MTV Special on the Seven Deadly Sins

Our entire culture today reflects this passion for sin. We live in a culture where the passion is now legitimate. In some cultures it isn't. And so there are social restraints on it. But not in ours. Our entire culture reflects this passionate love for sin and nobody wants to seem to hinder it. Nowhere is this more visible than in the media world. The media...the media have become the spokespeople for the base sins of man. And nowhere is it more vile than on MTV. MTV, called Music TV, broadcasts non-stop images of sex, drugs and violence...non stop. Its programming is purposely designed to appeal to the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh and the pride of life. It has no other purpose. It has no redeeming virtue, it is not intended to make people moral, to make them good, to make them think deeply. It is not intended to educate them. It is not intended to inform them. It is intended to release their passion. That is all it is intended to do. That is its entire purpose. MTV's highest rated program is an animated series featuring two characters whose entire lives are spent watching music videos and challenging every standard of goodness and morality. Beevis(?) and his friend, whose name shouldn't be mentioned in public but is known to you, have literally plumbed the depths of moral nihilism on television. The language, the images featured on these programs are purposely offensive. They are purposely vile. They are anti-morality, anti-Christian and wouldn't even be appropriate for me to discuss in a worship service.

In spite of this amazing reality of MTV, which is the dregs, the sewer of the media industry, MTV recently did a special on the theology of sin. I didn't see it on MTV, I want to make that clear, cause I don't...I don't have that on my television. I saw it on PBS where they repeated on the Public Broadcast System. I was frankly surprised to see that MTV would even acknowledge the concept of sin, let alone do a special series on it. So I was curious to see what it was about.

I watched a video tape of the program. It was pretty much what I expected, an entirely humanistic rationalization that portrayed sin as something that wasn't evil, just redefined it. There were certain kinds of behavior they said that were inadvisable. I mean, some things were imprudent and sometimes it's unkind to do certain things. But there was nothing inherently wicked in anything and there was nothing that offended a God because there was really no God.

Now the series was built around the seven deadly sins. And if any of you have a background in Catholicism you've probably heard some people talk about the Seven Deadly Sins...they're not listed as such in the Bible but in medieval times some medieval theologians put together a list of what they thought were the seven deadly sins. It's a somewhat familiar list, here they are...pride, covetousness, lust, anger, envy, gluttony and sloth, or laziness. Not a biblical list but a classical grouping, probably assembled by some medieval theologians. The purpose was not to identify all sin but to identify the root attitudes of all sin.

You will notice that those seven sins, called the Seven Deadly Sins, are not actions, they are attitudes. Pride, covetousness, lust, anger, envy, gluttony and laziness, those will issue in certain words and certain actions but those theologians thought were sort of the things that were underlying human sinful behavior. Now on MTV the Seven Deadly Sins were portrayed as anything but deadly. In fact, what they did was they got sound bites from cartoon characters and excerpts from well-known movies and interviews with celebrities and punk rockers and rappers and interviews with people in the mall and it was all edited to provide a running commentary on these sins. And here are the typical responses. Queen Latifa(?), a rap singer, said, "Pride is a sin? I wasn't aware of that." Actress Kirstie Alley agreed, quote, "I don't think pride is a sin and I think some idiot made that up."

A rocker from the group Arrowsmith said, quote, "Lust is what I live for. It's what I got into the band for. Little girls in the front row." Rapper Ice Tea said of anger, quote, "It's necessary, you have to release this tension because life brings tension. We release our anger when we do records. When we did `Cop Killer' we were angry and the cops got angry back." Some Michael Douglas character in a movie called Wall Street said, "Greed is good."

And, of course, there was along with all of this total reversal of definition of sin, the inevitable appeal to pop psychology to defend these viewpoints and the defense was always along the line of preserving self-esteem. Psychology says we can't be labeling people as sinners, it will mess their self- esteem up. Ice Tea said, quote: "Pride is mandatory. That's one of the problems of the inner city, kids don't have enough pride. I got into a gang because of pride."

Now how warped is that? John Leo wrote a perspective on this in the U.S. News and World Report, summed up the program's flavor which I read and thought it was very interesting, listen to what he said. "Instead of the language of moderation and self-control, everybody seems to speak the therapisized language of feelings and self-esteem." Pride isn't a sin, you're supposed to feel good about yourself. Envy makes you feel bad about yourself. When you have sex with a woman, one rocker says, she makes you feel good about yourself. But I don't know if it saves you in the end. Even the repentant Gay basher is totally committed to self-talk, quote, "Forgiving myself has been the challenge of my life." He writes, "There's a vague sense that sin, if it exists, is surely a problem of psychology." Kurt Loader(?) the narrator tells us at the start of the program that we are dealing with compulsions. He says, "The Seven Deadly Sins are not evil acts but rather universal human compulsions that can be troubling and highly enjoyable."

Discussion of gluttony quickly deteriorates into chatter about addictions. That's the way all habits and attachments are discussed and the pop therapies the MTV generation grew up on. "I'm addicted to my girl friend," one male says about gluttony. Someone else says that the twelve-step self-help program is God's gift to the 21st century. He's just chronicling the chaos and the confusion.

By the way, the repentant Gay basher referred to in that article was a young man who had actually killed a homosexual and then described his feelings of remorse. He wondered if he could ever be forgiven so he went to a chaplain, I suppose in his prison, and the chaplain told him forgiveness is possible but the only way he'll ever know he has forgiveness is if some day he feels it. And so he lives each day to feel forgiven. Sad.

Sin, according to MTV, is not based on absolute moral standards. Instead it is a question of each person's own preference. In other words, what is sin to me may not be sin to you. And the MTV program ends with an appeal to universal tolerance. Listen to this, the real danger of sin, according to MPV (means MTV) is anything that does damage to your ego. That's sin. And no sin, listen to this one, is as evil as the killjoy attitude of those who think sin is an absolute standard that offends a holy God. Thinking that is the worst sin.

That's how perverse the culture has become. The entire production, the entire defense of sin reminds me that we live in a culture given over by God to its own evil lusts. People love their sin and they will go to extreme ends to justify it and rationalize it. And as long as they do that they damn themselves, right? Because if you don't define the disease properly, you're never going to come to the proper cure. You can't come to salvation unless you understand sin. Obviously then this kind of thinking is deadly and damning to those who are deceived by it.

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Excerpted from Rev. John MacArthur's sermon "Keeping a Pure Mind." You can read the sermon in its entirety here.