HOLLYWOOD AND HER FRIENDS

Hollywood has two friends, the universities, and the media. They're tight, so tight, that when you hear one speaking and then the other, they're saying the same thing. Their thoughts and words carry the same message, so what we hear, we hear over and over and over again.These three friends pretty much control what people see and hear. The question is, "What are these three BFFs talking about?"

Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda expert for the Nazi's said, "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." What if the message of the three amigos is a false one? Then that's what we'll hear, pretty much all the time, and that's what we'll believe.

Let's take an example from Hollywood concerning this unified message of the big three. They make many a movie or a TV program for one purpose: to deliver a message to you and me. Many times this message comes packaged a speech, usually by a leading actor in the movie, and at the end of the show, just so you won't miss it and you'll go home with it. Two examples come to mind.

KNOCK, KNOCK

Hollywood made a movie in 1949, called, "Knock on Any Door," with Humphrey Bogart as a lawyer who's defending someone who killed a policeman during a robbery. The accused insists he's innocent; he comes from a troubled background: after his father was jailed, leaving the family without any income, he fell into petty thievery and wound up in jail repeatedly despite attempts by a social worker and his girlfriend to set him straight.

SPOILER ALERT!

As the plot develops in the courtroom, we at last learn that the accused has been lying to his lawyer (and us) all along: he's as guilty as can be and finally admits it on the stand as he crumbles into a crying mass of humanity under the withering cross-examination of the D. A.

We, the audience, have now been set up for the climactic speech by Humphrey Bogart will deliver the message of the movie as he dramatically and eloquently tells the courtroom that his client didn't kill the policeman, "You did, you and me."

He goes on to deliver the message: his client is more a victim of society than a natural-born killer. He arouses sympathy for the plight of those trapped by birth and circumstance in a dead-end existence. And then comes the reason for the title of the movie as Humphrey Bogart tells us, "Knock on any door in the slums and you'll find somebody just like him."

The message: it's not his fault that he murdered a policeman; blame society.

COMPULSION

In another movie, called "Compulsion," based on the horrific 1924 case in which Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two brilliant students at the University of Chicago, kidnap a 14-year-old named Bobby Franks, kill him by bludgeoning him with a chisel, and drive to a lake in nearby Indiana where they dumped his body in a culvert. All this in order to show that they're a superior species not bound by any morality. (They read and liked Nietzsche.) At the time, it caused an uproar in America that two college students would do such a thing, just because.

SPOILER ALERT

The movie stars Orson Welles who portrays Clarence Darrow, the lawyer of the two killers. They made the movie to get to Welles' long, way long, and, and, in my opinion, boring speech at the end, by which he saves the two monsters from capital punishment by his eloquence. (In real life, at the trial, the speech took 12 hours.) The long, way long speech delivered in the commanding voice of Orson Welles, is an extended argument against the death penalty based upon Clarence Darrow's view that man has no free will: they couldn’t choose to commit or refrain from crime, but were conditioned completely by their constitutions and environment. So, according to that logic, nobody is accountable for any wrong.

In real life, Darrow's eloquence carried the day. The judge was weeping whenDarrow finished and spared their lives by a sentence of life in prison. 

TODAY

As we're seeing in our society, Hollywood, the universities, and the media want to shut down speech they deem "politically incorrect," (politically incorrect speech is anything they do not approve of, such as any major doctrine of Christianity like the atonement, the deity of Christ, et. al) and they are unanimous in this. And they are powerful. In other words, they want to shut you up. As Stella Moribito has written:

 ". . .political correctness ends up separating people as never before.  PC not only squashes civil discourse, but creates a strange and rigid polarization in society that spawns destructive caricatures of others.  . . . The point of this kind of propaganda is to centralize power by first dividing people, quite often by demonizing those who don’t subscribe to the narrative.  It breaks up personal relationships.  And this allows those wielding power to control who says what to whom, and to dictate who relates to whom.

"People who obey the narrative are allowed to partake of society, while those who don’t subscribe to the narrative end up as 'nonpersons.' Personal relationships are the ultimate source of human power.  Ground zero for functioning relationships is the family unit.  That’s exactly why the family is the prime target for destruction by today’s forces of political correctness."

NOW FOR THE GOOD NEWS

But what Hollywood, the universities, and the media can't control are your private conversations, man-to-man, one-on-one, conversations that carry the pollen of truth, truths like grace, the atonement, the resurrection, faith alone in Christ alone. It is this private sector that all totalitarian governments hate and want to destroy because they can't control it any more than the religious leaders could control the private conversations of Philip and the Ethiopian treasurer or Peter and Cornelius or Paul and Lydia, then Paul and the Philippian jailer, and innumerable others. The power of person to person conversation, like the private nighttime conversation recorded in John 3 which has so echoed down the centuries that we're still listening to it and studying it.

Many of those who study evangelism have written that the day of mass evangelism is over in America; it's by the private, one-on-one conversations about the crucified and risen Christ that the seed is planted, watered, and the harvest comes. Christ commanded those in the churches to get out there and start talking. (The Great Commission) Paul cannot conceive a church that's focused inward.