Tolerance for hire

There is an article on CBS News today that makes me scratch my head a bit.

I chuckled at the taken-for-granted superficiality of this piece. Of course the ability of a product to sell makes it acceptable. Duh. What do you mean you should have a part of yourself in public just because you believe it? How last century of you.

There was an astute comment in there though. It's something that I've noticed since moving up to NYC. The writer was wondering about why the market of evangelicals - a rather large purchase power group - was news to Hollywood.

[Jess] Cagle notes, “As one producer told the magazine, the people who run the studios are a very homogeneous group of people, and there is a great divide between those people and evangelical Christians.”

But it's more than misunderstanding a consumer group. I think that this may be uncovering a deeper idea that has been held - incorrectly I believe - for a long time.

Ever since I can remember, I've heard folks say that I produce this or that because it sells. You know, sex sells, hip-hop sells, etc. Well, seems to me that it's more a preference for what people want to create in the first place.

Folks are all suprised that religion and sacrafice sells - I'm not.

I think that the real artists wanted to produce and create with sex and violence in the recent past and the followers have followed them. The artists, I believe, have rediscovered religion, and inevatibly the followers will follow. They will write articles about new trends like the one in CBS News.

But the taste for religion in the common man never went anywhere. The producers just wanted to sell what they wanted to sell.