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It should be no surprise to anyone that the moral quality of popular culture is in a state of decay, it has been for a long time, likely longer than any of us have been alive. Despite this an incredibly large proportion of the world's population hold Christian values even if they don't admit it. However it seems as if the people who hold that power to shape popular culture have completely abandoned these values and they really have no understanding of the people who still hold them. There are two big issues within popular media that I feel should be highlighted.
There is no question that the most important role that a man can ever fill is that of a father, the presence of a father while growing up is the number one predictor of a child's success in life. It is quite sad that we now live in a world where many kids are growing up in fatherless households. Popular media has shifted to include a lot of fatherless households which is not inherently bad, it is often desirable for media to reflect the world that is is made for, but it has done it in a way that shows a father to be unnecessary, which is giving young men the impression that fatherhood should not be a priority in their life.
Consider the sitcom Full House, which began its run in the late 80s, Full House is a show about a single father who brings in two of his male friends to help him raise his girls as he struggles to compensate for their lack of a mother (since motherhood is naturally just as important as fatherhood). The father in this show is a great example of what a father should do to provide and care for his children and it is quite interesting how in later seasons the girlfriend of one of the father's friends moves in and it is shown that she becomes a great mother figure for the father's daughters. Contrast this with the shows sequel, Fuller House, which was made in recent years. Fuller House has basically the exact same premise that Full House did but the genders of all the characters have been swapped so this time it is a mother (who was one of the daughters in Full House) that brings in some of her female friends to help raise her three sons. Now I haven't actually watched this show (and I didn't watch too much Full House either) but I don't think that the importance of fatherhood was focused on in Fuller House like the importance of motherhood was in Full House. Full House never tried to give its audience the impression that two extra dads was a necessarily good substitute for a mother, but I get the feeling that Fuller House is not as careful as its predecessor was when it comes to respecting the role of the missing parent.
Now you may ask how I could make such an assumption, how can I assume such a thing about a show which I have never watched? I can because I can see how things are going in the whole entertainment industry. Take a look at the seasons of the Simpsons that come from the 90s, its best decade. In the Simpsons Homer, the father, is pretty dumb and does a lot of stupid things, however the classic seasons of the Simpsons often do a great job at showing that Homer loves his family and tries to do the best he can for them despite his general stupidity, alcohol addiction, and short temper. One of my favorite episodes of the Simpsons is one where Homer's love for his family is strongly emphasized showing that he wakes up every day to go to a job that he hates so that he can provide for his family which he loves. This love is not something focused on in later seasons of the Simpsons and it is absent from most of the many Simpsons clones out there. They portray the father as a bumbling idiot but they fail to show is love and value. Now we have the popular show Rick and Morty where the father is shown to be generally out-of-touch and unwanted, it almost seems as if the family in Rick and Morty would be better off without the father.
These patterns present in modern entertainment are wrong, young men (and unfortunately many older men) need to be shown the importance of fatherhood and they need to understand what a good father looks like. Yes the world is filled with families with no father, or lack-luster fathers, but this is not an excuse for the entertainment industry to discredit and mock the very important role of a father.
The Big Bang Theory is a show that I am ashamed to say that I once liked. Once you take away all the comic book references, scientific jargon, and the laugh track you realize that it is really just an unfunny show about a group on incels trying to get laid (and it really didn't have anywhere to go after most of the main characters got married or in serious relationships). For years there have been many shows like this and none of them really have much substance to them despite being among the most popular sitcoms of their era.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is another one of these shows which is really just a show about a group of guys who own a bar trying to get laid. I've only seen a few episodes of it but one of the ones I did see was a perfect demonstration of the entertainment industry's inability to understand Christian and Christian-like values. In this episode the main characters have an argument on the topic of abortion and (because the show is made by liberals) the guy who leaned towards being pro-life was singled out as his friends planned to go to a pro-abortion protest. Wanting to learn more information on the topic the guy who had been singled out goes to the headquarters of a pro-life organization where he finds an attractive girl working there. This girl was written as some "crazy Christian chick" who went to church twelve times a week and probably carried a Bible with her wherever she went and was generally overzealous about being pro-life and such. Wanting to get with this chick the guy pretended that he was just as enthusiastic about church and being pro-life as she was which caused him to win her over quite quickly. Towards the end of the episode the girl became suspicious as to whether or not the guy was what he said he was so, to test him, she told him that she was pregnant and that she was so exited that they were going to have a baby. The guy reacted by instantly telling her she needed to get an abortion which confirmed her suspicion and caused her to instantly cut ties with him since he had been lying to her the whole time.
There is a problem with this episode which is crystal clear to any Christian that the producers and actors in this show were completely oblivious to. No Christian girl as outwardly overzealous as the one they were trying to portray would be caught dead spending her Thursday afternoon having sex in the car of a guy she met on Tuesday, this would simply never happen. In 2010 Steven Crowder wrote an opinion piece for Fox News talking about the clear benefits of abstinence, soon after he was mocked on national television for his opinion he had backed with evidence. Fortunately this experience did not cause him or his then girlfriend to compromise their sexual purity and two years later he was married and was able to write about how their abstinence had made their wedding special. To this day he is grateful for that decision and he occasionally will talk about how his life choices made him and his wife happier than people who fail to live higher moral standards.
Abstinence is unheard of in a lot of places now. This failure in our modern culture is the cause of millions of broken families worldwide. Children should be taught to be sexually pure, instead we live in a world where a child's average first exposure to pornography occurs when they are eleven and ten percent of pornography consumers are under the age of ten.
Men and women, and young boys and girls, need to be taught that they should not be seeking sex for the sake of just having sex. Many people like to brag about their body count or something when in reality it is self-control that is much more impressive. No couple can trust each other if they had sex after their first date, if they did it with them what would prevent them from doing it with someone else? Remaining sexually pure is the only way to ensure trust in a relationship.
These are only a few examples of cultural decay that occasionally enter my mind. The way of the world is not one which leads to happiness we cannot follow that path. I encourage you to spend time finding the correct path to happiness and joy.