All good Christians know the evils of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. All good Christians know that heavy metal music is of the devil and R-rated movies are wrong. All good Christians know these things. So what's wrong with me?
To me, the real threat to the Christian mind is not the obvious evil, but the "hidden" one. Sing a song about "Satan rules" and nothing gets by us -- it's evil. Sing a song about "spending the night together", and it's a love song -- what's wrong with that? Rarely do we examine our church song content for errors because they're ... church songs. And the G or PG rated movie should be no problem at all, right?
Last night my wife watched the new NBC show, "Grease - You're the One that I Want", and I was reminded all over again how much I despise this show. My wife loves it, but to me it represents this same creeping evil that so few bother to evaluate because it's a "harmless" little ditty about high school life in the 50's. What could be wrong with that?
Meet Rizzo, the leader of the Pink Ladies, a group of tough girls that hang out with the T-Birds, a group of tough guys at Rydell High. Near the beginning, Rizzo, a high school senior, believes she is pregnant. Well, now, I wonder how that happened? Her boyfriend, Kenickie, tries to "do the right thing" as the father of her child, but Rizzo assures him he's not the father. Hmmm ... I wonder what that says about Rizzo? And, of course, there is Rizzo's popular solo. To Rizzo, being good is "the worst thing I could do." Amen, sister! Preach it!
Meet Danny and Sandra. Danny Zuko is more or less the leader of the T-Birds, a high school ruffian, who meets Sandy Olsson over the summer. Sandy is a good girl who genuinely falls in love with Danny. Both are surprised, however, when they end up in the same school for their senior year. Sandy is stuck. She's a genuinely good girl in love with a genuinely bad boy, but she doesn't know he's bad. Danny is a bad boy trying to become good against the flow because he really does care about Sandy. So Danny makes some changes. He takes up track, earns a letter, and actually graduates from high school. So this is the warm and heartening "bad boy turned good" story, right? No. In the end, it is Sandy who changes. She turns slutty, Danny tosses his letter jacket, and Sandy sings, "If you're filled with affection you're too shy to convey, meditate in my direction. Feel your way." Instead of turning into a good guy, we take the genuinely good "Sandra Dee" and make her just as bad as the rest, dropping any advances Danny made in the process.
The message is clear. Don't try to be good. It's boring. Just do whatever you want. In the words of Rizzo, "Even though the neighborhood thinks I'm trashy and no good, I suppose it could be true, but there are worse things I could do."
And we smile and snap our fingers to the catchy 50's-style music and enjoy the romp through memory lane (or something like it) and miss entirely that this "fun" little "harmless" piece is exactly what Paul was talking about in Romans 1 when he said, "Though they know God's decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them" (Rom. 1:32). Now, maybe approving of Grease isn't all that bad, but when we accept this kind of message without evaluation, that is the worst thing we could do.
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