimly in this life, the concepts whose shadows we grasp at.  Like the Creator, we take ideas and mold them into being, whether through visual arts, writing, music or dance.

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It’s no coincidence that we’re compelled towards creativity. The evidence of God’s creativity, his love of diversity and beauty is all around us in nature. We were created in his image. Our culture is the fruit of that gift of creativity. Andy Crouch talks about this in his excellent book Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. I hear a lot about the culture wars within church circles, but fighting for power against those of differing views strikes me as incredibly misguided. It seems a lot easier to simply take part in culture making and to strive for excellence.

I love the story Andy tells of looking forward to autumn nights making a pot of delicious chili. He and his wife love chili, but his kids hate it. He lists out the options the kids have: they can protest loudly or offer a more nuanced critique, but he and his wife aren’t going to give up their chili. They could learn to tolerate it or just not eat it. But chili is still going to remain the only choice for dinner. But as they grow old enough to cook, they could simply prepare a different dish for the family themselves. If Andy comes home to a lovingly cooked meal, he’s going to appreciate it, even if it’s not chili. He tells this story to illustrate the point: “The only way to change culture is to create more of it.”

And this applies to anyone, whether or not they’re an artist. God is the God of all of our lives, whether we are missionaries or ad executives.  If we are architects, he calls us to be good architects, not that we might only design churches, but that in all that we do, we do it unto him.  If he has given us the gift of creating buildings, we rejoice in their creation.  If God has given us the desire to create, everything we create glorifies him, whether it’s a painting of a ballet dancer or a story about an axe murderer.

So, creating culture is important, but so is practicing discernment, developing our eyes and ears and minds to recognize goodness, truth and beauty wherever we encounter it. And just as importantly, we need to do this without snobbery. It’s easy to see ourselves as superior because of our tastes. There’s a scene in the novel High Fidelity where record-store owner Rob Fleming meets a wonderful couple and sees what he considers to be a horrible music collection. “It’s not who you like,” he realizes, “it’s what you’re like.”

But at the same time, we should expect greatness from the entertainment we consume. Discernment is as simple as asking yourself the question, “Does the song, movie, book, show or video game spark something inside me? Does it make me think about the truths of this world or show me a glimpse of heaven or make me feel joy? Or does it play to those base attributes of my old self—envy, meanness, lust, pride?”

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Psalm 139:14 says, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”

God’s works are wonderful. I don’t think anyone here would dispute that. But, unfortunately, Christians in the media haven’t always set the bar to quite the same level. I look at much of what’s come out of the Contemporary Christian Music industry or the Christian film industry, and it’s often a sad imitation of its secular counterpart.

For some of you who grew up in the church, creativity, originality, mystery and depth were often sacrificed at the altar of safety. We have a Christian radio station in Atlanta, The Fish. Its motto is “Safe for the whole family.” I truly have nothing against artists who play contemporary Christian music or people who listen to it. But I am a little bugged by radio stations that take advantage of their audience’s fear by promising sanctuary from the evil world out there. Rather than engaging the world, it’s mostly just trying to sanitize its own little gated community inside it.

And we can pick on Christian versions of the media, but the truth is that you’ll find the same commercial forces that pressure Christian record execs to send musicians back into the studio to increase the JPMs—the mentions of Jesus per minute—in a song, are at work across the entertainment industry. When the goal of music is to simply keep people from changing the station and movie studios follow up every blockbuster hit with a sequel whether or not there’s a story to be told or dig up every ‘80s TV show that engenders a little nostalgia, the art isn’t going to be great. We need to remember that we have a choice when it comes to our consumption of the arts, even when much of what’s on the menu is fast-food. The gourmet stuff is there; it just sometimes takes a little more effort to find.

This week, the David Crowder* Band released a video where they photographed more than 1,000 LITE BRITEs using stop-motion video. I hadn’t spent much time listening to the David Crowder* Band—they’ve found themselves mostly confined to the world of the Christian ghetto. But all of the sudden, music blogs that ignored the CCM world—including ours—were calling attention the video simply because it was original and interesting. The band enlisted dozens of friends to painstakingly shoot the entire video as a series of stop-motion photos that would need no additional effects. It was brilliant.

Changes in how media is consumed has led to some of the best pop culture creations rising up through grassroots promotion. Instead of some vice president at a record label choosing what’s going to be big, a network of music fans are sharing their discoveries with each other. The power to determine what breaks big is now in your hands. I can’t think of a more enjoyable responsibility.

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