"'The Blind Side's' removal from LifeWay’s shelves sends an ominous ...unbiblical message: Christians need not only to be 'not to be of the world,' but also must be sheltered from the world’s realities."
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What a ridiculous statement. Refusing to voluntarily place sin before myself is a far cry from being sheltered from the realities of life. Using this author’s reasoning, all Christians should go out and try drugs (each of them mind you) and visit a strip club at least once in his life. Every Christian woman should have an abortion somewhere along the way. What an incredible misunderstanding of the holiness of God, to which we are called.
Why is it that my voice always seems to be loudest when I am saying the dumbest things?
Haven’t seen “Blind Side” but someone told me it’s an inspiring film
My take is that it is readily available from other retailers (Amazon for example), so why would a Christian bookstore need to sell it.
1) This movie is not a call to Christ, and not on par with Scripture. If a Christian store doesn’t want to carry it, well alrighty then.
2) I’d like to take a look at what is on the shelves and nightstands at home and in the Netflix queue of the people who hollered the loudest. Just sayin’.
I enjoyed The Blind Side, but thought it had some “problems” from a moral point of view. Most Christian Moms don’t teach sexual self-control by threatening to emasculate their college bound boys if they get in trouble. And I was disappointed in its very hesitant, watered down depiction of a Christian family. They seemed nominally Christian, and did a good, noble thing. Great.
It’s just a movie, and Lifeway is a business that has every right to set standards for what they sell. They never said Christians should not see this movie. They just had issues with some things in it and decided not to put it in their product line.
The fact is, The Blind Side, as it is, would probably not have passed Hollywood’s own censorship code from the days when it regulated its own moral content. So why should a Christian business not be at least as careful as secular entertainment companies used to be? Because it doesn’t want to follow cultural trends? Good for them.
People often overlook the potential to be influenced. That is, they reduce the situation to two choices: either we’re aware of things or we’re sheltered from them. But there are at least two other possibilities: aware but not influenced, and aware and influenced (harmed).
It’s naive to think that we can watch just anything and not be influenced by it. On the other hand, it’s oversimplification to think that because a piece of film/fiction/etc. depicts wicked people behaving wickedly viewers/readers are automatically influenced/harmed by it. There’s a highly individual element when it comes to what influences whom in what ways.
LifeWay shouldn’t be castigated for wanting to be careful about what sort of influence their products have.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
I totally, totally agree with the spirit of CMC’s post. It is critically important that we are aware of the ugly, sin cursed realities of this earth. Illustrating those ugly realities is a necessary part of living on Earth. We may recoil or shriek or cover our eyes (and we should at some of the stuff portrayed in The Blind Side), but that is the result of sin and a depraved nature. The things illustrated in TBS are ugly, but one of the highlights of that movie is Michael Oher deciding to stand up and stand against the gangs and moral ugliness of his past. That’s something that anyone can and should celebrate.
If we do decide to start ‘protecting ourselves from the world’s evilness and filth, where do we draw the line? Do we ban Schindler’s List or avoid the Rwanadan Genocides in history class? What about Christian evils like the Catholic Inquisition? Do we portray the reality of war in a cleaned up, sanitized version so that it’s ‘morally safe’? Or do we deal with the realities as they are? The better, I think, to portray it as it is and have it turn our stomachs because it is evil.
I like what Eric Metaxas said, in his take on this:
Look, I’m as concerned about cultural messages as anyone. I’m a father. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to do this — and the wrong way definitely includes the permanent state of umbrage that many Christians seem to exhibit. They seem to have confused being salt and light with being curmudgeons. Here’s a particularly egregious case in point: the recent campaign to remove a great movie, “The Blind Side”, from the shelves of LifeWay Christian Stores. Remember, “The Blind Side” was denounced as Christian propaganda by many liberal critics. It explicitly depicts an affluent white Christian family devoting itself to helping an impoverished black kid because it’s the Christian thing to do. The film’s offense, according to a Florida pastor who started the campaign to have LifeWay stores pull the DVD, is that the movie contains “explicit profanity, God’s name in vain, and racial slurs.” It doesn’t seem to matter that the objectionable language is used to depict the palpably unpleasant world from which the young black man, Michael, was rescued by his adoptive family…
For outsiders looking in, the moral of the story is that “there is no pleasing Christians. They always seem to be looking for something to be mad about.”
We complain about the calumnies and caricatures of Christians on the big screen; and then, when an Academy-Award winning film shows us at our very best, we complain that scenes depicting harsh, inner-city reality are too true to life!
We are, in effect, making our participation contingent on all our possible objections being met beforehand. Since there are many people who would be happy if we stayed within our cultural and religious ghettos, it’s difficult to imagine how we Christians can hope to be taken seriously in cultural discussions and debates with this kind of an approach.
