Church as Screen Time and Pastor as Parasocial Personality
Just a quick riff on a couple of news items coming out this week:
- First, the introduction of the hologram pastor.
- Second, research published in Pediatrics suggests that childhood obesity in pre-school age children is directly linked to dislocated familial attachments facilitated by too much time in front of the television and too few communal meals with the family.
- Third, a second unrelated research project coming out of New Zealand suggests much of the same conclusions with regard to teenagers. Teens with more “screen time” have significantly lower attachment to their parents and peers (HT: Kara Powell).
There’s a fascinating sentence in the last summary:
“However, it is also possible that adolescents with poor attachment relationships with immediate friends and family use screen-based activities to facilitate new attachment figures such as online friendships or parasocial relationships with television characters or personalities,” the authors write.
I’ve written about this before, calling it the “mediation of experience.” If “screen time” inhibits our social interactions and relational attachments by replacing the real thing with “parasocial relationships” with unreal characters can the same be said to be true of other instances where we replace real live relationships with unreal characters or personalities?
Obviously I think the answer is yes.
One of the problems with the prevailing mode of church in America is that it has turned the pastor into a celebrity personality, complete with a performance-oriented and technologically mediated relationship with an audience. Once the church reaches a certain size, the pastor’s interaction must occur as a performance by a character through media. Cultural expectations about church structure coupled with assumptions about the virtues of media nearly require this. The trouble is, the character that pastor portrays, in my experience, in never quite the real thing. Some pastors try very hard to “be themselves” on stage, but others intentionally slip into a very different persona. But even for the pastor trying to be genuine, it’s very difficult in my opinion – perhaps impossible – to avoid some level of acting when you’re a preacher on stage, largely because of the entertainment-based expectations we currently impose upon the notion of what it means to be a “good preacher.”
One of the bizarre side-effects of this mediated relationship between the pastor and congregation is that, because of the high level of mediated exposure to the preacher, many in the church (most, in the case of very large churches), actually feel a personal connection to the pastor that doesn’t actually exist. They don’t really know the pastor, in much the same way they don’t really know Oprah or Dr. Phil. They only know your stage persona. This is greatly magnified in those churches who embrace the personality-driven church model and use a charismatic pastor’s performance skills as a means of growing the church.
Hence, the church gathering becomes just another version of “screen time.”
Now consider how “screen time” becomes literally true in the proliferation of video venue churches, where many congregations only interact with a version of the pastor that is literally unreal. Now replace the video screen with hologram which remains unreal, but magnifies the level of illusion.
Moreover, much like the teens in the second study cited above who talk to each other about the fictional characters they’ve mutually engaged as relational surrogates, church members will often interact around the pastor’s persona. In this way a false persona can become a means of false social relationships. This is akin to kids talking enthusiastically about what “happened” to Hanna Montana in the latest episode (nothing happened…she doesn’t exist!). In celebrity-driven churches much of the social energy occurs around the campfire of a false persona.
Does it matter? Is there harm being done by moving church toward just another version of “screen time?” What are the consequences of this to discipleship? Perhaps, like the studies above, the consequences are spiritually obese, socially disconnected and disaffected Christians.
Ceci n’est pas une pipe.