(LifeSiteNews) — Reality TV shows have always been one of the lowest brow forms of “entertainment,” and they’ve only gotten worse. The name itself has, of course, always been a contradiction in terms — but the paradox about TV is that it is not a mirror — but can become one. People watch, and as Walt Hickey noted in his 2023 book You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything, they are shaped by the stories they absorb.
Or as Rachel Maddow put it in the 2020 documentary Visible: Out on Television: “Reality TV became part of the coming out process for this country.” Reality TV is bizarre and abnormal, but it can normalize bizarre and abnormal behavior. It creates a fiction that everyone is in on but that people often subconsciously accept. As Chesterton once said: “There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.” That sums up perfectly why TV, even trash TV, has such a potent cultural impact.
Thus, it was unsurprising to see a clip featuring what amounted to an anti-Christian struggle session go viral across social media this month. In Season 8 of Netflix’s garbage reality dating show Love is Blind — if only the viewers were! — two “brides” left their grooms at the altar over social issues. One informed the jilted groom, in front of the gathered guests, that she loved him and all that, but his church was too “traditional.” She had apparently found an online sermon from the church he attended that expressed disapproval of aspects of the LGBT agenda, and that was a bridge too far.
I must note here: The conservative commentariat’s insistence on portraying the jilted groom as a Christian condemned for his beliefs is, frankly, a joke. He insisted that he was on the same page as her on LGBT issues, told her he’d abandon his church, and it is frankly ridiculous that any kind of “traditional Christian” would be participating in this voyeuristic Netflix atrocity. That said, the message of the show was clear: Any person who is not overtly waving the LGBT flag or goes to any church with any reservations about the LGBT agenda is unacceptable.
The other couple broke up over … abortion. “I still don’t feel really comfortable saying Devin’s views, but I’ll tell you about mine,” the erstwhile bride said in a recap episode. “I believe that women should have the decision to choose if they want to have an abortion or not.” Devin, who deliberately degraded himself by participating in this “reality show” farce, at least dodged the bullet of marrying someone whose red line was the legal right to kill a child in the womb. But to be clear, there are no winners here — only losers. In fact, in the recap episode, host Nick Lachey then subjected the other jilted groom to an interrogation about his church’s stance on same-sex “marriage.”
The message could not be clearer: Anyone who does not embrace abortion and the LGBT agenda is an unsuitable partner. It would be simpler to say: Anyone appearing on a reality show is an unsuitable partner.
Discerning readers might ask: What possible point is there in reviewing these sordid details about a sordid show (that I have, for the record, never watched)? Unfortunately, as I pointed out earlier, these shows do have a genuine cultural impact. Love is Blind is a top-ranked show as of last year and has achieved over 1 billion minutes viewed. The fact that these shows are popular says something about how deeply degraded our culture has become, but we should be aware that the impact of these shows is real.