Concerns about the language in the film also miss the larger point: what made the Tuohys—the family depicted in the film—such great Christian exemplars wasn’t their non-use of profanity; it was their willingness to reach out and embrace someone in need.
If we Christians can’t get this, then maybe we really should refrain from commenting on culture in the first place.
"Our task today is to tell people — who no longer know what sin is...no longer see themselves as sinners, and no longer have room for these categories — that Christ died for sins of which they do not think they’re guilty." - David Wells
1) A moral decision is not inherently “umbrage” or being a “curmudgeon,” or being “mad.”
Maybe it’s just a standard or even a preference.
2) Schindler’s List absolutely should be “banned” from school classrooms, not because it is violent, but because it is pornographic..
[Wayne Wilson]1) A moral decision is not inherently “umbrage” or being a “curmudgeon,” or being “mad.”
Maybe it’s just a standard or even a preference.
2) Schindler’s List absolutely should be “banned” from school classrooms, not because it is violent, but because it is pornographic..
I should have noted that while I’m not in favor of what LifeWay did, I DO strongly believe in introducing people to things that are like that only when they are capable of handling it. I would not put TBS on for a roomful of seven year olds, but I would watch it with some twentysomething year old adults in my church (if it came up).
"Our task today is to tell people — who no longer know what sin is...no longer see themselves as sinners, and no longer have room for these categories — that Christ died for sins of which they do not think they’re guilty." - David Wells
Jay, I was more curious about at what age you would introduce them to Schindler’s List?
The naked inmates are hardly pornographic. Immodest mayhap and shouldn’t seen by immature audiences. But, we are talking about a concentration camp not a strip joint.
[Wayne Wilson]Jay, I was more curious about at what age you would introduce them to Schindler’s List?
Hoping to shed more light than heat..
Rob, apparently you didn’t see the film.
As long as Lifeway continues to sell theological obscenity such as the heretical material of Beth Moore, their taking The Blind Side off the shelves is like washing a few grains of sand off of a razor blade before chewing and swallowing it.
[Wayne Wilson]Jay, I was more curious about at what age you would introduce them to Schindler’s List?
It depends on the maturity of the (potential) viewers. There are 24 year olds that can’t handle Captain Planet, and then there are seventeen year olds that could understand and handle the nudity in SL.
For the record, I *had* to watch SL in high school (I attended a public high school and it was a mandated part of the curricula for World History). I handled it OK, but if I had the choice I probably would have waited a year or two to watch it, so I would have been 17-18. But that’s just me.
"Our task today is to tell people — who no longer know what sin is...no longer see themselves as sinners, and no longer have room for these categories — that Christ died for sins of which they do not think they’re guilty." - David Wells
@ Jay - there are ways to portray what happened without being flagrant, and I would not want my 17 or 18 year old son seeing SL in any setting. Frankly, with the rampant problems with pornography reported in the church, I wouldn’t want any man to watch the movie as it is currently formatted. It is certainly not necessary to watch such material in order to learn about the horrors and atrocities of WWII. I fail to see how such material can be reconciled with Psalm 101:3 or Philippians 4:8 (just to cite two verses). And, lest someone should suggest SL must be acceptable since the Bible portrays horrific scenes, there is a significant difference between written and visual portrayals of an event (as has been discussed elsewhere). It is far different to read that prisoners were stripped naked and forced to run in circles so doctors could pick out the strong and weak vs. watching the scene portrayed.
@ Alex - while I may not have expressed the sentiment in such extremes, I agree with the general thought behind your post.
Why is it that my voice always seems to be loudest when I am saying the dumbest things?
So, Jay, to you it is perfectly acceptable for Christians to watch other people engaged in sexual intercourse as a history lesson. Now that you have presented the idea that there is nothing inherently wrong with paying people to simulate copulation in an explicit manner, and for women to be stripped naked for a commercial enterprise, I have two questions:
1) Where do you draw the line? If scenes like that are acceptable for some historical reasons, are they acceptable for serious drama…like Shakespeare? Romantic comedies? Action movies? If not, why not?
2) On what biblical basis would you claim for treating actresses this way? (How well you think you can “handle” something is not the only issue involved.)
By the way, Schindler’s List did not add any historical light on the holocaust that other excellent films haven’t done already… such as Judgment at Nuremberg. If Schindler’s List did not exist, the world would still know about the holocaust, without moral compromise. A godly Christian girl in our church recently had the Schindler’s List matter thrown at her in her public High School. She refused to watch it, and asked to be allowed to substitute other films. I gave her a list of five or six worthy alternatives. Permission was granted. Since she is an excellent student, so it was a fine testimony to her moral standards.
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