Art or Entertainment?

For centuries the upper crust had an appreciation for the arts. But to enjoy the arts required person to think, to meditate, and to engage the mind and the soul. This new brand of entertainment, increasingly being enjoyed by the masses, was mindless. It was “about gratification rather than edification, indulgence rather than transcendence, reaction rather than contemplation, escape from moral instruction rather than submission to it.” 

In other words, they new forms of entertainment gaining popularity with the ordinary man were nothing more than senseless fun—and loved for just that reason. The elite hated entertainment for the same reasons that the working class delighted in it. The elite loved art, Shakespeare, excellent, thought-provoking literature and classical music while the masses were swooped off their feet by dime novels, ear-splitting music, and trash of all kinds.

Gary Gilley, This Little Church Went to Market, pg.25

We Become What We Enjoy Looking At

There is the myth that what we watch doesn’t affect us. However, various studies have shown that violent video games and other media can produce both short-term and long-term aggressive behavior in adolescents and adults; and we hardly need a study to prove the degenerative effects of pornography use on everything from marital relationships to how young people view sex. Why would advertisers spend billions for ads if what we see doesn’t affect our behavior? Let me put it even more strongly: we become what we enjoy looking at.

Erwin W. Lutzer, The Church in Babylon: Heeding the Call to Be a Light in the Darkness, pg.124

Entertainment is the Left’s Identity

For important reasons liberal democracy and entertainment found enthusiastic allies in each other. Entertainment became the most obvious and direct manifestation of freedom that liberalism offered humanity and, at the same time, the most tangible confirmation of the dominant status of the democratic man and his tastes. To be sure, his dominance was larger, deeper, and more consequential and by no means exhausted itself in an inner necessity to have fun. And yet the omnipresence of entertainment was something by which the democratic man became easily recognized: it was his trademark, his coat of arms, his—so to speak—symbolic identity card.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.37

Our Culture is Living in an Alternate Reality

In today’s world entertainment is not just a pastime or style, but a substance that permeates everything: schools and universities, upbringing of children, intellectual life, art, morality, and religion. It has become dear to the hearts of students, professors, entrepreneurs, journalists, engineers, scientists, writers, even priests. Entertainment imposes itself psychologically, intellectually, socially, and also, strange as it might sound, spiritually. A failure to provide human endeavors—even the most noble ones—with an entertaining wrapping is today unthinkable and borders on sin.

The modern sense of entertainment increasingly resembles what Pascal long ago called divertissement: that is, an activity…that separates us from the seriousness of existence and fills this existence with false content. Divertissement is thus not only being entertained in the ordinary sense of the word, but living and acting within artificial rules that organize our lives, setting conventional and mostly trivial goals which we pursue, getting involved in disputes and competitions, aspiring to honors-making careers, and doing everything that would turn our thoughts away from fundamental existential matters. By escaping the questions of the ultimate meaning of our own lives, or of human life in general, our minds slowly get used to that fictitious reality, which we take for the real one, and are lured by its attractions.

The difference between Pascal’s divertissement and today’s entertainment—or rather, having fun, as it has become customary to say—is that the modern man, no matter how much a desire to have fun has captured his soul, knows very well that it is an artificial construction, not the real thing. Whether some other, more objective reality exists is to him a matter of indifference, and if told there is not, he would probably still remain unmoved. Having neutralized all musings about objectivity, the modern man takes pride in his deep involvement in entertainment, which in the absence of other objective references he considers natural.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.36-37

The LEFT’s Real Power

The Left’s real power does not derive from any covert conspiracy but rather from a state-within-a-state that is very much in plain sight.  He Left doesn’t need to rely on the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA because it already has three of the most powerful institutions of our society.  They Left dominates academia, Hollywood, and the media.  These are the three most powerful megaphones of our culture and they are the primary instruments for disseminating information to people, especially to young people. In a democratic society, whoever controls the flow of information controls public opinion that ultimately decides all questions.  This state-within-a-state is the strongest, deadliest weapon of progressivism and the Democratic Party. Without it neither progressives nor Democrats could get as far as they have, or mount the kind of scorched-earth opposition they have against Trump.

Dinesh D’Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, pg.196

Are You Violating the Spirit of the Law?

When we watch sex on the silver screen, we are asking unbelievers to behave in ways we would never tolerate among ourselves. Yet we tolerate it so we can enjoy entertainment we otherwise couldn’t enjoy. We outsource our depravity so we can live within the letter of the law, even while violating the spirit.

Tim Challies, Sex on the Silver Screen – Outsourcing Depravity

Is it Logical?

How logical is it to expose our eyes and ears to violence and profanity and wickedness in the form of “entertainment” or “games” and justify it as such, yet expect our sense of justice, purity and righteousness to be outraged when we see something similar in real life?

Gail J. Storkel, Logic: The Right Use of Reason in the Inquiry After Truth, Study Guide, pg.79

Read a Book — Drop the TV

A student’s freedom to read is nor seriously injured by someone’s banning [of] a book on Long Island or in Anaheim or anyplace else….  Television clearly does impair the student’s freedom to read, and it does so with innocent hands, so to speak.  Television does not ban book, it simply displaces them.

