I think that part of our journey toward becoming " wise as serpents" is to learn to recognize when values - morals - contrary to our faith, our worldview are being so subtly impressed upon us.
After having watched the latest X-Men movie, I feel that something I have noticed for some time needs to be expressed.
Some of us know the tremendous value that stories and fairy tales have in expressing truths - or what we believe to be true - in a disguised form, making the acceptance of those ideas more palatable. C.S. Lewis expressed it as "getting past the watchful dragons", and the effect is to get ideas across to minds hostile to the naked ideas when caught out in the open. Both the imaginary worlds of Narnia and Middle Earth certainly do get across deeply Christian ideas in a format that even people hostile to faith can enjoy.
Sometimes, the attempt does not work. Philip Pullman's fantasy series fails for it's excessive obviousness, it's "preachiness" in attempting to ape the techniques, used successfully by Lewis and Tolkien, to promote atheist ideas.
But the X-Men DOES work - only it does so in the sense of successfully communicating false ideas - for it is popular entertainment in the superhero genre that does carry the modern attitudes towards "sexual orientation" and "gender" (what our grandparents called simply our "sex") which actively promote the idea that there IS no normal or abnormal, but only "alternative norms". Much is made of the X-Men being different and needing to "accept who they are". In the latest film, X-Men: First Class, it becomes more blatant: "Mutant, and proud", and harping on the need to accept and embrace " who you are" (something true enough when it really IS who you are), echoing the slogans and sentiments of the gay lobby. And so even a person otherwise committed to traditional Christian faith, or at least "traditional values" - which really are Christian in origin - rejecting the modern attitude towards homosexual desire and action, is nevertheless subtly influenced in favor of tolerance of the views promoted by the gay lobby, that what they desire is a natural and normal outcome of who they are, defining themselves by their desires. The false analogy of fantastic "natural characteristics" of the person to the sexual desires experienced by people is thus successfully brought past the watchful dragons of common sense, where the naked idea still is, for now, rejected by most people. It becomes part of the onslaught begun in public education, controlled by a tiny minority of radicals, and continued here in the media against the common sense and traditional morality always held across space and time.
In this brave new world, there is to be no "normal"; or more accurately, every person will provide their own definition of the norm. We're supposed to look at Raven in all her blue scaly "glory" and sympathize with Magneto when he says he prefers her that way. Likewise with "the Beast" and so on. Abnormal preferences are to become the new norm. Raven is supposed to disdain her desire to be beautiful as if that were the abnormal thing.
I'm not saying that the movies are bad and wicked. I AM saying that they express the attitude at the heart of the support for "gay rights", and it behooves us to recognize when that attitude is being championed, even in entertainment.
).
