2024 was a pretty eventful year—let’s take a look at some of it’s highlights. Hm . . . Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, beginning in March 2023, ended about a month ago in early December, having visited everywhere from Vienna to Rio de Janeiro to the Philippines and performed to hundreds of millions of people, earning over a billion dollars. Moana 2—just another standard Disney film—was released in late November and shown in theatres literally all over the world, smashing expectations by grossing over 900 million dollars. And let’s not forget Super Bowl LVIII, which averaged 123.7 million total viewers—making it the most-watched broadcast since the Apollo 11 Moon landing—was available on every continent except Antarctica, and streamed in the United States through CBS, who received 7 million dollars for every single 30-second advertisement.

This is the world we live in: one dominated by immensely widespread and outrageously high-earning massive-scale entertainment. But what’s all the hype really about? Why are Taylor Swift, digital animation imagery, and some grown men throwing a leather ball around making more money than we can even imagine? It’s tempting to just blame it on that ever-present big bad consumerist culture, but to say that is to oversimplify the issue. These things—music, film, sports—have immense influence on pretty much everyone, and it’s not just because we like to listen to Bad Blood and watch the Chiefs beat the 49ers in our free time.

But is that really such a bad thing? Okay, maybe certain elements of modern entertainment are less than good, but is liking movies and sports enthusiastically really going to ruin us? The answer is more complex than it might seem—but let’s dive into it.

What We Already Know

There’s no scarcity of people—especially traditional, Catholic people—criticizing the “modern world.” If we wanted, we could make a book the size of the World Encyclopedia listing the problems of society. But looking specifically at our everyday lives, we hear people say that the modern world runs after temporary pleasures that ultimately don’t have the power to satisfy (that phrase probably could’ve been taken straight out of a Sunday homily). Money, power, drugs, gambling, sex, alcohol, overused social media—on and on.

These are the things we know are harmful and sinful, that are causing—or resulting from—all the problems around us. Every single one of the things I listed above has a common factor: they’re addicting. Why? Because all of them are trying to do the same thing: they’re seeking to fulfill a very specific desire that’s present in every person, but fail to do so either permanently or completely; so everyone comes back for more.

Bear with me; I’m going to make the bold claim that this “specific desire” which makes somebody commit substance abuse is the same desire that causes us to go to Mass every Sunday—and it’s also the same one that caused religion to be formed in the first place. It’s the “transcendantal” one, the one that drove every human society to look for a higher power. It’s a longing to make sense of our existence, to orient our lives towards their proper final purpose so that we can live correctly and in a meaningful way.

That’s the seed of our Catholicism—but it doesn’t always lead to faith. When it’s degraded and twisted, it leads to those “things which do not satisfy”; drugs, sex, alcohol, and all the others are a twisted form of seeking something higher, of making sense of existence, of living life in a fulfilling way. It’s the same root cause, but its manifestations are polar opposites.

All this we already know, but what does it have to do with entertainment? Before we go too far, we should figure out what exactly we’re referring to when we use that term.

What “Modern” Entertainment Is

The idea of entertainment, used loosely, has existed as long as people were sitting around wondering what to do (which is always). It’s related to leisure, which, in turn, almost directly gives rise to culture. So entertainment/leisure brings music, art, literature, social arts, and a host of other things.

“Modern” entertainment isn’t the same as that. While we could discuss the idea of “amusement” and the mindless warding off of boredom, I’m going to give the definition that it’s any form of entertainment which has as its sole purpose the making of money—which, of course, is heavily related to the concept of amusement. In that sense, it’s not really modern: it’s probably existed just as long as leisure and culture.

Something necessarily follows from this conclusion. If this entertainment has as its only goal to earn as much money as it can, it’s not going to be satisfied with something that you do once and that’s it. It’s going to want to make you come back, and come back again, and keep coming back; it wants to be addictive. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be doing what it’s supposed to do.

What makes people come back? Well, what makes people come back to the ultimate addictive things, like alcohol and gambling? Yes, there’s a physical element to the addiction, but that’s not all: these things give the illusion of fulfilling that deep-seated transcendental desire. They make people feel, for a time, like they’ve found something higher, so they come back for that feeling. That sense of offering an ultimate fulfillment, a way to make sense of things, is deeply religious—but in a twisted way. Serious addictions are offered in a way that imitates religion. Addicting entertainment, then, must also.

Using this definition, what makes entertainment “modern” isn’t the content itself; it’s the way the content is presented. Any form of entertainment can be “modern”—or not.

