By Rev. Jeff Gannon
As you may recall from last week’s blog……..
I was invited recently by the George Barna group to be involved in the conversation around faith and culture trends. I certainly don’t need another thing to do but carefully decided this was important. The benefits of participating far exceed the minimal demands of time.
The George Barna group reported three major faith and culture trends to pay close attention to in 2014.
I am blogging about one trend each week, for three weeks. Last week, I wrote about cultural trend #1 … People want Jesus and people are not as interested in the church. This week we deal with cultural trend #2; Americans live with a culture of violence. The top three fears for Americans are as follows:
1. Bullying at school
2. Gang violence
3. Domestic violence
Perhaps most surprising was the connection most adults and practicing Christians placed on violence in relation to music, video games, and movies. Fifty-seven percent of all adults and 69% of all practicing Christians believe violent video games directly contribute to violence in America. Movies and music are a close second and third to video games and its impact on individuals becoming violent.
When one of our three children wanted to purchase a video game that glorifies war, I cringed. Honestly, I caved in to the demand and rented the game. I was absolutely appalled at the amount of violence to the point of blood dripping off of the scope of the gun that one uses to take out one life after another. This is bound to affect one’s mind negatively!
The Christian perspective is that all life is sacred. Therefore, violence toward anyone in anyway is never appropriate.
We must re-claim the message and practice that because everyone is a child of the living God, created in the image and likeness of God, each one’s dignity is to be honored and maintained.
Remember I John 4:18…”perfect love casts out all fear….and fear has to do with punishment.”
Where there is love, there cannot be fear. Where there is fear, there cannot be love.