CURRENTLY IN TELEVISION: The nature of American society

JIM COGGINS

It is widely understood that the people who make most television shows are much less religious than the general population in the United States and Canada. As a result, the programs they make have a secular bias. There are few Christian characters (and hardly ever any Christian characters portrayed in a positive light), there are few Christian ideas, and Christian morality is rarely affirmed.

How blatant this secular bias is becomes clear when there are programs for which the producers do not control all the content.

The program Rescue 911, for instance, presented true stories of ordinary people who had been rescued from some kind of accident or other trauma, including details of their reactions to the situation. Many of the people portrayed were not Christians, but a surprising number were--and these often responded to crises with prayer, faith and love. Their words were often not profound; they were simply ordinary Christians revealing their faith through how they lived their lives. What was striking was not the nature of these Christian testimonies, but how unusual they seemed in the context of network television. What the viewer of such a program may come to realize is that North American society is not as secular and anti-Christian as it is normally portrayed to be on television.

The Herald is continuing to search for a regular columnist or columnists who would write regularly about television.

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