The Audience of the Future: Building the Religious Counterculture

early in the evening on February 10, the newsfeed alerts on everybody’s phones suddenly began beeping and chiming with a breaking story: Jon Stewart was leaving The Daily Show. I happened to be within watching range of a TV at the time, so I turned it on and it seemed like every station was announcing the news. Jon Stewart, Jon Stewart, Jon Stewart. They were running clips from the early days of the show; pundits were pontificating. It was a whole thing. And then it came time for The Daily Show itself . . . the one where he was going to make this announcement. Or, rather, the one where he had already made this announcement to the live studio audience several hours earlier.

That live studio audience had spread the news after the taping, the networks had picked it up, and by the time the show actually aired, the entire TV-watching public already knew. Now Jon Stewart, being the media-savvy fellow that he is, had guessed in advance that this would happen. And so when The Daily Show began that day, he looked into the camera and said to the TV audience, “You probably know things these people [in the studio] don’t know yet, which is a twist on things but — we’ll get there.”

Maybe if I were a regular TV watcher I wouldn’t have found this as completely mind blowing as I did. But Jon Stewart was speaking to an audience of the future — one that didn’t exist yet — one that would know something and be affected by something that, at the moment he said those words in the present tense, affected no one. At that moment, there was no TV audience that already knew “some stuff that these folks here in the studio” didn’t. But he knew that they would know and so he was addressing them in their future state. And he said, “We’ll get to it. We’ll get there.”

When you think about it, that’s really how time and life work. We have the live studio audience right here, right now — you and me and the people we know and love and don’t love. And then we have the much, much larger TV audience of the future: our grandchildren, our great-great-great-grandchildren, our farms and cities in the year 2200, the entirety of the human and natural worlds of the future that will all be affected by what happens and how we live our lives here and now. Our lives will make sense to them only in the context of things they know but which we can’t possibly fathom. Truly, we are speaking and acting in the present tense but being watched and heard by the audience of the future.

Getting Past the Culture of “Now”

The culture of our secular society is oriented primarily around the live studio audience. We are a “now”-focused people. Our attention spans are short and, research indicates, growing shorter than that of a goldfish. Politicians focus their work on the next election; corporate executives make decisions based on predicted quarterly or yearly earnings. Our economic policies are intended to grow the economy and create jobs now, regardless of the painful environmental or long-term social impacts they may cause. We seek immediate gratification in food and entertainment, despite health risks to others and ourselves. And tragically, in both our interpersonal and our global relations, we all too often resort to violence to force swift results rather than doing the slow, painstaking work of building relationships for a lasting peace. The “now” culture sacrifices the future for the present, as if the future were an expendable resource placed on the earth to serve us, the live studio audience.

By contrast, the ethic of the religious counterculture calls the live studio audience to orient our present-tense words and deeds toward the TV audience of the future. We are not here to preen in the spotlight, but to serve the universe that grants us our moment in it. From a religious point of view, we...