Early in my career in acting, some of my colleagues justified their taking part in projects I felt dishonored the Lord by saying: “It’s just a movie.” My grad-school professors drilled it into our heads that media reflects culture, it doesn’t create culture. But even as a 24-year-old I knew that if media didn’t impact the choices of audience members, advertisers should have to pay back billions.
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Last night we were watching an episode of Vindication (a crime show made by Christians, with salvation in season 1, discipleship in season 2, and strategies against corruption and weaponization of law enforcement in season 3). In one scene, a character was eating popcorn, and I hit the pause button and went and popped some of my own! If you can think of a time you made a choice because of something you watched in a show, you know media has an impact on our behavior.
When Clark Gable took off his shirt in It Happened One Night and audiences saw he wasn’t wearing a T-shirt, T-shirt sales plummeted. After a toilet was first shown in a film, toilet sales skyrocketed, and after Ferris Beuhler’s Day Off there was a rush on skipping school to spend the day in the big city.
Producers of those films probably weren’t intending those results, but I believe many filmmakers do set out to change belief, behavior, and culture itself.
Larry Poland founded MasterMedia, which — among many elements of its ministry — has a prayer calendar with a different media leader and cultural influencer every day of the year. Poland got started by asking to meet with media executives. He said he expected when he got inside these production studios he’d find people dancing around cauldrons intentionally corrupting the culture, but what he found was broken people sharing their brokenness with the world.
I do believe that’s partly true. The Pilgrims left England for Holland so they could worship freely, but they ultimately moved to America because the Dutch were corrupting their children.
There Is a Conspiracy
But recently I discovered there actually is a documented conspiracy to corrupt our culture through media.
W. Cleon Skousen was an agent for the FBI, and his task was to track communists in America. After retiring, in 1958 he wrote The Naked Communist, which identifies 45 goals of the Communist Party USA. In 1963 those goals for taking over the U.S. without warfare were read into the Congressional Record. Reading through them helps make sense of the direction America is heading.
At least six of those goals are being carried out in the media industry:
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy, and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”
As Marxists have been achieving goal 21 they’ve been using media to promote many of their other goals, and if journalist Andrew Breitbart is right, the six goals above are their most important, since “politics is downstream from culture.”
Why do they focus on making our culture less moral? Maybe they read John Adams: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Then they made it one of their goals to discredit him and his peers:
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the “common man.”
Degeneracy also works toward these goals:
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a “religious crutch.”
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”
When Sam Brownback spoke at the IFA Policy & Prayer event last October, he said:
“Religion is the only entity with enough loyalty to it — and enough people’s hearts pull toward it — to stand up to a government. It’s the only entity. Business can’t do that; civic societies can’t do that. But people by faith will move, and they’ll move against a government if they are so moved.
This is why Marxists are using media to corrupt culture.
I’ve also heard the “it’s just a movie” argument used to justify consuming media that points people away from the Lord and His ways.
In the same way commercials are intended to make you more likely to consume specific products, films are intended to make you more likely to think and behave the way the writers and producers want you to.
Subtracting Truth
Even films about real people and historical incidents can be used to move minds down an intended path.
Ty Warner, the inventor of Beanie Babies is upset by how he’s portrayed in the film The Beanie Bubble, and Michael Oher is upset about the way he was portrayed 14 years ago in The Blind Side. While performing my play that tells the rest of the Chariots of Fire story I was given a letter from Eric Liddell’s sister. She did not appreciate how she was portrayed in Chariots of Fire. The screenwriter, Colin Welland (who won the Oscar for Best Screenplay in 1981), shows her urging her brother to give up running so he could focus on missions. Eric’s sister wrote that she always encouraged him to run. Why did Welland pick her as a negative voice? It’s challenging to find dramatic tension in the Liddell biographies. I didn’t find quotes from anyone saying anything bad about him! In order to create a dramatic arc I made one of his students the protagonist of my play.
Usually artistic license is taken to raise the stakes, but producers can have darker motives. Many eradicate the Christian history that’s an integral part of the very story they’re telling. It’s been a while since I’ve seen Hamilton, which was the hottest ticket on Broadway for years, but I don’t remember any mention of God. Yet, our Founding Fathers spoke eloquently about the importance of God in our fledgling nation. If you’ve been following and/or taking part in the Command the Foreword initiative, you know our nation was dedicated to the Lord in 1607 and almost every state constitution mentions God in its preamble.
The movie Saving Private Ryan leaves out the fact that the Tom Hanks character, who risked his life and those of others to save one soul trapped behind enemy lines, was a chaplain in real life.
I took a break from writing this article to jump on a video call with IFA contributing writers Joyce Swingle (my bride) and Lori Meed to talk about the film Golda. Meed pointed out the filmmakers left out the miracles that took place during the Yom Kippur War.
Other Subtractions
The fictional film Mission: Impossible II — distributed in 2000 — is about a big pharma exec buying a virus his firm has the cure for. At the end of the script, there’s a line that didn’t make the final cut of the film. In the script, Ethan Hunt’s handler was supposed to say:
“Anyone whose operations require the levels of disinformation that yours do is bound to get a little flak here and there. You try flogging the stories to CNN I’ve had to come up with about what’s been going on around here the last few days. At any rate, it’s been most instructive — what they’ll swallow, or what they’ll broadcast with a straight face.“
More than two decades ago, some high-level person at Paramount didn’t want these tactics exposed.
Adding Sin
Almost every secular film promotes sex out of wedlock. Because we’ve kept buying the tickets, sexual perversion has gotten worse.
Planned Parenthood sends out a script doctor who helps filmmakers tailor their scripts to encourage abortion. Phelim McAleer reported on June 9, 2022, in the Unreported Story Society newsletter:
Her name is Caren Spruch. Spruch told The Washington Post in 2019 that, in addition to Obvious Child, Planned Parenthood has advised Hollywood on more than 150 movies and shows. These include the shows Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Jane the Virgin, The Deuce, The Fosters, and Parenthood.
If your goal is to control the world, that’s going to be easier if there are fewer people. Films push not only abortion but also sexual lifestyles that leave out human reproduction. It’s almost easier to list secular shows that don’t have this element in their stories.
Use Discernment
We vote for what we want to see by how we spend our dollars on media, so spend wisely.
Pray for discernment across America and around the world. Pray for your children and grandchildren to have discernment in what they take into their precious souls. Note that a television show is called a program. We are being programmed, but we can choose the code. Pray that the Lord would raise up more Christian filmmakers to use the gifts and the vision He has given them to create content that points people to Him, and vote for more of them by seeing their shows.
Do you think the media shapes culture, the culture shapes media, or is it some hybrid phenomenon? Share your ideas below!
Rich Swingle has taught and performed in 39 nations across six continents, mostly in his own one-man plays, five of which were performed Off-Broadway. He has performed in more than 45 film projects. He and his bride, Joyce Swingle, another contributing writer for IFA, now have 41 “screen children.” The Swingles live in New York City. Visit www.RichDrama.com for more information. Photo Credit: Aleks Dorohovich on Unsplash.