Interesting and ambitious attempt at navigating the murky waters of Christians and entertainment: (PDF here)
Neil Postman ( Amusing Ourselves to Death) denounces entertainment as a new slavery. Church leaders perceive entertainment as a danger (as Forrest explained). For example: "Entertainment does not tolerate silence" so important for spirituality (Jim Taylor). "Entertainment is not serious, is too superficial." Is it true? Are theatre, movies, dances etc. only superficial? If not, how could they be spiritually meaningful?
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Postman denounces media entertainment as being a non-sense situation, applying superficiality and triviality to any topics it touches: culture, education, politics, morality and most of all, religion. Jacques Ellul argues the same way (in The Humiliation of the Word), particularly when he denounces audiovisual media as incapable of transmitting any coherent religious message and, worse, opening wide the doors to idolatry. In England, a very brilliant and famous journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge (in his book Christ and the Media) compared media entertainment to pure "fantasy", opposed to the reality represented by Jesus. For his demonstration, Muggeridge uses Pascal's approach to divertissement: to make a diversion, that is, to escape from the main questions of life to engage in distraction, entertainment and amusement.
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Is entertainment a new slavery? Entertainment looks like a danger to Church leaders (as Forrest explained well). It does not tolerate silence - silence and stillness - which are essential to spirituality. For sure, we remain ill at ease with some goals of divertissement: how to spend one's free time, how to avoid facing hard facts of life, evil and death, suffering and destiny? These are the preoccupations we try to escape by mean of entertainment. As Pascal believed, the depth of the infinite would leave us in terrible distress, or our finitude would kill us prematurely or would paralyse us. So we enjoy entertainment, we appreciate divertissement because it gives us the opportunity to take a short break from our human and daily situation. But the Church was feeling more ill at ease yet with fun and amusement. Why? One can think that it is due particularly to feasts, masquerades, popular carnivals and so on. All kinds of situations leading to drinking, and worse - to sex. (In French Canada, a few preachers used to say that we should watch out for three dangers: religious swearing, drunkenness and females.) That gives a warped idea of entertainment!
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What is play?... When we play, we live a double -level situation: we know that we are playing (that creates a distance), but at the same time we agree to play fairly and seriously. "The most sublime then can happen..." This appears to be a very good approach to explain that fun can also be serious.
The German philosopher Eugen Fink, taking Huizinga's intuition further, insists on the fact that play should be received as an extremely serious behaviour, because it is giving - as in a mirror - the meaning of the world we are living in. The Greek philosophers (e.g. Plato) disregarded poetry as a danger, because poetry (through mythology) gave to gods power over humans, who were treated as slaves subjected to them and acting out that submission in rituals. Plato represents a first step to "disenchantment" of the world. Modernity achieved the second step of "disenchantment": relegating all spirituality to the domain of myths, continues Fink. Meanwhile, we have accepted to repatriate - from the gods to history - the control of what is happening to humans. This is why play today has never been more important: to express who we are and what our cosmos is about, even at the spiritual level. This approach complements Huizinga's. These authors shed more light on the power of imagination and representation. But, is it really applicable to spirituality and to religious questions? Caillois refutes Huizinga's point of view that play was used as dramaturgy in rituals, even in Christian liturgy; he opposes Huizinga, saying that precisely those rituals were no more a play, but vital gestures to save one's own life and the group's life from the gods' wrath: there were no more fun or play in there. I disagree with Caillois, because I believe that both functions can stay together. When touching spiritual matters, should any kind of play and representation be no longer a play, because it is too important for life? If so, we return to compulsory religious seriousness. That would represent a dead end. I prefer Godard's intuition, that should prevail here: "Imaginary is not the pure reflection of reality, but the reality of the ordinary normal daily life", a kind of crystallization of humans situations and choices, and values.
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