I watch Game of Thrones.

I’ve seen all of it. I don’t think its a particularly fantastic show, but it’s quality television and on a good day it makes me feel adventurous or exhilarated and often provokes me to difficult introspection, not an easy thing for pixels and sound to do.

A few people asked John Piper about whether Christians “ought to be” watching Game of Thrones, and he responded with the following resolve: “never intentionally to look at a television show or a movie or a website or a magazine where I know I will see photos or films of nudity. Never.”

Piper gives twelve reasons for this, and I was moved to speak up in defence of myself and my fellow “hip, cool, savvy, culturally aware”1 Christians because I disagreed vehemently with every last one of them. I’ll quote him exhaustively.

Piper calls “watching nudity” a sin.

His first five points all assume that conclusion. If “watching nudity” isn’t a sin, all of those points are moot. Point three makes this argument: “Seeing naked women — or seeing naked men — causes a man or woman to sin with their minds and their desires, and often with their bodies.”

Also in point five, “the defilement of the mind and heart by watching nudity dulls the heart’s ability to see and enjoy God. I dare anyone to watch nudity and turn straight to God and give him thanks and enjoy him more because of what you just experienced.”

I dare say a great many people are able to do this, and this is where his argument doesn’t work.

“Nudity” is a social/cultural construct.

There is no objective standard for modesty. Throughout history and across culture the definition of nudity and its parameters have always been fluid, even those times and cultures exposed to and entrenched in the Abrahamic traditions have experienced ebb and flow with respect to modesty standards. A few examples:

Are we as listeners or readers of Piper to understand that he would refuse entry to la Musée D’Orsay in Paris because the work of Manet, Ingres, Cabanel, etc. are on display? Would “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” bring him into fits of panicky rage?2

The theologian who, according to the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, was the most important third century Christian theologian recorded the right of baptism as follows, “when they come to the water […] they shall take off all their clothes. The children shall be baptized first. […] After this, the men will be baptized. Finally, the women, after they have unbound their hair, and removed their jewelry. No one shall take any foreign object with themselves down into the water. […] The bishop passes each of them on nude to the elder who stands at the water. They shall stand in the water naked.” Everyone is emphatically naked and in full view of everyone else, during a church ritual, the purpose of which was to symbolize the purifying of the spirit from evil and the entrance into covenant with God and the church.

I’m not particularly bound to Rome but I believe Pope Paul II when he said, “the human body can remain nude and uncovered and preserve intact its splendour and its beauty. Immodesty is present only when nakedness plays a negative role with regard to the value of the person […] The human body is not in itself shameful […] Shamelessness (just like shame and modesty) is a function of the interior of a person.”

Nudity and modesty are subjective. They’re a product of a collective understanding, not an etherial form God invented when Adam saw Eve. In Matthew 5, Jesus says “anyone who looks at a woman with lust in his eye has already committed adultery”.3 The problem occurs in your own eyes, or behind them, as is the modern update. The way you think about the nudity observed is the problem, not the nudity itself.

To consider “watching nudity” a sin objectifies the body, demonizes the mind, and makes us terrified of beauty.

When Piper considers viewing the naked human body an act that detracts from the purity of all involved parties4 objectifies flesh, stripping the beauty of the human form of its legitimacy. Postulating that to see someone without clothes on, at all times and in all places save for a spouse, turns the human body into a walking taboo and assumes that the mind with respect to its attitude toward flesh is irredeemable and infinitely corrupt.

We, as humans, have the power to observe a beautiful thing without being consumed by the need to own it. I know its difficult sometimes, and our culture and our generation are particularly bad at this, but Piper’s restrictive perception of the unbreakable tie binding nudity and sin only makes this problem worse. It makes us terrified of the nude form, mythologizing flesh. The sexuality of a thing, a person, a body part, an article of clothing, is only enhanced by the narrative that surrounds its exposure: secrecy and obsession only leads to taboo-driven arousal.

How/why I watch Game of Thrones:

I can view nudity in the context of a TV show without crumbling to lust. There are a number of other things that I can’t do or watch without being overcome by temptation. Game of Thrones has depicted incest and rape (in and outside of marriage) very vividly. Prostitution is Westeross’ go-to pastime. Watching the show makes me think about whether or not those things are good ideas, beneficial to communities, acceptable behaviour, normal, amoral, etc.

Depiction isn’t affirmation. An exploration of darkness is essential to our understanding of the fallen world in which we live. Watch the show, ask questions, look to the truth for answers.

Footnotes:

1. Those are his words but I’ll gladly receive them.

2. I went to that museum with my dad and my brother in February, we were all fine.

3. The emphasis here is mine but Jesus probably said it that way.

4. He does this throughout, though specific examples are found in points 5, 6, 7, and 9. “Men and women who want to be watched in their nudity are in the category with exhibitionists who pull down their pants at the top of escalators.” 6 breaks this rule in the extreme – “God calls women to adorn themselves in respectable apparel with modesty and self-control. When we pursue or receive or embrace nudity in our entertainment, we are implicitly endorsing the sin of the women who sell themselves to this way and are, therefore, uncaring about their souls. They disobey 1 Timothy 2:9, and we say that’s okay.”