In other words, we have to ask ourselves whether we are getting knocked off balance constantly and can no longer walk the walk that we talk?
The author, Matthewes-Green, correctly notes that in terms of the language of interpersonal communication, “Smart-alecky speech doesn't even work. It may win applause, but it does not win hearts. It hardens the person who feels targeted, because he feels mocked and misrepresented. It increases bad feeling and anger. No one changed his mind on an issue because he was humiliated into it. In fact, we are misguided even to think of our opponents in the ‘culture wars’as enemies in the first place. They are not our enemies, but hostages of the Enemy. We have a common Enemy who seeks to destroy us both, by locking them in confusion and by luring us to self-righteous pomposity.”
Whether one is Christian progressive, Buddhist, Muslim or Hindu, one needs to recall: “Culture is not a monolithic power we must defeat. It is the battering weather conditions that people, harassed and helpless, endure.”
TO FIGHT A BEAST OR NOT?
In order to make her case, Mathewes-Green talks about Hollywood and Christians’ relationship to cinema over the past 80 to 90 years.
Among numerous ebbs and flows of culture, religion and politics over the decades, Mathewes-Green notes that it was not the (WTCU) Woman's Christian Temperance Union which dealt a near death blow to the media tradition of exalting at someone’s drunkenness or drunken behavior.
Instead, it was an awareness by the 1970s of how many lives had been destroyed or hurt by alcoholism—not only on the nation’s highways, but in homes and public space, too. This national awareness led both to television and Hollywood making ever more less light of the town drunk.
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