Neil Postman

Good Education!

I find television to be very educational.  Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book.

Groucho Marx

Entertainment Now Is Moral Authority

Film and [other] visual entertainment are a pervasively important part of our culture, an extremely significant influence on the way our society operates.  People in the film industry don't want to accept the responsibility that they had a hand in the way the world is loused up.  But, for better or worse, the influence of the church, which used to be all-powerful, has been usurped by film.  Films and television tell us the way we conduct our lives, what is right and wrong.  When Burt Reynolds is drunk on beer in Hooper and racing cops in his rocket car, that reinforces the recklessness of the kids who've been drawn to the movie in the first place and are probably sitting in the theater drinking beer.

George Lucas, cited by Ron Rhodes, The Culting of America, p.125

Consequences of Illicit Sex?

NO ONE ON TELEVISION PAYS THE PRICE OF ILLICIT SEX.  YOU ONLY DO THAT IN REAL LIFE.


Josh McDowell and Dick Day, "Why Wait?" p.41 (caps in the original)

Creating the Herd

Entertainment, advertising, and television surround us with disorganized clamor of yearning and alienation, while education systematically turns students into autonomous units of will and ego, of “empowerment” and “self-esteem.”

That combined influence of education, popular culture, and television, has already produced results in our society.  One result is a large pool of people who respond readily to manipulation because they have been cut off from the knowledge (of God, of culture, of right and wrong) that would enable them to sift their experience and evaluate it.  Another result is a breed of young people who have learned to feel good about themselves while behaving in ways that are ruthlessly anti-social.  The same influences create both the herd, and the psychopath who cuts from the herd.



Brooks Alexander, “Abolished Man: From Instruction to Indoctrination in the New Education,” SCP [Spiritual Counterfeits Project] Journal, Vol. 16:4, P.5-6

Movie Discernment

When you go to the theater, do you simply let the story wash over you?  Or do you have the skills to analyze what a film is saying?  A movie generally communicates its perspective through the lead character.  What the main character learns or discovers is what the filmmakers want the audience to learn. . . .

When watching a movie, we should be asking:  What worldview is the movie communicating?  Are there elements that are true?  Are there elements that are false and destructive?  If Christians do not learn to ask those questions, they may well absorb nonbiblical ideas without even being aware of it.  T.S. Eliot once noted that the serious books we read do not influence us nearly as much as the books we read for fun (or the movies we watch for entertainment).  Why?  Because when we are relaxing, our guard is down and we engage in the "suspension of disbelief" that allows us to enter imaginatively into the story.  As a result, the assumptions of the author or screenwriter may go unnoticed and seep all the more deeply into our consciousness. When we "suspend disbelief," we must take care not to suspend our critical faculties.


Nancy Pearcey, "Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, & Meaning,"  p.253

Television Is About Control

Television is all about control.  When we watch it, we allow it to control us.  There is an unspoken agreement between the television watcher and the programmer in which the watcher trusts the programmer and simply soaks up what is being transmitted.  This has been preconditioned into us by decades of tele-watching.

Alan  Morrison, "God TV," SCP Journal, Vol.29:4-30:1, 2006, p.23

Is Your Reason Replaced By Emotion?

There is a big difference between processing information on a printed page and assimilating data conveyed through a series of moving pictures.  Images have a way of evoking an emotional response.  Pictures are effective at pushing rational discourse — linear logic — into the background.  The chief aim of television is to sell products and entertain audiences.  Generally speaking, television seeks to provide emotional gratification.  As a visual medium, its programming is designed to be amusing.  Substance gives way to sounds and sights.  Stirring feelings obscure hard facts.  Dramatic images drown out important issues.  Emotion replaces reason.

Arthur W. Hunt III, “Tomorrowland:  The Future Is Here — Isn’t It Mesmerizing?”  Christian Research Journal, Vol. 23/No. 1, p. 38

Hollywood's Agenda

We’ve always heard that Hollywood is about making money, but I think it’s really about an immoral or amoral agenda to promote lifestyles, relativism, compromise and shades of gray with no black and white. …

There is a force in that community that says more important than making $100 million is to plant seeds in the minds of young people that will take them away from Jude-Christian ethics. …

Like anything, if you’re exposed to it enough, you become numb to it and you don’t see its effects on you.  I tell the folks at our church it’s like eating cheesecake.  We wake up and can’t feel its effects.  But if we ate it and woke up with a big lump of fat that had appeared on our side, we’d say, “Whoa, that’s not good.”

It’s the cumulative effect that wears down our resistance.  The devil is willing to bide his time and wait for the end result.  Scripture tells us to resist the devil and he will flee from us (James 4:7) — but first it says to submit ourselves to God.

Michael Catt, senior pastor of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, GA.  Cited by Charles Chandler, “Hollywood’s Immoral Agenda,” Decision magazine April 2014, p18, 20

Think About Who Is Invited Into Your Home

Let's face it, television is an invention where you're entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your house!


Michael Landon, stated at a "Dean Martin Roast."  Cited by Franklin Graham, "Hollywood: Entertaining Ourselves To Death?" Decision magazine, April 2014, p.4