Entertainment | thebereancall.org

TBC Staff

Many have traced the roots of the [church related] entertainment explosion among the common people back to radical changes taking place in Western society during the 1800s....As these changes began to sweep across our land the intellectuals and cultural aristocrats were most often found sitting in their own corners, scoffing.  For centuries the upper crust had an appreciation for the arts.  But to enjoy the arts required a person to think, to meditate, to engage the mind and the soul.  This new brand of entertainment, increasingly being enjoyed by the masses, was mindless.  It was “about gratification rather than edification, indulgence rather than transcendence, reaction rather than contemplation, escape from moral instruction rather than submission to it.”

Gary Gilley, This Little Church Went to Market, Xulon Publishers, 2002 p.30