The Times (you may need to register) tells us that Halo is one of the primo youth recruiting tools of churches these days. Getting old people to come to church based on their fear of death seems to work pretty well. But apparently getting young people in to talk about some guy with a Halo on only works if that guy is armed to the teeth in a digitally-rendered 3D environment.
This is the kind of cheap cultural opportunism I often see religious leaders engaging in. Any cultural fad will do. Christian Rock, video games, anything at all. Racism and misogyny will do as well, if they're what the kids are into.
I have to wonder if the actual subject matter of religion is interesting to anyone at all in a modern society, unless it's been grafted onto one of our modern obsessions. In this case, the obsession is with "blowing people up."
"It’s very pervasive," Mr. Palmer said, more widespread on the coasts, less so in the South, where the Southern Baptist denomination takes a more cautious approach. The organization recently sent e-mail messages to 50,000 young people about how to share their faith using Halo 3. Among the tips: use the game’s themes as the basis for a discussion about good and evil.
First-person shooter videogames are usually cast in terms of black and white. There's you, the character with a gun, and there's every other moving object in the game which is trying to kill you.
This makes sense, I guess, if you're trying to inculcate people who have very little experience with the real world to a view of Us vs Them. There are no shades of gray in a videogame. The only thing that doesn't shoot back is the scenery.
Complicating the debate over the appropriateness of the game as a church recruiting tool are the plot’s apocalyptic and religious overtones. The hero’s chief antagonists belong to the Covenant, a fervent religious group that welcomes the destruction of Earth as the path to their ascension.
Yes, because teaching our young to incorporate their spirituality into war porn is a healthy path to Jesus.
I'm a big fan of first-person shooter videogames. I'll be blunt and honest. My kids play them, I play them. But my kids know that what's in the game is completely fake, and that behaving like that in the real world would leave everyone's life a ruinous mess. The only things relevant to the real world in such a game are the physics, and even those are there for special effects.
Seeing videogames hijacked by churches and used as some sort of allegory for what I believe to be the already-fucked-up themes of Good vs. Evil dictated by an omnipotent hierarchical being who cannot be overruled or disagreed with -- that's a whole level of fucked-up I can't get over.
Maybe if we hadn't already seen the Left Behind videogame used as a digital dress rehearsal for ethnic cleansing, I wouldn't be so alarmed by this continuing development.