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Media Influence: How Hollywood Has Hijacked Our Minds

media influence

Want to learn more about media influence, especially on today’s young people? Keep reading for one youth pastor’s take on how Hollywood has hijacked people’s minds.

Recently I was introduced to the idea of Soft Power. The term alone caused so many things to instantly click in my head. Soft Power is a clear paradox to Hard Power, and once you grasp the simple concept, so much will make sense. It’s the reason you always feel like you’re offending someone. Or that if you disagree with someone, you’re anathema to the cultural tide.

For example, consider the two Koreas. North Korea has nuclear weaponry aimed at the soil of the world, hovering her finger above the launch button if someone pries too closely. Hard Power. The bully with the bigger muscles and the baseball bat.

By contrast, South Korea is a rising star in the music scene with numerous breakout bands. K-Pop is infecting radio waves alongside the behemoth of entertainment which is the United States. Soft power is far more subliminal but perhaps even more powerful than its opposite.

South Korea, with its intellectual Soft Power, is growing the ability to influence fans however they want. Of course, this is slow and over time rather than blatant like North Korea’s nukes. The reason this is so important? In the West, we’re in far more danger of giving in to Soft Power than Hard.

Soft Power & Media Influence

For instance, look no further than the third chapter of Genesis. Does the serpent come to Eve with a crossbow and tell her to eat the fruit “or else…”? No, of course not! Satan slips subtle lies into her mind. He makes Eve question things she was once so sure of. Before long, she has given in and doomed the progeny of the world to death and toil.

I’d wager that few of us face AK-47s or barbed-wire clubs on the daily. But we face a far more insidious power: Intellectual Colonialism. What is Colonialism? It’s the invasion of Western culture into indigenous lands. The white man came in and said people should do things a certain way (to put it lightly).

Without realizing it, Christians in the West have become slaves to the machine of Intellectual Colonialism. We’ve hear that how we think is wrong. Media influence tells us we need to do it like them. We must be sexually liberated (as long as it’s safe and consensual). We need to tolerate every belief simply because someone feels it’s true.

Problem is, feelings aren’t great dictators of truth. Someone once commented on a YouTube video of mine. They said I shouldn’t be so hard on Christians who may believe something the Bible doesn’t teach. “If they believe it strongly, then it can be true for them.”

That phrase, in addition to being ridiculous and ignorant, was disproven in the 300s B.C. Something cannot be simultaneously true and false depending on how someone feels. No matter how hard I feel that the winter should be sunny and 75, reality will keep dumping snow on me.

But now I’m off track…