Why Media Literacy Matters
My mother was cautious about the movies I could watch. Thankfully, my dad was more flexible. I experienced a Christian culture that distrusted secular media for promoting promiscuous sex, graphic violence, and foul language. But avoiding media that offends, confuses, or even corrupts (thinking we are immune) is naive.
So I became a filmmaker, not to try to right some cultural moral wrong or as an excuse to watch movies my mother wouldn’t let me watch, but out of curiosity. Studying cultural theory, I realized that film is the modern practice of philosophy. Movies question reality, wrestle with meaning, and ask difficult questions.
Adults need advice navigating social media algorithms. Young people need to understand what they are watching on YouTube. Impressionable teens need to know that they won’t forget what they see.
Fortunately, media ethics gives us literacy tools to think critically.
Ethics for Dummies
Before tackling the ethics of a movie, it helps to have a grasp of major ethical traditions.
Ancient Greeks laid the groundwork. Socrates interrogated social authorities to discover truth. Plato’s Cave showed how people mistake the illusions of shadows for reality. Aristotle believed storytelling teaches virtue, arguing that we learn by watching our heroes make moral choices.
Medieval Christian thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas tied ethics to our relationship with God and natural law. The Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant spoke of a universal moral duty to treat others as we want to be treated. Utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill based ethics on outcomes that brought the most happiness to the greatest number of people. The twentieth century emphasized individualism, focusing on a person’s right to define what is best for themself.
We see ethics through three lenses: Universalism argues that moral principles, like justice and human dignity, apply to all people, everywhere, in all times. Utilitarianism focuses on ethical decisions that benefit the majority. And individualism prioritizes personal rights and freedoms. Each can be useful. But each has limitations. Applying these principles to media helps us put what we watch into context.
Christianity and the Magic Lantern
We see visual storytelling all the way back to prehistoric cave drawings and hieroglyphics. But in the 1600s, Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit scholar, used his magic lantern invention to project shadow-plays. Supported by the Catholic Church to encourage church attendance, his projections were theological stories designed to scare people back to faith, warning about the torments of hell.
This was one of the earliest versions of what would become cinema: motion picture stories reflected on a wall in the dark, while the audience sat in lines with their backs to the projector, watching in silence. Kircher’s important invention also reminds us that the content of media has always carried moral messages.
[T]he content of media has always carried moral messages.
Christians rejected cinema as corrupt—associated with content that encouraged sinful living—through much of the twentieth century. But in the 1960s, parachurch ministries like the Billy Graham organization used media to evangelize people. Eventually the popularity of faith-based entertainment became a booming industry.
But Christianity as a label on a film does not guarantee good art. Too many faith-based films were preachy, with poor-quality storytelling. And Christians realized that their favorite secular movies also offered powerful messages of hope and redemption. (How many times have you seen The Matrix used as an example in church? The Shawshank Redemption and Schindler’s List are about compassion. Life is Beautiful is about the importance of humor. There are movies about nearly every moral virtue and ethical pursuit.)
Public tolerance for what is ethically acceptable in media has shifted over the decades. Pastors now use salty language from the pulpit that could not be broadcast on television in the previous century. Nudity once confined to pay-per-view is now a mainstream marketing tool. Violence has always been more accepted than language or sex, but graphic images barely shock us any more.
Our mothers told us to avoid sex, violence, and bad language. But how do we tell stories about a sinful world without showing sex, violence, or bad language? Sanitizing content robs stories of their power to reveal grace and transformation. We need to ask instead, Does the content in a movie glorify sin or reveal its cost and consequences? We won’t agree on ethical boundaries. But to say “To each their own” is also shallow and lazy and does not lead us to solutions. Christian ethics demands from us more reflection on the content we consume.
We need to ask instead, Does the content in a movie glorify sin or reveal its cost and consequences?
A Critical Approach to Ethics and Movies
We need to do two things when thinking critically about what we watch: 1) understand how ethical values are demonstrated in any given movie, and 2) recognize principles of faith that help determine our ethical values.
Although this is a general list, the following are foundations of beliefs that I think most Christians would agree with: God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are divine. God is relational and present in human history. Humans are stewards of creation. Jesus teaches love and sacrifice. The Bible communicates truth. Although we are all sinners, God offers grace. There is hope beyond death.
The Bible isn’t a media rulebook, but it does offer guardrails. Consider these verses that provide a good place to start:
Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable . . . think about such things. (Phil. 4:8)
Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. (Prov. 4:23)
The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. (Matt. 6:22–23)
For a generation that recognizes the importance of mental health, these verses could not be more poignant.
Scripture reminds us to protect our hearts and minds. Media that dehumanizes, trivializes suffering, or exploits people as entertainment directly contradicts the Bible and the tenants of the Christian faith. However, this does not mean that we are to avoid images or ideas that challenge our beliefs and understanding of the world. Ethics and media literacy require wisdom and discretion as we ask good questions: Does the media I am watching uplift or degrade, teach or distract, challenge or corrupt? Answers are rarely simple.
This is not a checklist but a lens to help discern how ethics interacts with faith in a film. It is a more constructive approach to thinking about media than our mothers saying, “Because I said so.”
Case Studies: Movies My Mother Would Not Let Me Watch
When do we cross from the harmless and benign content to graphic media that my mother would never have let me watch? These three case studies feature sexuality and nudity, violence, and excessive crude language. I selected extreme cases as opportunities to measure the ethical and thematic values behind a critically acclaimed and popular movie, a streaming series, and a cable television show.
Boogie Nights: A Case Study for Sex and Nudity
Set in Los Angeles, Boogie Nights (1997, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson) is a biopic about a dishwasher-turned-porn-star that chronicles the adult film industry’s rise and fall through the 1980s. It is a film about sex and includes substantial nudity. While there are no references to God, Christ, or Scripture, it is a vivid portrayal of the consequences of sin.
While there are no references to God, Christ, or Scripture, it is a vivid portrayal of the consequences of sin.
The characters are drawn into an industry that promises glamour, luxury, and fame but actually leads to alienation, addiction, and tragedy. Drug overdoses, broken relationships, and spiritual and emotional collapse all indicate that “the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). In the end, the film does not glorify pornography—it deconstructs hedonism.
Initially framed as playful and innocent, the dark consequences of an industry that exists based on exploitation emerge as we witness the characters’ pain, humiliation, and devastation. Anderson highlights the emptiness of the taboo world, critiquing the pornography industry.
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Dr. Murray Stiller is a media professor and filmmaker with twenty-five years of teaching and creative experience. He is also the founder of Toolkit Media and Education, helping students and creators explore storytelling as an art form and cultural force. Blending philosophy, theology, and hands-on creative practice, Murray teaches courses in filmmaking, screenwriting, theory, editing and sound design, and the use of AI in media – digital storytelling with a focus on meaning-making and transformation. Known for connecting Socrates to Scorsese and turning classrooms into creative labs, he equips students to think deeply, work skillfully, and use media to engage the world with clarity and purpose.