But, nevertheless, certain things in our society undoubtedly fall under this umbrella. In terms of commercial entertainment (which is nearly a synonym for modern), there’s visual (movies, TV shows, video games, VR), audial (music—of all types), and competitive (streaming professional sports—not playing the sports, but watching them in a commercially streamed environment). There are probably other ones as well, but these are the most prominent.

The negative element we pointed out about modern commercial entertainment—that it emulates “religious” addictions—is very abstract. If I like listening to Post Malone and watching Marvel movies, is that really a serious problem? Isn’t it just innocent entertainment? The answer can be yes—but ninety percent of the time, it isn’t. The truth is, entertainment can start to do the same things as those “big sins” we listed above, but it’s subtler, harder to identify and condemn. 

How? Let’s explore this in a practical way.

1. Entertainment’s Simulated Experience

We already talked about “religious” desire, how it gives rise to faith and transcendance, and how part of religion’s purpose—any religion—is to fulfill this desire and make sense of the human experience. We believe that Catholicism goes further than that, but whether we look at the gods of the Greeks or the philosophies of the Confucianists, we find this same purpose of explanation, orientation, and fulfillment.

Entertainment tries to do something similar, but warps it. Instead of actually giving meaning to human experience, it seeks to provide simulated meaningful experiences, essentially imitating what religion does. To demonstrate this, let’s break things down by category.

Visual: What makes movies, pop novels, and video games so popular? Good stories, right? Yes—but why? Well, have you ever sat down and watched a superhero or romance movie because you were feeling a little down and wanted something to pick you up? I certainly have, and this is actually a profound phenomenon. At its best, it’s when good stories draw us out of our daily lives, present heroic deeds and meaningful ideas to us, so we can return to the world and appreciate it more fully.

But it’s a little different at its worst: the term we use is “escapism.” This is where we’re unhappy with our lives, so we seek to get out of them for a bit. We could talk about how narrative escapism differs from substance escapism, but, in essence, it’s when we seek to forget our own experience in exchange for a simulated experience, one that’s better than ours—but doesn’t actually belong to us. This is a religious thing: escapism is a simulated “transcendent” experience that gives us the sense that we’ve found something higher, that we’ve found a way to fulfill our everyday experiences with something meaningful. Our lives are depressing, but we can save the world like Luke Skywalker and get the girl like Peter Parker.

Audial: If cinema is simulated existence (a better life), music is simulated emotion. That music has the power to move emotions has been known since ancient times, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Bach’s second Brandenburg concerto has the power to move our emotions, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The issue arises when the emotions are simulated or forced, when they’re replacing instead of complementing our natural emotions.

Simulating emotions is something that almost all popular music does. Why? It’s effective. I like listening to “Believer” when I’m low on energy and “Memories Bring Back” when I’m melancholy, because they make me feel things I want to feel but can’t. But this, also, is a transcendent and religious experience: it tries to build the guise that music can fulfill and make sense of your emotions, that they can be made better and more meaningful.

Competitive: The thing that sports simulates is harder to pinpoint than the other two, possibly because it’s more innocent on the surface. It’s just “root for the home team,” right? Yes—until it isn’t. Streamed competition simulates a desire, but it’s a specific desire, not something more general like existence or emotion. It’s the desire for competition, for battling and striving and winning glory. This is why women don’t get as into competitive sports as men: not because women are incapable of enjoying sports, but because the desire to fight and surpass isn’t as universal among them.

You guessed it: this is also a transcendant, “religious” experience. When it’s made as widespread and commercial as it is today, it becomes a promise that your desire for contest and glory will be fulfilled through the competition of a sport. It’s a little bit of a difficult idea to put into words, but when I watch an NBA highlight reel or game ad, that’s what I feel: there’s a true battle of skill and power to prove worth and gain glory, and I can participate in it by . . . watching the game and helping the service its streaming on make money.

All these things simulate the fulfillment of human experience, but only by giving the guise of doing so. Religion’s true fulfillment of experience isn’t as flashy as entertainment’s, but it’s more permanent.

2. Liturgical Entertainment

From transcendent religion comes religious liturgy, and from faux-transcendant entertainment comes its psuedo-liturgy. “Liturgy,” used in this sense, might be more accurately described as a “rite,” a fixed formula that’s performed for a specific end. Religious rites—often-sacrificial liturgies—seek to orient that upward-facing impulse in a set of actions. “Media rites” do the same: channeling and orienting that transcendent but perverted impulse that brings people to entertainment. 

