If you’re an avid reader of Christian blogs, you’ve probably run across Stuff Christians Like more times than you can count in the past few weeks. I happen to like the John Acuff’s oft-witty always insightful observations about the church.
Yesterday he wrote about Christians counting swearing in movies:
I have some friends that are like the Siskel and Ebert of movie profanity. (I know that one of them is dead, but if I said “Siskel and Roper” I’m not sure the opener would have worked the same way.) Whenever I ask them how a movie was, the first thing they say is, “It was pretty good, but it had 14 swears. Couple of S’s, one GD, seven F’s and one MF.”...
Why give other sinful things a free pass? Why just pick on swearing? Shouldn’t we also count things like idolatry? Anytime someone in a movie drives a really nice car or lives in a home bigger than us and we feel a little jealous of their life, that should count as one “idol.” I mean every super hero movie on the planet is written so that men in the audience think, “It would be so cool to be that guy.” Sorry Iron Man. Or stealing, anytime someone steals a car in a movie to chase down a bad guy that should count as stealing.
Such a good point to ponder really. I’ve often wondered about this very thing in relation to violence as well. It seems that depictions of murder are far more acceptable than depictions of sex.
So, is there a hierarchy of acceptability with the depiction of sin in movies? Is there a line that a movie has to cross in order to become unacceptable? Other thoughts?
