Blue Mountain State - Artifact 1

Blue Mountain State

For my first artifact, I chose to watch an hour of television.  I took in two episodes of the show Blue Mountain State.  The show follows three freshmen at Blue Mountain State University, as they try to deal with all the advantages and disadvantages of playing on a Division I football team.  The boys go through a lot of unscrupulous hazing and bullying from upperclassmen, but in the end, they see it as all worthwhile as they see the perks of being the most popular men on campus. 

This show tells us that we must all endure hardship to gain the final prize.  This is very much like the life of Christians.  We devote our time to God when we might rather be doing something else, but in the end the eternal goal is salvation, just like how the boys of Blue Mountain State go through difficulty and misery in order to achieve their desired lifestyle.  God put us on earth to serve him and restore his kingdom.  The characters of Blue Mountain State show no regard for laws or morals as they go out to seek a life center around themselves and not God.  In the first episode I watched, Thad the senior captain of the football team seeks out his own pleasure by putting all the new recruits through intense and demeaning hazing, meant to show the upperclassmen’s seniority of the freshmen.  As a Christian watching this show, I felt the very things that the characters were praising (sex, drugs, and alcohol) were the very things that should have been portrayed as evil.  Instead characters had remorse not over what I thought of as wrong, but of what they did when they were drunk or high.  The show glorifies hazing, sex, drugs, and alcohol as a rite of passage and that all teenagers must endure.  The college experience is portrayed as what our society has turned into.  It shows us just a part of what life in empire is like.  Fortunately not all of culture is as crazy as Blue Mountain State, but what we see is the exact opposite of the Kingdom of God.  In the Kingdom of God, we set out to please our maker not ourselves.

1.  This was the first time I have watched this show and probably the last, but is watching this kind of show, that glorifies what we see as evil, fine for the Christian mind?

2.  Should Christians be ashamed of the life being portrayed of Americans in Blue Mountain State, even if we have nowhere near the same lifestyle as these college boys?