Why are entertainment choices important?
While there are a
number of reasons, the following three interrelated reasons seem most
important.
1.
Whenever we consume a type of entertainment we
encourage producers to create more of that type.
We live in a market economy where businesses only survive when they meet the
demands of consumers. What we consume signals our demands—if we consume and
thereby demand smutty entertainment, producers will meet that need by producing
more smutty entertainment; if we consume wholesome or virtuous entertainment,
producers will meet that demand by producing more wholesome and virtuous
entertainment. The type of entertainment created is important because it
creates our ideas of normalcy, which leads to the second point.
2.
Entertainment creates moral normative windows.
The average American spends upwards of 30 hours per week in front of a
screen—that is far more time than they spend interacting with people in real
life. Because of this our ideas of what is good and normal are being formed by
the things that entertain us. The sad fact is that even Christians are being
more formed by what they watch than what God says. This fact explains why the
behavior of Christians is indistinguishable from non-Christians and unrecognizable
when compared to the Bible. Take just a couple of examples. Our movies, shows,
and music over the last fifty years normalized first co-habitation and then
homosexual relations. While the Bible hasn’t changed a word, Christian’s
attitudes and behaviors have as they have been formed by the norms in our
culture’s entertainment. Right now only fifteen of every hundred Evangelical
Christians is a virgin on his or her wedding night and a growing majority
support same sex marriage. The numbers on these two issues were quite different
fifty years ago, but by portraying these sins as normal and good our
entertainment has created new ideas of what is normal and good and these ideas
have changed the thoughts and patterns of behavior of everyone, including Christians.
This is important because the way that people live affects all of us. No
political structure or candidate can create freedom and order; it is only
individuals living moral lives that allows these two things to flourish together.
The community is the product of individual behavior, what we watch affects our
individual behavior, so ultimately what we watch affects the happiness and flourishing
of our communities. Take for example sex before marriage. The number one predictor
of both imprisonment and poverty is not a person’s race or class but rather
whether or not they are raised by a single mother. Our society has normalized single
motherhood and portrayed it as a good, which has led to a vast increase in out
of wedlock births. These out of wedlock births are the number one driver of poverty
and crime in our country. We think that what we see on television is normal and
good and we do what is normal and good, but this is harming our communities. What
is more these thought patterns and behaviors often hinder the Gospel message,
which brings us to the last point.
3.
Sinful entertainment creates plausibility structures
that often make it more difficult to accept the Gospel and grow in faith.
A plausibility structure determines what type of information you will consider
fairly, i.e. find plausible, and what you will dismiss out of hand. For
example, if I lived in North Korea and someone told me that the United
States was a free and prosperous country, I would not fairly listen to what
they had to say. Everything that I would have seen and heard growing up in
North Korea would have made their idea completely unbelievable to me, absolutely
implausible to me. In the same way, what I watch and listen to here in the
United States forms my plausibility structures—it determines what I think is
possible and believable. If I watch entertainment that portrays sexual
immorality as normal and enjoyable I am going to think that sexual immorality
(things like sex before marriage or homosexual activity) is normal and
enjoyable. That belief is going to make Christianity seem implausible to me,
for how could a good God prohibit what is normal and enjoyable? At this point
one of two things will happen: 1) I will do what I want and ignore God’s
prohibition and thereby ignore God or 2) I will think God is stupid or evil for
prohibiting something that is normal and enjoyable. If I am not a Christian,
these beliefs will likely keep me from coming to Christ; if I am a Christian
these beliefs will either lead me from the faith or prevent me from growing in
faith.
The
reason why entertainment’s influence is so powerful is that it works on us at a
subconscious level. No one listens to a song or watches a show and thinks “I
don’t think premise A is true; or, I think there might be a logical fallacy in
that conclusion.” These ideas go straight into our subconscious without any
type of rational criticism. Because they exist there we often cannot recognize
them and therefore think that “what I watch is no big deal because it doesn’t really
affect me.” But it does. It affects our thoughts, which affect our acts, which
affect our communities, which taken together affects our ability to receive the
Gospel and grow in faith.
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