Sheldon would be no televangelist

By TIM MILLER

Special to The Capital-Journal

Television was but a faint glow on a distant horizon late in the lifetime of Charles M. Sheldon, but it isn't difficult to conjecture what he would have thought of the medium. Sheldon's ideas on popular entertainment are solidly on record, and television wouldn't have escaped his lifelong call for such amusements to make themselves wholesome.

It is television's content, not the medium itself, that Sheldon would have criticized. He was never anti-technology; he went to the movies, drove a car and generally enjoyed the fruits of the industrial age. He approved of dancing and popular music, even though many of his fellow Protestant ministers condemned such worldly diversions. Once television became widespread, he would have had a set in his home.

But he wouldn't have thought very highly of most of the programming that characterizes television, any more than he approved of everything that appeared on movie screens. (Once, in 1930, he was sufficiently revolted by a film that he walked out halfway through and demanded his money back as he left.) The human race, he argued all his life, was in desperate need of uplifting, and popular culture in all its manifestations needed to work to make society better, not worse.

"I do not think there is any necessity for dragging into religious fiction --- or any other, for that matter --- details that would bring a blush to a young girl's face," he commented in 1899. Surely, the television shows with jiggle, killing and violence would have inspired a stream of jeremiads from Sheldon, a lifelong apostle of the wholesome.

How did he think worthwhile entertainment might come to pass? As he demonstrated in the case of his Christian daily newspaper experiment at The Topeka Daily Capital, Sheldon believed the whole structure of an entertainment medium had to be rebuilt. Nothing less than Christian management, Christian personnel both on and off screen, and morally upright content would do. The resulting program might not be as popular as lower, crasser fare, but, he maintained, morality can never be subordinated to money.

Sheldon himself never hesitated to put principle above profit; when he received a proposal for a lavish stage production of his all- time best-selling novel "In His Steps," he turned it down (and thus turned down a big payday for himself) because he couldn't be sure all of those involved in it were convinced Christians and because the project seemed driven by money, not Christian idealism.

If the programming and corporate structures of television would have troubled Sheldon, would he then have liked contemporary Christian television? Surely, he would have liked some parts of its programming and would have embraced some of its loftier goals, but he wouldn't have endorsed it without reservation. The endless appeals for financial contributions would have repelled him. The kind of excessive emotionalism common to religious broadcasting was never his style; good religion to Sheldon was as dignified as it was ethical. And he would have found the extremely conservative theology of much of Christian television uncomfortable.

Sheldon, for all of his commitment to moral and ethical living, was no fundamentalist. Theologically he was a moderate, even a liberal, who embraced many of the modernist theological innovations of his day. He never insisted that the Bible had to be understood in rigidly literal fashion, and he explicitly came down on the side of evolution in the evolution-creation debate. So he would have been ideologically at odds with much of Christian television.

The message of Charles M. Sheldon was eminently simple. The foremost obligation of the committed Christian was to lead one's life in emulation of the example of Jesus. Where television encouraged good belief and behavior, Sheldon would have applauded it. But where it pandered to low popular tastes, he would have condemned it vehemently.

Tim Miller is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies at The University of Kansas. He is the author of "Following 'In His Steps'," a biography of Charles M. Sheldon.

Sheldon

Copyright 2000
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