THE MAIN CHARACTER PROBLEM

Like most parents of young children I find myself sizing up our culture with an increasingly critical eye these days, and also like most, I find that the TV is a constant focus of concern. All manner of nastiness is indiscriminately fired buckshot into crowds of wide-eyed children seated before the barrel’s opening and soaking up every word, image and idea. Perhaps “indiscriminate” is a poor choice of words. Really the marketing behind most television programming and advertising allows producers to tailor content and packaging to a specific target audience for maximum effect. Whether the hearts and minds of my kids are specifically targeted or simply hit by stray bullets is not a moot point. It is significant and concerning, but these are tired talking points that others have articulated better before me.

There is something else, however, which worries me. The sheer volume of stories my kids consume has aroused a concern in me which I call the main character problem. With a few notable exceptions, most television shows, movies and books tend to center around a main character. This is especially true for those marketed to children. If the story is well crafted we feel and experience what happens to the main character as though it were happening to us. We are intended to identify throughout the story with the main character. Increasingly, Americans view life and the world through this foggy egocentric lens- we are all Truman. I shouldn’t wonder than that my kids tend to view themselves as the main characters, and this life as an unfolding drama centered on them. Mom, Dad, siblings and others all fall into the role of supporting cast or, even worse, antagonist. I know that my children are very young and that being egocentric is a natural stage of development, but what concerns me is the number of adults who retain these childlike traits well into adulthood. We have become a nation of main characters and I think this may be directly linked to the amount of media we consume. We are all chiefs and no Indians and the result is that no one seems willing to play the role of supporting cast in their marriages, communities, friendships or even their churches.

Of course, to be prideful and self-centered is a part of every person’s make up, but I think that this has never been so unashamedly indulged and unchecked in our culture prior to these days.

The church has something needed to offer to a culture that is suffering from the main character problem. Becoming a Christian radically reorients a person’s perspective away from their own small lives to the great overarching story of God’s plan to redeem fallen man. In becoming a Christian a person’s eyes are opened to see that they are not main characters. This life is not an unfolding drama centered on us. We are living within a story, and Jesus is the main character. We are not even supporting cast. Who can claim to be a support to the almighty? )Acts 17:25) It is in Him that we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). He is the vine, we are the branches, and apart from Him we can do nothing (John 15:5). In truth, we are all supported cast.