Christian Video Games and
Turning the Other Cheek

December 14, 2006

With the general level of violence in video games, I am hardly going to get bent out of shape by a violent Christian video game.. but it is nevertheless curious to read about the game "Left Behind: Eternal Forces." Just to sidestep for a moment the issue of Christian violence, I think the game is broadly indicative of a Christian community whose general tactic in combating the secular world has been to propose mirror alternatives. Don't listen to secular rock.. listen to Christian rock! Don't watch those bad cartoons.. watch Christian cartoons! And now we get: Don't play those video games.. play a Christian video game! You will excuse me for observing that for an outsider it is tough to see how in the end this strategy does not simply affirm the general lifestyle and demands of our mainstream culture..

The company website makes a curious statement about violence and Christianity:

Christians are quite clearly taught to turn the other cheek and to love their enemies. It is equally true that no one should forfeit their lives to an aggressor who is bent on inflicting death.

That sounds so reasonable.. as if there were two competing Christian truths to be balanced. But while the first statement about turning the other cheek is drawn from the Gospels, the second statement about how no one should forfeit their lives to an aggressor is just made up out of thin air. I challenge anyone to find a passage in the Bible where that idea is presented. Yet the statement is presented as something obviously true!

Seeing something like that I can't help ranging back to the early centuries of Christianity and thinking about the cult of martyrdom that developed among Christians. Just read the Martyrdom of Polycarp. Now there is much that is off-putting in that early Christian cult of death.. but it is hard to imagine any early Christian figure accepting the obviousness of the claim that "no one should forfeit their lives to an aggressor who is bent on inflicting death." That happens to describe pretty accurately the situation of early Christianity.

So how would someone smuggle violence into Christianity? One effective way seems to be emphasis of the book of Revelation. Moving these apocalyptic visions into the center of Christian experience.. which is a central thrust of modern Evangelicalism if one tallies what is being bought.. opens the way for an embrace of global conflict and derring-do on the part of resistors to the world order. We are obviously paying dearly for these fantasies today in our engagement with the Middle East.

In the long term the most dangerous aspect of the video game is the continuing demonization of a viable global system. We.. i.e. the population of the world.. are confronted with challenges that boggle the mind, environmental and political. Any sane person must admit that greater global cooperation would be a great good.. But here the video game (and I am sure the Left Behind series of books as well) is sending young people off to virtually fight the "Global Community Peacekeepers", There is a bunch of bad guys with a frightening name! They are of course led by the Antichrist. Could it be any clearer how fascination with apocalyptic imagery plays into the hands of the most extreme versions of American patriotism?