Advertising 101

Thanksgiving break finds me flipping on the TV more than I’d like. Maybe it’s the green bean casserole that always makes me sick and couch-confined, or maybe it’s the futile hope to catch a decent, classic Christmas movie to watch with my kids. And football is always a good second option.
I’ve waited years for my boys to grow up enough to sit still for more than a minute, so I take primetime football as a sign we have finally arrived at our destination. Televised football, I reason, is my reward for the hours and years I’ve spent on the floor racing hotwheels and reading board books.

But along with football comes some awful commercials. The TV we are so careful to monitor becomes a minefield. 

This is where my feelings get worked over, where I doubt my standing, if I’m really a nice person, and most of all–where I stand on Culture.
I remember learning in sixth grade about advertising. We took notes on how companies try to sell product, services, and ideas by putting an emotional or compelling spin on their brand. Drinking Pepsi makes you fun and possibly capable of rollerskating backwards. A diamond necklace wrapped up under the Christmas tree means your daddy loves your momma, and she will cry ecstatic tears of joy when she opens it. Good food and family time can be bought, and endless breadsticks will never let you down–Olive Garden.

Maybe the rest of it went over my head; maybe commercials haven’t changed that much. But I get a sense there is more culture molding, more propaganda than ever before. Brands aren’t just trying to get me to buy what they are selling. They’re actually trying to invade my brain with their version of the world. They want to destroy my conscience by numbing it. Repetitive, outrageous behavior becoming normalized.
I’m not talking about healthy, slender people sinking their teeth into a Big Mac, Coke, and fries (though I’ve never seen an obese, self-loathing character in a McDonald’s commercial).

I’m talking about same-sex everything, the glory of “coming out”, grown men pretending to be little girls, drag queens, nebulous he/she/they situations, women falling in love with women. I’m not saying JLo undressing on a pole during halftime is any better, but this influx of regularly, reliable “strange flesh” (Jude 7) on television is disconcerting. 

If you don’t think these situations are a problem, if you think it is mere “conspiracy”–there is a good chance you have become desensitized to evil. You are ignorant to the impact these advertisements have on your conscience, your morality.

It isn’t just on television where my kids are exposed to this cultural revolution. In my six year old’s online Spanish curriculum, he was introduced to the idea of two women on a honeymoon (nevermind he is still only mastering greetings and simple phrases. Donde esta tu esposo? No tengo esposo, tengo esposa! Um, que?!)
Several days ago, our school district sent out an email to the parents of 85,000 children, announcing the celebration of Trans Week.

News flash: this is not normal behavior.
Romance languages worldwide are not reordering their feminine and masculine nouns to accommodate a generation of gender-confused, sexually-disoriented people.
Most other countries are not suddenly identifying a mass bending of gender.
It still takes one man and one woman to procreate.
The stable family unit–one mom, one dad–is still the strongest predictor of life success (kids actually need both).
In less affluent societies, children desire an education and hope to rise from poverty–they don’t take turns in class declaring their preferred pronoun.
And more telling than anything: these rapid, evolving perversions are rolling in by the dozen. Grooming children? Pedophilia? Tell me, o wise Netflix, what shall I give into next?

Lest you be confused, at this moment in history suicide, anxiety, hopelessness, mental illness, sexual disease transmission (!) is at an all time high. There exists only one explanation, one correlating schema.

Sin destroys people.

Our culture is very, very weak. Take a gander: we have undermined our own efforts at eliminating mental illness in schools by actually celebrating deviant behavior. By normalizing fatherless and motherless homes, we are effectively telling our children there is no one path, no example, no model of right living, because anything goes.
We are confusing our little girls by letting perverse men pretend to assume their innocence and naivety. We are devaluing womanhood and manhood by suggesting there is nothing special about one’s sex, nothing creative and wonderful and God-given. We are unraveling the fabric of our society by claiming birth-assigned gender is mere suggestion, open to interpretation. We are destroying our children with confusing misnomers instead of firmly, lovingly giving them some sturdy truth.

Our glory is our shame.

When, in the past, tolerance of evil becomes the sacred cow, when we’d rather not say anything out of fear of retaliation, when cultures have disparaged the family, when they’ve resorted to total anarchy and rejection of stability–namely values, virtues, and moral uprightness–when they have rejected what is True and Right without blinking, shameless and corrupt, haters of God–this is when they were decimated. It didn’t take a feather to knock them over; they rotted from the inside out.

This makes me want to turn off my TV. It makes me glad schooling is remote this year and that we have our kids under our wing.
But I can’t keep them there forever. We cannot avoid living in this world, cannot hang up blackout curtains and pretend Rome isn’t burning. I want my kids to be able to contend for our faith someday. I want them, more than anything, to stand firm (1 Thess.3:8).

We need practice.

So this is what we’ve been doing–pointing out the inconsistencies.

Just like sixth grade, the lesson is advertising. How are we being manipulated, kids? What are the tools the enemy is using to sear our consciences?
Do you recognize it? Is it worth buying?

And just like that very erroneous, cheap bedazzling kit with which to ruin a perfectly good jean jacket–it might suffice for one glamour shot session in the early 1990s, but it won’t hold up in the washing machine.

Don’t be taken in. Don’t for one second think it is loving, compassionate, or reasonable to fall for it. 

Love allows a person to think and choose.
Love does not pressure us to give in to the madness.
Love begets wholeness, not emptiness.
Love is long haul.
It doesn’t act unbecomingly, does not seek its own, doesn’t rejoice in unrighteousness (1 Cor. 13:5,6).

Advertising 101: do it for the kids sitting on the couch next to you. Explain those rainbow flags, point out flagrant, destructive behavior. Change the channel, but bring it up. 

Explain God’s truth, how Jesus died to wash us clean.

Stand firm, friends.

…they exchanged the truth of God for a lie.
And just as they did not see it fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper…
Romans 1:25,28

For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace.
Romans 8:6