What does it mean when Christians won’t give up ungodly entertainment?

The roar of thousands of spectators filled a Roman amphitheater as gladiators fought for their lives. Among the spectators sat Alypius, a young law student who despised the bloody contests. His fellow students had pressured him into attending, but he was determined to resist. He closed his eyes, refusing to watch. Then a gladiator fell, and the crowd erupted. Overcome by curiosity, Alypius looked. Soon he was cheering with the others, captivated by the violence he had entered determined to reject.

The incident was recorded by Augustine, the influential early Christian theologian, in his autobiographical Confessions, written around AD 400. Augustine knew Alypius personally and described how his friend became so enthralled by the spectacle that he wanted to return. The experience revealed how readily enjoyment could overcome moral conviction, turning something a person condemned into something he eagerly desired.

Augustine eventually became a bishop, responsible for the spiritual care of Christians in North Africa. He discovered that the theaters he condemned were sustained partly by people who attended his church. In one sermon, he remarked that the theaters would be nearly deserted if Christians stopped going. He knew his preaching would reach people who enjoyed the very spectacles he was challenging, yet he considered their attachment too serious to leave undisturbed.

For generations, many pastors preached with a similar concern about ungodly entertainment. They warned Christians against finding pleasure in things Scripture condemned, although their judgments were sometimes excessively restrictive. Today, such preaching is seldom heard in many churches, even as entertainment has become an almost constant presence in people’s lives. The contrast is disturbing because a widespread problem among professing Christians deserves far more attention: many have become so attached to ungodly entertainment that they are unwilling to give it up.

What makes this particularly serious is that the resistance often persists after the moral issue has become clear. Someone who professes faith in Christ may recognize that a favorite program glorifies sexual immorality and still refuse to stop watching it. The person may sincerely believe that sexual immorality is wrong, attend a church that teaches the same, and have no intention of committing it. Yet the pleasure of watching it celebrated remains something the person is determined to preserve.

That contradiction raises a question with implications far beyond entertainment. What does it mean to profess allegiance to Jesus Christ while knowingly protecting something that displeases him?

Augustine understood the difficulty from his own experience. Before becoming a Christian, he struggled to abandon sexual relationships he knew were contrary to the life he believed God required. In Confessions, he admitted that he had prayed for chastity while secretly hoping God would delay granting it. His difficulty was painfully simple: he wanted to become a different person without yet losing the pleasures of the person he had been.

His confession illuminates the spiritual danger of refusing to surrender ungodly entertainment. A person can understand a moral command, acknowledge its authority, and still prefer the pleasure that violates it. The conflict has moved beyond uncertainty about right and wrong, it concerns the will: whether someone who knows what obedience requires actually wants to obey.

Jesus addressed that deeper problem in Luke 6:46, “So why do you keep calling me ‘Lord, Lord!’ when you don’t do what I say?”

Those words are unsettling because Jesus directed attention to the distance between religious profession and actual obedience. Christianity teaches that salvation comes through God’s grace, rather than through a person’s ability to achieve perfect conduct. Genuine believers can struggle painfully with sin, and their failures do not automatically mean their faith is false. But Scripture also warns that a profession of faith can exist without genuine submission to Christ. Persistent, deliberate refusal to relinquish known sin therefore raises a serious question about the authenticity of that profession.

The distinction between struggling against sin and making peace with it is crucial. A Christian may repeatedly fail while sincerely grieving the failure and seeking God’s help to change. Someone else may recognize the same wrongdoing and decide that keeping it matters more than obeying Christ. Outwardly, both may continue participating in the same activity. Spiritually, their responses to God’s authority are profoundly different.

Entertainment makes this distinction especially revealing because it concerns pleasures freely chosen. Much of life brings unavoidable encounters with wrongdoing, but entertainment is generally something people deliberately invite into their minds and homes. When a professing Christian knows that a particular form of amusement is ungodly and nevertheless insists on enjoying it, the attachment deserves examination. What has made this pleasure worth resisting the claims of Christ?

There is an additional concern in the extraordinary importance entertainment itself has acquired. With amusement available at virtually every moment, people can become accustomed to escaping silence before they have experienced it. The seventeenth-century Christian thinker Blaise Pascal observed that people often pursue diversion to avoid confronting their own condition. His insight takes on particular significance when a person’s waking hours are so thoroughly occupied by entertainment that serious reflection, prayer, and attention to God receive only fragments of what remains.

The consequences for the church are substantial. Pastors who once challenged these habits increasingly face congregations accustomed to treating entertainment as a private matter beyond pastoral concern. Barna research has found that half of surveyed Christian pastors sometimes feel constrained from addressing moral and social issues because people may take offense. That study did not measure preaching about entertainment, but the pressure it identifies helps explain the difficulty of addressing pleasures that church members are reluctant to surrender.

Pastoral responsibility requires careful judgment. Scripture does not provide a catalog of forbidden films, songs, or activities, and portraying evil within a story does not necessarily mean celebrating it. Nevertheless, such complexities cannot justify avoiding the deeper issue. A pastor who faithfully teaches repentance must sometimes confront the pleasures people have learned to excuse. Otherwise, church members may receive abundant instruction about Christian beliefs without ever being challenged to consider whether those beliefs govern their actual lives.

There is another episode in Augustine’s account of Alypius that gives this history an unexpectedly hopeful ending. Before the gladiatorial spectacle, Alypius had become captivated by chariot racing. One day, while attending Augustine’s lessons, he heard his teacher criticize the games. Augustine had no idea the remarks would touch his student personally. Alypius, however, recognized the truth of what was said and abandoned the pastime.

Augustine remembered that another person might have resented the criticism. Alypius instead became grateful for it. That small difference in response reveals why courageous preaching can be such a profound kindness. A cherished pleasure may seem indispensable until someone helps us see what it has begun to cost. And sometimes the first evidence of a heart becoming willing to obey God is the unexpected relief of discovering that something once fiercely defended can finally be surrendered.

Scotty