Article originally hosted and shared with permission by The Christian Economic Forum, a global network of leaders who join together to collaborate and introduce strategic ideas for the spread of God’s economic principles and the goodness of Jesus Christ. This article was from a collection of White Papers compiled for attendees of the CEF’s Global Event.
by Ben Howard
More than two thousand years ago, Plato said, “He who tells the stories rules the culture.”
For centuries of human history, a society’s ethics and values were shaped by oral tradition passed from one generation to the next, often within families. Perhaps the preeminent storyteller was Jesus of Nazareth, who used stories and parables to convey profound spiritual truths. Time and time again, Jesus told simple tales about farmers, wedding banquets, and athletes to reveal something eternal about the Kingdom of God. This isn’t because Jesus was folksy; it’s because He knew that stories change people. Change enough people, and you can change the entire culture.
It’s no surprise that during the Civil Rights Movement, there was a marked increase in television shows featuring minority families. The Jeffersons, All in the Family, and Good Times illustrated week after week that Black families faced the same daily joys and challenges as White families. Those programs paved the way for changes all throughout the culture, particularly in the South.
For a more recent example of this phenomenon, consider the LGBTQ+ movement. On September 21, 1998, a new sitcom premiered in primetime on NBC. The show focused on a single man, his female best friend, and the trials and tribulations of their sometimes glamorous, but always humorous, lives in New York City. Sound familiar? Take a guess.
It wasn’t Friends. It wasn’t Seinfeld.
It was Will & Grace.
The only significant difference between Will & Grace and other sitcoms of the day was that Will & Grace featured two openly gay men playing openly gay characters. For decades, gay and lesbian cinema remained sequestered on platforms attracting only their most ardent supporters and did not get exposure in mainstream media. This began to change with shows like Will & Grace, where gay and lesbian characters were shown as ordinary people living their lives in relatable settings.
In an essay for Huffington Post in 2014, author Jack Myers wrote, “Part of [Will & Grace’s] success was that … homosexuality is not the central theme of the show. While the two main leads are a gay man and his straight female friend, the show is not simply about being gay. Instead, it happens to have gay characters among its cast. This paved the way for shows that introduced gay issues and gay characters. Essentially, this lack of overall emphasis on being gay made homosexuality less of a loaded issue and pushed it toward the background.”
This show and others that came after it, such as Modern Family, have led the way for a cultural shift in America, and our laws and norms have followed suit. The same could be said for increasing public awareness and empathy for people with autism through shows like Parenthood, The Good Doctor, and Love on the Spectrum. Politics follows art, not the other way around. Artists and storytellers have long understood that if you want to change the culture, you must tell more and better stories.
So, what currently exists in the mainstream? In short, a plethora of dark, hopeless content. Listen to any dinnertime conversation, and you’ll hear Americans share their favorite shows, volleying titles back and forth like a rapid-fire tennis match. Thanks to digital production and delivery, more stories are now available to people than ever before. According to the Motion Picture Association’s 2021 THEME Report, the number of original online programs has doubled from 347 in 2019 to 693 in 2021 — a 100% increase in just two years.
Despite this explosion in quantity, the quality of content remains sadly predictable. Programs overflow with gratuitous sex and violence. In an essay for Newsweek entitled “Why Does America Crave Heartbreaking TV?” New York-based culture writer Anna Rahmanan writes, “From HBO’s Mare of Easttown (granted, a very good show), to the network’s The Undoing, Hulu’s Little Fires Everywhere and even ABC’s Big Sky, the vast majority of TV productions now premiering deal with heart-wrenching and downright depressing storylines that all seem to follow the same sort of formula: a mystery is solved by a strong woman, and on the way to semi-justice, the audience is shocked by revelations of infidelity, homicides, suicides, sexual predation, and other horrible tragedies.”
Award-winning dramas such as Succession and Yellowstone aim to depict real life but fail to offer audiences even a shred of hope that good will conqueror in the end. Characters are not just flawed — they are so depraved that they leave us no one to root for. Plotlines center on evil vs. evil. Like rubber-necking past one bad car wreck after the next, audiences binge their way through these series, leaving them feeling hollow and sad.
If that were it — if dark television and films merely left a bad taste in our cultural mouths — then we could just sit back and wait for better content to emerge. But unfortunately, art doesn’t exist in a vacuum; stories have cultural consequences. As is well-documented, rates of anxiety and depression have been on the rise. Authors Anne Case and Angus Deaton, in their New York Times bestseller Deaths of Despair, write, “In the past two decades, deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism have risen dramatically, and now claim hundreds of thousands of American lives each year—and they’re still rising.” While not causal in nature, the correlation is hard to ignore. We are a people drowning in depressing, hopeless stories. Is it any wonder that so many people are left feeling depressed and hopeless?
