The Dove Channel and Purity

The Dove Channel aims for purity, but fails at beauty.

Purity is a lovely thing despite the people who have twisted the word. Purity, holiness before God, is necessary for a Christian and leads to beauty. Purity includes, but is not limited to sexual purity for men and women. Purity is good and if it is good, then it is beautiful and therein hangs the problem for the network that advertises as “pure” in my social media feed.

Art need not be pure in a broken world, since some art must show the brokenness of creation. However, most art a Christian would choose to consume should aim for purity as one good.

If a film is “pure” (having an absence of vice), but is also badly made (ugly), then the film will make the absence of vice look like a bad thing: the absence of beauty. Real purity must be beautiful or it is mislabeled. If that seems tricky, imagine a sermon with no profanity (a good thing), but that taught heresy (a very bad thing). The Arian heretic who makes a movie without profanity is still making a damnable movie.

Purity is necessary, but not sufficient for Christian behavior and it is a highly inadequate standard for art. After all a piece of art may be pure, but badly made. Would bathing ourselves in ugly art be good for us if the art contained nothing “impure?”

The problem with much of  “purity culture” is that it gets a few small things right while becoming ugly. Don’t believe me? Google images of purity balls. Creepiness in defense of virtue is still creepy.

Only if eating tasteless food that contained no vitamins or poison is good for us. An entire network made up of badly made movies is like a church dinner where everyone brings tasteless food. There may be little swearing on the Dove Channel, but there is little good cinematography, acting, or story telling. If the Bible had been written like these films, nobody would be a Christian. The Bible is the greatest story ever told, these are some of the most trivial stories ever filmed.

Old doesn’t mean good. In the case of many films here, it just means creaky and badly made. An old film like Quiet Man or Mary Poppins is wonderful, but some old films have all the vices of their times with none of the virtues of modern film making. We have learned a thing or two about acting, shooting a movie, and screen writing.

Many of the older films or television contain racial stereotyping. Surely this is as important to warn us against as the cautions about “cleavage.” Cleavage is a shame only to he who thinks evil of it and a normal, good thing in real life. Racism has led to lynching, oppression, and slavery and is never a good thing. Purity can never be racist, because racism is ugly and unholy. If warnings are needed, better to warn of racism than cleavage.

Cleavage will exist in heaven, but racism will not.

“Chop Kick Panda” is a film on the Dove Channel, really. There must be no sex in this film, but there is also no creativity. Evidently, imitation to the very border of intellectual property theft is not impure, but it is also not godly. For God so loved the world, that He sent His Son, not “a reasonable facsimile of His Son made safe for 1950’s sensibilities.”

If you like the Dove Channel, it is a free country. Enjoy. On the other hand, this suggests you may have bad taste, since another Christian value in addition to objective morality is objective beauty. Most of these films are objectively badly made and ugly. May I suggest that it is better to watch no film than most of these films?

I bet I would like the people behind this channel and I approve of their goal. Sadly, there are not enough good, modern films with our values to sustain this project.