How to Change a Culture

The other night my wife and I were flipping through channels in hopeless attempt to find something to watch. For one thing, we don't have cable, by design. We have decided that we already watch too much television with only the over-the-air broadcast channels we receive. For another thing, we can't justify spending the money. But the first reason is more important.
Nonetheless, we were flipping the channels and lighted upon NBC for a few moments. I could tell it was one of the incarnations of Law and Order. I have enjoyed some of these, especially the way they take a story currently in the news and twist it a little to make a fictional story. However, what I saw that night was nothing to be amused about.
The version I caught was SVU (Special Victims Unit). I rarely like these because of their attention to children and sexual crimes. I didn't like this one either, but for different reasons. I caught the story most of the way through, but I got the gist of it pretty quickly. A child had died and the evidence had led the investigators to a mother whose own child was known to play at the same public park as the victim. What happened next left me dumbfounded. The woman was arrested for murder because she had refused to vaccinate her own child and that child had spread a mild disease to the victim.
I actually didn't even finish the episode. I had seen everything I needed to see in those few moments. The characters provided the commentary that was necessary to change or establish public opinion on the issue at stake.
The people who make Law and Order and most of the other shows like it are at the forefront of culture change in our day. They are the George Eliot's of today, making it seem reasonable to think in ways that are actually quite contrary to biblical attitudes. Eliot, as I've posted here before, used the subtlety of her novel to slowly change attitudes toward aristocracy and wealth. Law and Order and the shows like them do the same thing for sexual preference, socialism, abortion, and the whole host of social actions in the news today.
The longer we watch shows like this without questioning them and their assumptions, the easier we make it to change the very foundations of our culture. The people who make these shows know this. This is the big game now. We are having our attitudes of culture and society changed around us without our even knowing it. These new thoughts are presented as matters of justice and common sense. Only really uptight and bigoted folks would reject the premises presented by the show. Only prudes would maintain sexual purity in the modern world. Only over-protective religious freaks would homeschool their children in the modern world (also seen lambasted in a Law and Order show).
This is the world we inherit if we watch carelessly and without thinking.