Posts Tagged ‘Culture’

Sorry it’s been so long since the last post. The last month has been incredibly interesting. Long story short, we drove one car from East Texas to Chicago for Christmas, flew back, sold the other car in 1.5 weeks flat, packed, moved to Chicago, my wife jumped through tons of hoops to get as many of her credits as possible to transfer to her new school, and I flew back to Texas to finish my last few weeks here at Teen Mania.

Yup, that’s my excuse.

I hope to take some time this weekend to work out a lot of improvements and write several posts that have been stirring around my head. I’m still putting together a brand new home and brand new look for the blog. You’re gonna love it, but until then, here are a few headlines that have been catching my attention lately:
Fortunately, TV has no idea about teens’ real life
Christianity is no longer America’s default faith
More teens charged for taking inappropriate pictures of themselves
Facebook Whooper Sacrifice gets banned (It was definitely a unique app, but Facebook obviously didn’t like it!)
Even in bad economy, more teens are getting plastic surgery (Why? To improve self-esteem of course! Not surprising considering most tweens and teens think they’re overweight)
Football stardom now starts at 13

Why should that scare us?

Because it’s filled with plenty of content that will tempt our students and kids and taint their mind with sin, and it’s not easy to avoid. According to a recent study from the Parent’s Television Council, even innocent searches on YouTube like “Hannah Montana” quickly leads kids to explicit content.

A group called the Parent’s Television Council just finished a first-of-it’s-kind study of content on YouTube. Personally, I wasn’t surprised at all by what they found! I avoid surfing around YouTube because it’s so easy to stumble into videos that are downright shameful. It’s not a question of intention, but what you might stumble across in spite of your intentions that can pull you down a path of sin and destruction.

I’ll spare you the ridiculous details, but here’s a summary of what they found:

“Children who use YouTube to search for video clips of their favorite stars like Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers are exposed to some of the most offensive profanity in the English language. Video searches for these popular terms showed that YouTube’s gating procedures do not extend to text commentary. 

“And despite YouTube’s policy of not hosting sexually graphic videos, entering any number of popular search terms produced videos linked to ads for triple-X pornography – often without even requiring age verification.

“With nearly half of boys and a third of girls ages 13-17 naming YouTube as one of their top three favorite websites, no parent can afford to ignore these findings.  The results of this study should serve as a wake-up call for any parent concerned about graphic or indecent material on websites they perceive to be ‘safe’ for their children.” PTC President Tim Winter.

Most parents (and some youth pastors too?) still give a blind eye to what teens are doing online. We stop after telling them to not do “bad stuff” on the internet, but little do we realize that even when they surf for perfectly harmless things, the bad stuff finds them.

Is it too far to tell students to stay away from YouTube? Would students do it, even if we taught them to–and how should that affect what we teach them?

It’s a proven fact that teens watch a lot of TV (although they tend to multitask more often now, browsing the web or listening to music while channel surfing). Is anyone concerned about the garbage they’re consuming with all the hours they spend in front of the screen?

A recent Levi’s commercial went farther than most. Two teens, a girl and a boy, undress in front of each other while the camera focuses on the unmentionable areas. There’s a slew of extremely suggestive dialogue, like “You’ve never done this before, right?,” “I’m scared” and “Don’t you trust me?” We learn at the end that they’re really just jumping off a pier into a lake, but by then the damage is done.

This commercial is part of the “Live Unbuttoned” campaign, which you can read more about in the Parent’s Television Council’s newsletter, and it’s not the only one of its kind. The entire campaign is highly provacative and the creator’s intentions is clear–to provoke temptation-laden thoughts and images and connect the Levi’s brand with the concept of an young, sexually active lifestyle.

If you’re not convined that this sort of stuff is all over TV, you can also read a recent article from the Baptist Press highlights a few more “worst of the worst” moments on broadcast TV.

The Levi’s campaign is terrible and enough to convince me to not buy any more jeans from them until they clean up their act. But it raises an even bigger question. How do you protect students from the garbage that’s everywhere on TV? Especially the younger and much more impressionable ones?

I’m starting to teach and encourage students to give up TV. There’s very little good to it, but a whole lot of bad. It’s a high call but there’s nothing but benefits. My wife and I haven’t watched much for several years and our relationship is much richer, with each other and with the Lord. The students I do know that have given it up are not socially akward or maladjusted because of it. In fact, most of them have an even stronger walk with the Lord now.

Why wouldn’t you teach and encourage your students to give up TV? What’s the best way to actually do it?

The American Humanist Association launched an aggressive pro-atheism advertising campaign on city buses in Washington, DC last month. The transit agency says that they can’t reject advertising only because one individual or group finds it offensive, even after more than 200 people complained.

The message is simple: “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake.”

The struggles between faith in Christ and opposing belief systems are becoming more and more blatant. Students are asking deeper questions about their faith while simple and misleading arguments like this one are catching their attention and driving wedges between them and Jesus’ message of redemption.

Our response must be two-fold. It is important that when we discuss and present faith in Christ and what it means to be a Christian, whether with a group or individually, that we dig deeper. Jesus saved us from the penalty of sin and gave us eternal life in heaven through faith. But He also created the world and put the universe in order. He gives us purpose and meaning. He gives us answers to our deepest questions. We need to study carefully and ask students to find out what those questions are so we give them relevant answers, not just our prepared “Jesus loves you” speech.

We also must pray, and pray fervently. Faith does not happen because of what we say. It is the work of God in students’ hearts. Prayer must be our foundation as we rely on the Lord’s work in our young people’s lives.

You can find out more about the advertising campaign on their official website, www.whybelieveinagod.org.