Music famous person Taylor Swift deserves pity. However she additionally deserves love, for she is nothing greater than a pitiable sinner like the remainder of us.
On Wednesday, Time Magazine introduced that it had named Swift 2023’s “Person of the Year.”
Additionally on Wednesday, conservative commentator Jon Root posted a 12-second clip from the music video for Swift’s track “You Need to Calm Down,” which depicted two males kissing in what gave the impression to be a wedding ceremony, adopted seconds later by a close-up of 5 stereotypical “hillbillies” — one wore a cowboy hat, one other wore a tank high with an American flag — angrily trying on in protest.
Swift used these “hillbillies,” after all, as stand-ins for anybody who holds the Christian view of marriage.
The track’s lyrics made that clear: “Why are you mad? When you could be GLAAD? Sunshine on the street at the parade, but you would rather be in the Dark Ages.”
“Here’s a quick reminder of what Taylor Swift thinks about Christians …,” Root posted.
Right here’s a fast reminder of what Taylor Swift thinks about Christians… https://t.co/LfjzAhEBNp pic.twitter.com/nQBx5SF33E
— Jon Root (@JonnyRoot_) December 6, 2023
The complete video for “You Need to Calm Down” amplified the anti-Christian and “pride” themes. Actually, the video concluded with that exact message.
“Let’s show our pride by demanding that, on a national level, our laws truly treat all of our citizens equally,” the message mentioned.
As for “Person of the Year,” we should always not start by complicated that award with an ethical endorsement. In any case, Swift now shares that honor with the likes of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
Time’s annual acknowledgement merely gauges perceived affect. It acknowledges these whom former Time Managing Editor Walter Isaacson referred to as “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year, for better or for worse.”
How precisely Swift “affected” lives or “embodied” the 12 months reveals a lot concerning the trendy world.
For example, in a prolonged article explaining the selection of Swift, Time’s Sam Lansky — the article’s creator — employed telling language.
Swift’s affect, we’re informed, is “without a contemporary precedent.”
“She deploys the most efficient medium of the day — the pop song — to tell her story,” Lansky wrote. “Yet over time, she has harnessed the power of the media, both traditional and new, to create something wholly unique — a narrative world, in which her music is just one piece in an interactive, shape-shifting story. Swift is that story’s architect and hero, protagonist and narrator.”
She has grow to be her personal story’s “architect and hero” in a means that lacks “contemporary precedent.” So why do followers flock to her exhibits?
Nicely, if you happen to traveled to a metropolis through which Swift held a live performance, you “made a pilgrimage.”
Actually, Lansky recalled attending one such live performance in Santa Clara, California, “in a stadium with nearly 70,000 other people having a religious experience.”
And to what finish, are these pilgrimages and spiritual experiences?
“She’s modeling radical self-acceptance on the world’s largest stage, giving the audience a space to revisit their own joy or pain, once dismissed or forgotten,” Lansky wrote.
To an untutored listener however cautious reader, this sounds an excellent deal like worship of self.
And the majority of Lansky’s article targeted on exactly that — her story, her emotions, her.
To the Christian — or, frankly, to anybody who has contemplated the character of the universe — an apparent query arises: Actually? Is that every one? She tells her story, fashions “radical self-acceptance,” and this quantities to a “religious experience?”
No marvel Swift has embraced “pride.” No marvel she denigrates the Christian view of marriage. If she took that view severely, then she must contemplate its supply, and that will lead her to one thing infinitely higher than herself.
In that sense, she instructions our pity.
However we should not enable that pity to grow to be a supply of mistaken delight in ourselves. Swift has, within the phrases of Paul, “conformed to this world” (Romans 12:2). For all of the occasions we’ve got finished likewise, we want God’s forgiveness.
Within the meantime, God instructions us to like Swift — and the tens of millions of confused individuals who assume as she does — the identical means we love ourselves.
This text appeared initially on The Western Journal.
