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what
the movies
did for me
by a Teenager
I was quite young when I saw my first movie — only about eight. A picture of the initial scaling of Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world, had come to town, and my schoolteacher had written to my parents urging them to let me attend a special after school showing of this educational picture at the thea ter. Reluctantly they agreed, and I went. It proved, however, that the Mount Everest picture was only one item on the program. The main feature was the story of a freckle-faced boy who broke his father’s heart by running away from home and then had his own heart nearly broken when his father died. I remember how strongly I was moved by that picture. It made a far greater impression on my mind than the educational picture. I cried over it and decided that, as for me, I never .would do anything to hurt my father or mother. The thought came, “Movies can’t be so bad, after all, when they give me feelings of this kind.” Many have used the same argument. “There are some really good pictures,” they say. “ Some films are very religious.”
And this leads me to mention my first criticism of the movies, which is that they are A n t i -C h r is t ia n in T h e ir E ffect Why is that? Because the goodness they teach is human goodness. They give the impression that any young person can be good if he tries hard enough, whereas the Bible teaches that the only righteousness acceptable to God is that which is produced in one’s life through the redeeming work of Christ. No one can be good enough to enter heaven; each one must be “born again,” the Bible says. But you will not find that gospel message in the movies. Besides, there is always a mixture. I have attended the theater hundreds of times and have seen some of the so-called “ good” films, and I cannot remember a single program which did not have something on it that would violate a Christian’s standards of purity, piety, and modesty. My second criticism of the movies is that they are W orldly in T h e ir I n f lu e n c e It was through movies that I learned the ways of
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THE KING'S BUSINESS
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