Cultural Abandonment by The Church & Shoddy Christian Art Has Cost Us Our Culture

If Christians are going to change the soiled and now soured diaper on our nation’s collective bottom, then we must get into entertainment and the arts with some killer tunes, scripts and talent and light this country up—or we’re doomed to watch gay cowboy movies, Kesha sing/strip and listen to Little Wayne screeds until Angry Jesus returns.

So … what is the main anti-Hollywood noise machine, i.e., the Church, doing about the stuff spilling forth from TV and radio? Is the church’s answer to our cultural crassness low budget crap movies with D grade spirit-filled actors?  BTW, the D grade actors should thank God Christians make low budget/unimaginative movies or they’d be schlepping at Denny’s.  I watched 10 minutes of one “Christian” movie the other day.  I felt like pulling an Elvis and shooting my TV it was so horrid. Nothing like trying to beat something with nothing.

Which leads me to ask the church the tough question of why haven’t we championed serious involvement in the arts by our congregants versus just hissing from the lattices of our stained glass windows? I have actually heard pastors condemn those who wanted to pursue a career in Hollywood and in the music industry. I can’t think of a more needy place for serious and excellent Christian involvement than the arts.

Yeah, Christians have abandoned and eternally vilified a place of ridiculously powerful influence.

At this moment in American history, I’m hard pressed to find a focal point more in need of our missionary budget than the entertainment industry.

America is ripe for intelligent and creative Christian artists to effectively infiltrate it. Given the huge influence culture has on all of us, the internal rot our nation is undergoing in its character, virtue and faith and the dicey 21st century environment we have, we must try to influence the realm that has the maximum impact on this nation.

The call to impact the entertainment industry is just as valid as the call to go to the mission field or to be a pastor, and any minister who tells you artists any different is straight up goofy.

Look, Church, impacting our nation doesn’t just entail throwing up a pre-fab metal building and preaching genteel sermons to a self-marginalized people group while picketing and protesting things we hate. There is greatness to Christ’s great commission that takes the Christian, motivated by love, out of the four walls of our churches to the institutions and industries that influence our nation—and the entertainment industry figures immensely into that call.

Historically, Christianity had a huge impact on Western society. Not just in a ministerial sense through the Church or politically through our government, but artistically upon our culture. Believe or not, the Church communicated a Christian worldview; it mainstreamed character, faith and virtue, and not just through the primacy of preaching or through lobbying and legislation. How? Through the powerful impact of the artist’s brush, the writer’s pen and the poet’s verse.

So, Christian reader: picket, protest and boycott whatever and whomever in Hollywood who you think needs an economical smoke signal alerting them to the fact that you think they suck. However, at the same time, get on the offense. Sharpen your skills, you artists. Put down your clove cigarette and your frappachino. Get off your christian stretch pants, quit playing with and preaching to the converted, and go get dirty in the real world where there is a real impact to be made and true rewards to be had.