‘What Does The Bible Say?’: ZOEGirl’s Alisa Childers and Kirk Cameron Discuss Faith, Entertainment and Culture
By Movieguide® Staff
Christian singer and apologist Alisa Childers recently sat down with Kirk Cameron on the TAKEAWAYS show about how what God says in the Bible intersects with popular hot-button issues in American culture.
Childers, a member of the Christian band ZOEgirl, is no stranger to the entertainment and the music industry.
However, Childers encouraged Christians to be active participants in discerning what content is in the movies, TV shows, and other media that they consume.
“I try to teach my kids that, no matter what we watch, we’re looking for, what is the worldview of the show? What’s the message? What are the heroes like? What are the villains like? How does that compare to scripture?” Childers told Cameron. “I think that’s a much better way to go about engaging with secular entertainment than just sort of isolating ourselves off.”
“We’re living in a time, and we always have, where Christians need to be really critical about what they’re taking in,” she continued. “It doesn’t mean you can’t watch it, but we want to make sure that we’re thinking, that we’re not just absorbing. We’re saying okay does that line up with reality? Does that line up with scripture? What is this show wanting me to take away? What are they wanting me to believe when I walk away? I think that’s a much better way to engage with entertainment.”
Instead of walling off culture, Childers and Cameron agreed that the Bible tells us to go out into the world with the good news.
“In fact, a bunch of my apologist friends are starting to go on TikTok and just answering short skeptical questions,” she said. “I think going into those arenas as Christians is so vital and to do good quality content too.”
Childers also addressed the recent culture craze of canceling celebrities and public figures without showing grace.
“Cancel culture is this phenomenon we’re seeing right now. I think it’s largely possible because of the platforms of social media with that many people having access to talk about you, to you, at you, and tag you,” she says said. “We have this phenomenon where you know even people are going back into people’s old tweets and facebook posts and finding something from six years ago and then they blast it out and then that person gets canceled effectively.
“They lose followers, they lose their jobs in many cases, their livelihood, and I think that this is something that is very antithetical to the gospel,” she continued. “The Bible, it does talk about protecting the church from false teachers, from unrepentant sin. Paul puts a guy out of the church, he says, ‘I’m delivering him over to Satan that his soul may be saved,’ but the ultimate goal of that was to redeem the guy. We want the guy to come back to the lord and find redemption.”
“Redemption is not something we see in cancel culture,” she added. “It’s like you make that one mistake, you say that wrong thing, it’s over for you. As [people] get canceled maybe it’ll provide a seed bed for the gospel because that’s where they can ultimately find redemption. But it’s a really sad commentary on the state of our culture.”
Childers pointed out that while cancel culture and social justice may sound good, they do not uphold a biblical view of justice.
“When culture talks about justice they’re not talking about the Biblical definition of justice,” she said. “In the biblical definition it would be something like getting what’s due. We don’t actually want God to give us justice because that would mean we would go to hell and we would be judged and condemned.
“That’s why we’re so thankful for Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross,” she continued. “But in culture, justice has more come to mean a system in which everybody has the exact same outcome and any system where people have unequal outcome is unjust. That’s actually the opposite of the Biblical definition. If we did that we would actually be going against God’s standard of justice.”
- Content: +1Share:
- Content: +4