Subliminal Messages, Living Counter-Culturally, and Chronological Snobbery

A few scattered thoughts on fighting the subliminal influences we are constantly fed.

Consider these statements:

• A mother at home has next to no value.
• A father who leads is a relic of the 19th century.
• Obedient children are sooo not cool.
• Only one car with no garage? It’s time to move up in life!
• Move to another town to help start a church? Are you kidding? That’s what we pay pastors for!
• Get married before I sleep with someone? No one around us waits anyway. Why should I?

Whether we know it or not, want it or not, or even like it or not, the thousands of messages continually slipped into our subconscious (through TV, radio, music, internet, billboards, logos, tag-lines, etc.) alter our perceptions, impact our emotions, and transform our values.

Our belief systems, our comprehension of family, manhood & womanhood, finances, humility, the nature of God, love, justice, and a myriad of other aspects of our lives morph and sway under the weight of this ever-present subliminal pressure.

Watch this incredible example of the impact of subliminal messages:

It’s no wonder that Joshua told the Israelites to “meditate on it (the book of the law) day and night”. He knew that we needed a counter-balance, some way to fight these constant subliminal messages, a way to let the influence of ancient truth trump current opinion even at the subconscious level.

Otherwise, we’re trapped in this present time and this present culture. Unknowingly, left and right, we’re swallowing current cultural values, current blind spots, and current generational sins.

We are constantly being influenced… the question is “by what?“

John Piper in his sermon “You Shall Worship The Lord Your God“, said this:

I have an abiding fear of what C. S. Lewis called chronological snobbery. Chronological snobbery is the arrogant notion that the ideas of our own day are better than the ideas of a bygone day just because the ideas are in our day. Chronological snobbery feels that things are truer because they are newer. And so it is both irrational and naive.

C.S. Lewis

It’s irrational because being new is no guarantee of being true. It’s pure arrogance to think that a thought in my head is better than a thought in the head of Martin Luther just because I live in the twentieth century and he lived in the sixteenth. There is no logical connection between the truth of an insight and the century when God puts it into somebody’s mind.

And chronological snobbery is not only irrational. It is also naive. Because there aren’t any really new ideas under the sun. Ecclesiastes 1:9-10 says,

What has been is what will be,

and what has been done is what will be done;

and there is nothing new under the sun.

Is there a thing of which it is said,

“See, this is new”?

It has been already,

in the ages before us.

So I try to flee every temptation to be a chronological snob. I don’t want to be irrational or naive. C. S. Lewis prescribed at least one antidote. He said that every third book you read should be from outside your own century. It was good advice.