Music celebrity 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 “Particular person of the Yr.”
Additionally on Wednesday, conservative commentator Jon Root posted a 12-second clip from the music video for Swift’s tune “You Have to Calm Down,” which depicted two males kissing in what seemed 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,” in fact, as stand-ins for anybody who holds the Christian view of marriage.
The tune’s lyrics made that clear: “Why are you mad? When you could possibly be GLAAD? Sunshine on the road on the parade, however you’d moderately be within the Darkish Ages.”
“Right here’s a fast 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 Have to Calm Down” amplified the anti-Christian and “pride” themes. In truth, the video concluded with that exact message.
“Let’s present our delight by demanding that, on a nationwide degree, our legal guidelines actually deal with all of our residents equally,” the message mentioned.
As for “Particular person of the Yr,” 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 particular person or individuals who most affected the information and our lives, for good or ailing, and embodied what was vital concerning the 12 months, for higher 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 impression, we’re instructed, is “and not using a up to date precedent.”
“She deploys probably the most environment friendly medium of the day — the pop tune — to inform her story,” Lansky wrote. “But over time, she has harnessed the ability of the media, each conventional and new, to create one thing wholly distinctive — a story world, during which her music is only 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 approach that lacks “up to date precedent.” So why do followers flock to her exhibits?
Properly, in case you traveled to a metropolis during which Swift held a live performance, you “made a pilgrimage.”
In truth, Lansky recalled attending one such live performance in Santa Clara, California, “in a stadium with almost 70,000 different folks having a spiritual expertise.”
And to what finish, are these pilgrimages and spiritual experiences?
“She’s modeling radical self-acceptance on the world’s largest stage, giving the viewers an area to revisit their very own pleasure or ache, as soon as dismissed or forgotten,” Lansky wrote.
To an untutored listener however cautious reader, this sounds deal like worship of self.
And the majority of Lansky’s article centered 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 each one? She tells her story, fashions “radical self-acceptance,” and this quantities to a “spiritual expertise?”
No surprise Swift has embraced “delight.” No surprise she denigrates the Christian view of marriage. If she took that view significantly, 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 permit 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 instances we’ve finished likewise, we want God’s forgiveness.
Within the meantime, God instructions us to like Swift — and the thousands and thousands of confused individuals who assume as she does — the identical approach we love ourselves.
This text appeared initially on The Western Journal.