PENDRAGON, NUDITY, AND “CHRISTIAN ART” (🧵) I’m thankful for many things that @JeremyDBoreing (and @realDailyWire) have done. I believe in supporting the efforts of yellow Christians and even of conservatives in general, where we can. But I also believe in holding one other accountable and pushing each other to greater levels, not only of excellence, but of holiness. What we put in our movies matters. Here are some reasons why the sexual content in Pendragon is completely inappropriate for Christian filmmakers and viewers alike. 1- Nudity is never necessary. Plenty of the great films have nudity in them, but it is a complete error to cite that as proof that nudity is necessary. Braveheart could have been made historically accurate and without any nudity, and it would’ve been better, not worse. Just because godless Hollywood does it doesn’t actually mean that we should. Our standards should be the holiness of Christ, not the horniness of our culture. So Jeremy pointing to Braveheart as justification falls flat. 2- Speaking of culture, we must recognize just how desensitized we are by the slow drip of our licentious culture. Given the massive saturation of our society with p*rnography, smut novels, and sexual content in films and TV, what qualifies as “mild sexual content“ today would have been shocking to previous generations. This is, of course, one of the reasons why it is necessary to look to Scripture and to our Christian heritage for our standards. When pressed on this issue, the defenders of Pendragon keep saying “there’s nothing actually bad in it! There’s not actually any sex in it!” So the argument is, quite literally, that watching topless couples make out on their wedding night is fine; the red line, apparently, for now, is full frontal nudity and actual sexual intercourse. And since that doesn’t happen on screen in Pendragon, there’s “nothing bad in it.” It’s cleaner than Game of Thrones, after all! In other words, we are allowing our red line to be defined by the culture of Sodom. This slow drip has occurred in basically every area of our media consumption. In everything from sexual content to language to feminism to gratuitous violence, we accept as normal now things that would have not only shocked previous generations, but would even have shocked many of the very people who are now defending it if they had seen it 20 years ago. Your average run of the mill PG-13 film today is full of perverse speech, sexual immorality, feminism, humanism, and more. It is worth asking how we ever got to the place where we find this stuff to be entertaining and wholesome. 3- Let’s be honest about what is actually going on in these filmmaking situations. You have actors and actresses that are exposing themselves in front of an entire crew of people, committing actions that in any other context we would all rebuke as sinful. It would never be OK for a Christian to strip their clothes off, embrace someone that is not their spouse, and begin passionately making out with them, and with an audience to boot… Except when we’re making a movie. Then it’s OK. You can’t tell me that that is not a stumbling block for the actor/actress. You can’t tell me that it is not a stumbling block for the crew. You can’t tell me that the people who are watching the film are not envisioning and feeling the entirety of what is happening. And to the folks that say “you’re being Puritanical, I can watch this stuff, it doesn’t bother me”- allow me to suggest that this is a confession, not a flex. If you were not already used to promiscuous content, it would bother you. This is like bragging that small doses of cocaine don’t bother you… Because you’re used to crystal meth. Besides, I take a comparison to the Puritans as a compliment. So that’s not gonna get you anywhere with me. (Continued)