For over a century, Hollywood has served as the showcase for American culture. For generations, patriotism, hard work, fair play, and even religious fervor permeated the big screen because it was good business to give the public what it wanted.
An Avatar of Change
Whether at a glamorous Broadway opening or in the weekend movie house in thousands of hamlets across America, Hollywood promoted the hopes and dreams of millions of Americans. It was the guardian of American culture. That is no longer true.
Hollywood has become an avatar of cultural change, a far cry from its traditional role of providing family entertainment. According to his book Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values, film critic Michael Medved attributes this dramatic change to the 1960s invasion of a Marxist Ivy League elite.
As a whole, the entertainment industry no longer reflects the religious, patriotic and political views of the American people. Hollywood has come to be dominated by a cynical, nihilistic cultural elite that despises religion in general — and the Catholic Church in particular — for its long opposition to the secular “virtues” of fornication, adultery, divorce, abortion, and homosexuality.
Echoing cultural Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s “long march through the culture,” it has employed its big screen in its relentless pursuit of a sociological experiment, designed to change the very fabric of American cultural life. Ironically, to fill the void left by Hollywood’s disdain for religious truth and family values, the studios have created their own Gospel of Truth. The transition was quick. In 1965, the Academy Award for Best Picture went to the The Sound of Music. Four years later Midnight Cowboy, a bawdy tale of a male hustler in New York City, became the only X-rated film to win the award.
Dollars and Sense
This new trend started near the end of the 1960s when Hollywood replaced the declining star system that had given the world Bogart, Stewart, Cagney and Wayne, with an inexhaustible supply of car chases, sexual perversions, violent shoot-outs, and profanity that painted America as a place of self-loathing. Patriotic films such as Sergeant York, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life have given way to Scarface, Show Girls, and Natural Born Killers.
Critics of the Hollywood Gospel are quick to point out that the “R-Rated” movie with its disturbing combination of sex, violence, and blatant disregard for human life, seldom makes money at the American box office. Hollywood’s studio executives seem to have, paradoxically, placed ideology over finance. But these critics are missing the point that the global public loves anything that undermines American power and influence.
According to Michael Medved, in 1970 more than 70% of Hollywood’s revenue for the major studios came from the United States. This has declined to less than 30%. It all makes perfect sense when one realizes that Hollywood relies on marketing its movies and DVDs to an ideologically-driven world that ambivalently needs American culture, while it needs movies that portray American life in a critical light. To the delight of dictators and terrorists around the world, Hollywood’s constant emphasis on the dysfunctional nature of American life has misled the world about the extent of the degeneracy and evil of the American people.
The Marxist Triangle
As if in the vortex of a Marxist triangle, more dangerous than anything this side of Bermuda, the major pillars of American society have been slated for complete destruction by Hollywood’s elite. Tinseltown once revered strong families and well-adjusted children, whose love for their parents and a pet or two exuded a uniquely American quality. Its films usually praised the American family for instilling the civic virtues of hard work, self-discipline, respect for others, politeness and patriotism.
In today’s Hollywood, movies dish out an unhealthy diet of violence, sexual experimentation, disrespect for all authority, and anti-religious bigotry — all of which serve to undermine the moral and sociological importance of the family. According to the Hollywood Gospel, the traditional family does not fit all. The “designer family” must come in all shapes, sizes, arrangements, and tastes.
The Best Picture for 2000, American Beauty, best illustrates how Hollywood views the traditional family. The movie is the sordid tale of an embattled family caught in a web of deceit, oppression, and despair. Kevin Spacey plays the protagonist, a dysfunctional father, who cannot quell his lustful feelings for one of his daughter’s fellow cheerleaders. His dalliance with drugs while his business-driven wife has a fling with her boss is ended by the homophobic violence of a retired Marine neighbor. Like most of Hollywood’s American husbands and fathers, Spacey's character is an incurable dolt, who callously disregards the feelings of his desperate wife and the growing pains of their child. The only normal people in the film were the homosexual couple next door.
Among the prevailing beliefs dramatized in the movies are:
• religion is for weak-minded people;
• love is never saying “no” to any desire;
• America is an evil empire of greedy white males who have oppressed minorities, women, and homosexuals;
• the colonists were environmental rapists (cf. Pocahontas);
• insensitive louts won the West (Dances with Wolves depicted oppression of Native Americans and the slaughtering of their food supply);
• white racism is pervasive (cf. Mississippi Burning and A Time to Kill).
The United States military is often viewed as a malignant entity that is forcing its will on a defenseless world. The FBI, the CIA and religious conservatives alternate as the evildoers in American political life. In The Contender, an evil conservative maliciously plots to keep a liberal woman from becoming the country’s vice-president. In a Few Good Men, the Marine Corps is disgraced by the prejudices of one of its veterans.
Choir Boys
Several years ago, Harvard University’s Arthur Schlesinger said that anti-Catholicism was “as American as apple pie.” In his 2004 book, The New Anti-Catholicism, religion professor Philip Jenkins points out that enlightened American tolerance has strict limits where the Catholic Church is concerned. The new wave of anti-Catholicism is no longer based on the know-nothing, nativist, and xenophobic fear. It has taken on a more subtle appearance.
With its relative loss of influence, the Church has constantly been in Hollywood’s crosshairs. As a result, it is not surprising that Hollywood has played a leading role in a new kind of anti-Catholic bigotry. Its Marxist-oriented elite is not interested in the theological debates that fomented the Protestant Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. Hollywood’s attack on the Church stems from a modernist mindset which condemns any institution that opposes its secular gospel. Its pictures have persistently targeted the Church for its “failure” to accept the liberal worldview at the core of its progressive approach to making films. It thinks more in terms of sociological issues, such as population control, homosexual unions, and women priests. Tinseltown will use whatever means necessary to force the Church from the public marketplace of ideas. While Evangelical Christians get this same treatment, Hollywood has an easy time in portraying the mainline Protestant denominations which offer little or no resistance to Hollywood’s pagan crusade to unseat Catholicism from its exalted position.