If and when a title breaks through all that negativity, the results can be seismic. In August 2020, an under-hyped show called Ted Lasso dropped its first episode on Apple TV. An earnest and unflappable eponymous American football coach found himself at the helm of a floundering English premier league soccer team. With genuine kindness and some strategic homemade shortbread, Ted Lasso won over America, leading to an October 2021 article in the Harvard Crimson student newspaper entitled “Ted Lasso and the Kindness Revolution.”
Of course, in a culture of negativity, even goodness demands critique. In a piece entitled “Ted Lasso Can’t Save Us” for the New Yorker, Doreen St. Felix writes, “The sports comedy, now in its second season, is almost alarmingly unsexy, and yet it’s expertly attuned to the romantic and the sentimental, as if engineered by Pixar. You don’t discuss what the show is about but, rather, how it feels to watch it, which is comforting, or, as one headline put it, like ‘a warm hug of nice.’” The New Yorker can nit-pick. But if the overnight success of Ted Lasso teaches us anything, it’s that hope and meaning can sell too.
Another series that made positive waves was The Chosen, a Christian epic chronicling the lives of Jesus and his twelve disciples. Funded independently and hosted on its own app before becoming a breakout sensation, The Chosen has received more than 300 million views in 190 countries. As the Washington Examiner reported in January 2022, the show is “supported by the most successful crowd-funding campaign in history (16,000 people invested $11 million for season one), [and] is still going strong, with producers now inviting fans to contribute to production costs and ‘pay it forward.’”
Programs like Ted Lasso and The Chosen prove that success is within reach for content with hope and meaning. And certainly, there are other shows and films worth mentioning. But unfortunately, the mainstream media is a profit-driven business. Investors are often risk-averse. Why invest in hopeful content when despair is a sure thing? And so the trend continues; content providers (networks, studios, streaming platforms) green light juicy dramas. Talented writers, filmmakers, and directors who want to bring stories of meaning, hope, and faith are left to fund their own way — or give up the dream. The current system will continue in this direction without direct and intentional intervention to the contrary.
To put it simply: faith-driven storytellers are under-funded and under-trained. There are hosts of jump-start programs for aspiring writers, filmmakers, and storytellers in the secular space. Ron Howard and Brian Grazer of Imagine Entertainment host a bi-annual fellowship called Impact for up-and-coming writers to polish and pitch their film and television projects. Reese Witherspoon recently launched LitUp, a writer’s fellowship for unpublished, underrepresented women. These established producers understand that young talent needs both financial and creative support in order to make their way in a complex industry.
So, where are the fellowships for writers of hope? Where are the pathways for the faith-connected storytellers of the future? It would be easy to throw up our hands and abandon changing Hollywood as a useless endeavor. But Jesus called His followers to be salt and light in our world, intentionally stepping into dark corners wherever they exist. Yes, Christians are free to make content on apps like YouTube or by crowd-sourcing like the Chosen. But compelling content that can reach broad non-believing audiences requires sustained financial backing by investors with the vision to impact America at large rather than preaching into the echo chamber of Christian culture. Like it or not, if we want to be salt and light in our world, we cannot abandon mainstream media.
Simply put, people of faith must invest more aggressively in the power of storytelling. Every day, Christians give their hard-earned dollars to support non-profits, para-church ministries, and social causes to great effect. In the same way, billions of dollars annually send missionaries and evangelists to domestic and international communities, bringing news of hope and peace. These efforts are valuable and ought to be continued. But there’s another way to love our neighbors — and that’s by telling them a better, truer story than the one the world is telling. Not all is lost; hope really does win in the end.
So, where do we begin? First, faith-driven people must make overt financial investments into the media space, supporting faith-connected storytellers and the development of their stories for mainstream media. Second, this effort must be strategic and not piecemeal. Media projects require sustained effort over long periods of time, and financial investment must follow suit; token giving will not suffice. Third, any investment must pursue two bottom lines: positive cultural impact and financial return. However, the expectations must have a long-term horizon. Our story culture did not get to a place of despair overnight, and we won’t turn back the darkness overnight either. In time, break-even investments will attain market-rate returns comparable with the rest of the media business.
In the end, media is and always will be a high-risk investment. And yet, without adequate funding and support, stories of hope and meaning will continue to lose out to secular programming that’s seen as a ‘sure thing’ but only brings our culture further into the depths of despair. That doesn’t have to be the case. We can start a movement within media and entertainment, refusing to abandon those spaces to hopelessness. With the right partners in place, faith-driven investors stand to make a marked impact, not only on media but also on the culture of America writ large.
Now is the time to create great shows, films, documentaries, and other content that will impact people where they are and spread a message of hope. Now is the time for Christians to follow Jesus’ example and tell better stories.
