*TRIGGER WARNING* This post will deal with graphic content of violence, including rape, sexual assault, and gory physical violence.
The Most Recent Story:
Every 68 seconds, an American is sexually assaulted. On Monday, a horrific story of a woman raped on a train outside of Philadelphia came out. So what makes this story different? That this assault occurred for 40 minutes on a public train, in which police believe that none of the bystanders called 9-1-1. The police arrived to discover security footage showing many of the bystanders had phones in their hands, with cameras directed toward the assault, but had not intervened.
The Problem:
When I first saw the headline, I was disgusted. After reading the story in full, my stomach went from doing flips to having a fire of anger sitting in it. Something is wrong. For Christians, this shouldn’t be a surprising statement. Since Genesis 3, sin has plagued all of creation. Yet, due to social media and mainstream media, we now have access to see all of the world’s evil at a level that has not been possible until this point in history. However, with the ability to have this much information, this much violence, this much brokenness, the world has developed both an addiction and desensitization to trauma.
We’ve become numb to the shock factor of seeing the trauma. Instead of just seeing blood spatter on the wall with an off-screen kill, we’ve come to expect seeing someone with the back of their head blown off. Instead of the uncomfortable anguish and anger of stories of rape, such as in A Time to Kill by John Grisham, we have come to shrug off the discomfort. So, to still deliver a shock factor, movies, television shows, and books have increased the amount of trauma. And while I disagree with him on a range of issues, atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche may have given one of the better unintentional warnings, “if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” His premise was that if you spend enough time fixated on evil, wickedness, and darkness, gradually, it will have an effect on you, whether you intend for it to or not.
The danger is that with this increase in exposure to trauma comes a higher threshold for society to not react with an emotional response. To protect our own sanity, our minds dehumanize the people in these traumatic events. But at what cost to our souls?
The Response:
This is not a new phenomenon. Only the methods of this problem have adapted to wreak havoc in our present day. Yet, the solution to this for the Christian has stayed the same: to guard the mind against evil, and it is, in fact, an evil that plagues our world. Instead of falling into this trap along with the rest of society, we should continually have our minds renewed (Rom. 12:2) to be reminded of what is good. This includes the reality that all people are made in the image of God. Meaning that when we see that image devalued, it should bother us. It is at that moment, we look into the abyss. We stare into the darkness of this broken world, and our response should be to turn away in disgust, yet often we seem to not be able to look away. And if we would be honest with ourselves, it’s because the darkness of the abyss can be entertaining to some extent. But we should never become numb to cruelty. If so, then we risk others being simply a means to ends, not those with immeasurable worth and value.
Along with renewing our minds, we have to consider where our focus is. While we should set our minds on the things of Christ (Col. 3:2), do we actually do that? I believe too often we will spend more time on our fascination with evil, and I write that as someone who enjoys serial killer documentaries as much as the next person. But we live in a society that’s current most popular Netflix show is about adults playing children’s games with the losers being killed. This means that the things we give time for our minds to process matter. If we spend our time looking down into the abyss, we should not be surprised when our own hearts generate darkness that plays out in our actions and speech. Instead, we should be looking upward to Christ, the light in the darkness. If we fix our eyes on him, in taking the time to gaze upon him, to study him, to know him, that from our heart comes things that are pleasing to God.
Closing Thoughts:
So what? Do we pack our bags and move away into the mountains? Do we cancel all our streaming service subscriptions? Have an old-fashioned book burning? Maybe. Maybe for one reading this, you should do some heart cleaning. I want to propose a different approach, though. I think back to one of the songs I was taught in my church’s children’s ministry growing up; “Oh be careful little eyes what you see. For the Father up above is looking down in love. Oh, be careful little eyes what you see.” If we aren’t careful, after spending more time staring into the abyss of the world’s entertainment, that’s when we see real evil put before us, we are so desensitized that we don’t react. We have to guard ourselves if we do stare into the abyss. Because the question becomes: what kind of response will we have when it finally stares back at us?
Sloan Stephenson 