The public is the ultimate loser in this ideological struggle. The movie theater has lost much of its entertainment value and now serves as another battleground in the culture war.
Hollywood now views the Church with a more cynical eye, magnifying its every flaw. The Hollywood Gospel paints most Catholic priests as perverted, alcoholic or deeply troubled by the Church’s antiquated celibacy rules. It did its most slanderous job on the Church in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1990 film Godfather III, which amalgamated conspiracy theory with myth, rumor and innuendo to paint the Church hierarchy as a sinister mob of unredeemable murderers and thieves who made the Mafia look like choir boys by comparison.
Alternate Reality
While attempting to save America from the tyranny of its religious past, Hollywood has fallen into the pond of its own narcissistic reflection. It has succeeded in creating an alternate reality that has nearly obliterated real life and real people. This was best illustrated during the 2006 Academy Award presentations. Hollywood’s theme for the 2006 awards revolved around what can only be called boilerplate homosexual propaganda. According to the Hollywood Gospel, love is too broad to be confined to one marital union and to one gender. As a class, actors who played homosexuals or transgendered people dominated the nominations. Their frequent appearance added to the Left Coast’s illusion that homosexuality is normal.
Jami Bernard of New York’s Daily News loved Brokeback Mountain, the highly touted story about two cowboys “in love,” because the characters chose to experience “the love that dare not speak its name,” echoing the tormented thoughts of Irish homosexual writer Oscar Wilde. True to the Hollywood Gospel, Director Ang Lee, who garnered the Academy Award for this movie, portrayed their perverse form of male bonding as being far more satisfying than their respective marriages.
The use of the cowboy genre was an important step for Hollywood. Virile young cowboys have been an integral part of the sacred fabric of American society. Despite all of the pre-award hype Brokeback Mountain received, the Academy surprisingly voted the racially-charged Crash as Best Picture. As a form of penitential consolation, the Academy cited Philip Seymour Hoffman as Best Actor for his one-dimensional portrayal of the late homosexual writer, Truman Capote.
Enemies of State
On the political front, Hollywood has always shown a knee-jerk revulsion for the late Senator Joseph McCarthy. In movie after movie, especially its two renditions of The Manchurian Candidate, based on notorious McCarthyphobe Richard Condon’s book, they offered a sordid caricature of the public's fading memory of McCarthy. The 2005 film about Edward R. Murrow, Good Night and Good Luck, is a highly overrated film that returned to that same tired ground. With Murrow as its unflappable and driven hero, the movie savages McCarthy with a virulence that should have been reserved for the real enemies of state. While denouncing the Catholic Senator for his methods, true to Hollywood Marxist form, Murrow never considered the truth or accuracy of his charges.
Directed by actor George Clooney, who won the Academy Award for this picture, the movie is a black and white ode to liberal self-righteousness. Murrow cornered the market on smugness with his skillful editing of film clips that tied the over-stressed McCarthy up in a cinematic montage of embarrassing gestures, poses, and slurred speech on national television.
The movie’s most callous disregard for truth revolves around the character “Hornbeck,” a veiled reference to Laurence Duggan who leaped from a hotel window in 1954. Ann Coulter reminds her readers in her columns and her book Treason that Murrow’s good friend, Duggan, was a Soviet spy, responsible for having innocent people murdered. Yet in this movie, he is a tragic victim of McCarthyism. The allegedly brilliant and perceptive Murrow was not only unaware of the hundreds of spies running loose in the United States government, he apparently did not know that his close friend was a true enemy of state. In the mid-90s, the astonishing revelations of the Venona Dispatches were made public. These dispatches were coded messages between Moscow and its agents in the West, including Harry Dexter White, Alger Hiss, Harry Hopkins (all in FDR’s administration), and Murrow’s good friend Laurence Duggan. The decoding of the messages proved the scope and daring of the communist spy network that flourished for many years at the very highest levels of the US government. The Venona revelations also proved the truth of Sen. McCarthy’s major charges, yet Hollywood desperately holds on to its tired canard about “the evils of McCarthyism.”
The Last Centurion
The Hollywood Gospel is pervasive. It has entered all aspects of American life with its subtle poisonous visual pills. Americans have to stop resting on the pillow of indifference and become aware of the moral storm around them. It has been a man-made storm and can be changed, altered and even abated by other men and women. Moviegoers must learn to watch and listen between the lines of every movie they see and read accurate reviews before they attend.
For Catholics the task is daunting. Millions of Catholics unwittingly attend these movies that skewer their faith and mock the nation’s traditional virtues — the very virtues which have allowed them to live in freedom. Hungry for entertainment, many of them check their Catholic principles at the box office and fail to recognize that the Catholic Church is what Pope Benedict XVI called the “citadel of truth.” For her part the Church, through her bishops and clergy, has a responsibility to protect the faithful from the errors of secular society. In many ways it is the “Last Centurion” against a culture that is waist-deep in the moral waste of the Hollywood Gospel.
William A. Borst, Ph.D. is the author of Liberalism: Fatal Consequences and The Scorpion and the Frog: A Natural Conspiracy which are available from the
author at PO Box 16271, St. Louis, MO 63105.
The Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation is a worldwide educational organization which provides reliable information on the secular attacks on faith and family values and persecutions and abuses of human rights around the globe, and upholds the authentic teaching of the Catholic Church.
This article was adapted from the Mindszenty Report and was used by permission. For more information about the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation or to become a member click here.