To be clear, non-religious liturgical actions aren’t necessarily bad. My family’s Sunday afternoon is liturgical: we do basically the same thing every time. The problem begins when this half-liturgy promises to do the same thing as religious liturgy, to give the same type of experience and understanding that its prototype does. Let’s break it down again.

Think about actions you repeatedly perform in terms of entertainment. You go to the theatre. You click “play again” in Fortnite. You press “next episode” for The Mandalorian. You select the next track in your Spotify playlist. You turn on ESPN to watch the Yankees. These are all ritual things, if not liturgical—but the liturgy of entertainment goes deeper than that. There’s a rite in a narrative, a song, and a sports game. These things all use repeated formulas that they give to us every time, and we’re participating in them to receive something we know we’ll get.

Like we said above, just because they’re liturgical doesn’t mean they’re bad. The problem is that they’re perverting the same type of liturgy that religion uses. What’s the something we know we’re going to get? It’s a transcendent experience, a thrill, a burst of emotion, something that seems to fulfill us. That’s a bad copy of religious ritual, but it’s effective. Think about the “congregation” gathered in a music concert, movie theatre, or sports stadiums. If we’re not in the right mindset in those ritual places, we’re participating in a twisted imitation of religion.

3. Of Gods and Saints

This is the final Jenga block that makes the tower come crashing down. (That’s a bad metaphor.) It’s not an essential element like the other two; but it results from them, and it’s the capstone on the structure we’re trying to uncover.

In any religion—again, not just Catholicism—there are role models that are given to us, figures who show us the way to make sense of our existence and orient us in the right direction. We’re most familiar with the Saints and Jesus himself—but this could be anybody from Confucius to Odysseus to Buddha to Martin Luther (I wish that was a joke). Often, these models of “holiness”—or something else—are part of the religion, assisting in leading us to greater perfection. In a Catholic context, think of Mary.

If commercial entertainment wants to fulfill the same desire as religion, it, too, must have these figures. What do we call them? Idols? Hmm . . . actors, singers, fictional characters, sports players, on and on. These are people we trust to give us this sense of fulfillment we associate with the media they create. Why would somebody put a poster of Timothée Chalamet on their wall? Maybe because they got that sense of escapism when they watched Dune: Part Two? It’s the same with a tween’s “shrine” to Patrick Mahomes: the jerseys, the trading cards, all of it, because ol’ PM is the guy they want to be, who half-fulfills their desire for contest and glory.

Looking up to people—even if they’re not saints—isn’t bad. It’s when it’s religious that it is bad. I don’t have to bring up the cult of Taylor Swift to make my point; you know what I mean.

What Should We Do?

So modern entertainment is religious in a potentially harmful way. Fine—but what are we supposed to do about that? Listen to Mozart instead of Ariana Grande? While that might be nice, simply switching our preferences wouldn’t get to the core of the issue—and even if it would, most Ariana Grande fans would be bored to death by Mozart.

It’s important to understand that the big producers of entertainment aren’t doing all this on purpose. It’s not like Kevin Feige—the mastermind behind the billion-dollar Marvel Cinematic franchise—sat down and decided to make movies that would imitate religious fulfillment and transcendence. They’re just doing what makes them the most money, and that happens to be playing off of our deepest longings and desires.

The answer to what we should do is rather simple: be conscious. Put entertainment in its place, and keep religion where it’s supposed to be. That doesn’t mean boycotting all pop music, never watching a sci-fi again, and anathemizing the NFL and NBA. But what it does mean is never consuming those forms of entertainment to fulfill a transcendent longing. Practically, that translates to not listening to music to fill an emotional lack or watching movies because we don’t feel good about our lives. If the entertainment is fulfilling a need instead of simply providing leisure, that’s where problems happen. Once entertainment starts becoming an emotional crutch, it’s no longer true entertainment but psuedo-religion.

We talked about addiction before. But in terms of entertainment, that’s not the right term: a better one is obsession. I, like 90 percent of tweenage kids, was obsessed with Star Wars and professional football. That was bad. It was pseudo-religious; I was using them to fulfill a desire I didn’t even know I had. If we become obsessed with those types of things, that’s a big red flag that we’ve started playing into their imitation of religion. Don’t watch Luke blow up the Death Star and Jamar Chase catch awesome touchdown passes because it gives you a fulfilling experience. Do it for leisure. Do it with your family (consuming entertainment by yourself is another red flag!). Do it in moderation. If we accomplish that, we’ll be one step closer to giving religion—and God—their proper place.