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A great many people criticize—rightly so—the mostly mindless tripe on television these days.  I’m going to encourage you to watch a little TV instead.  Especially when a network gets it right.

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is a weekly series where a crew of designers, architects and builders renovate the home of a deserving family.  First, the family is sent on a dream vacation and then the fun begins back home.  In seven days, the original home is demolished and beautifully rebuilt.  It’s Habitat for Humanity on steroids.  My wife, Kathy, says it’s a redemptive story every week.  She’s right.  Whether or not you are a person of faith, you ought to send kudos to ABC.  If you are a Christian, you should doubly do so.

Why?

C.S. Lewis, the respected Oxford don and writer of such wonderful children’s literature as The Chronicles of Narnia had an interesting twist on Christianity.  He believed that Christianity is not just the fulfillment of Judaism, but of every religion, since everyone is made in the image of God.  Thus, every system of belief gets at least part of the story right.

So, watch this show and write a letter to ABC.  Or get involved with groups like Habitat for Humanity.  William Wilberforce and the Clapham community of the nineteenth century were positive participants in society who sought to “make goodness fashionable.”  That means complimenting and encouraging those who get it right.  For myself, I’m going to read The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, to see where he gets the story right.

When Spiro Agnew was Vice President, he lashed out at his political opponents by calling them “nattering nabobs of negativity.”  That’s not a very elegant phrase, but it was memorable.  Christians shouldn’t be “nattering nabobs of negativity.”  But we usually are.  We seem often bent on sniffing out where and when the wider world gets it wrong.  We owe it to God and others to affirm where and when the wider world gets part of the story right.  Christians lose nothing in affirming cultural goodness—regardless if it is done by a skeptic, saint… or a television network.