Kanye West Warns Against Media Indoctrination of Children
By Jessilyn Lancaster, Managing Editor
Music legend Kanye West warned against media indoctrination of children when speaking at Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church this weekend.
“‘Closed on Sunday’ is the hardest record ever made …because it’s talking about protecting your kids from the indoctrination of the media,” West told the megachurch crowd.
“Thousands and thousands of the images that are fed to children by the age of 6 or 7,” West continued. “Within those images are images mixed in that we don’t know about as parents, that are purposefully meant to lower the kid’s superpower and esteem so that they can be more susceptible to consumption, and feel that they need to consume and become part of the robotic, numeric system that controls so much of the media. You can do research on what I’m talking about.”
West’s statements reflect Movieguide®’s® mission and Annual Report to the Entertainment Industry. What children watch matters and the good news is that more than 40 years of research shows that movies and television shows that contain uplifting, moral messages outperform violent, lewd, foul-mouthed, and/or sexual movies at the box office.
West announced earlier this year that he is a born-again believer who serves the Lord. As part of his conversion, West appears to be forsaking many worldly idols, including money, pornography and even commercial success.
“I know that God’s been calling me for a long time and the devil’s been distracting me for a long time,” West said.
Much of that distraction, West said, came from the entertainment industry.
“You start to feel like Satan is the most powerful, and you start to feel like if you service God, that in life it means you will not prosper, and the only way to prosper is in service to fame,” he said. “It’s like the devil stole all the good producers, all the good musicians, all the good artists, all the good designers, all the good business people and said, ‘You’ve got to come over and work for me.’”
West further warned against Satan’s influence through sexual entertainment.
“When I’m in California, or when I’m in Vegas, they’ve got posters up advertising sex trafficking, because if there’s an advertisement for a strip club, that is advertising sex trafficking, because at the end of the night, when they close up, the manager says, ‘How much traffic did we have?’” he said, quieting the crowd. “So if it’s a man that’s going through things with his family or going through things at work, and he feels he has to go there, we all end up participating in these spirits that get advertised to us all the time.”
However, West told the crowd that his salvation is proof that a shift in culture is coming.
“The mentality is that Satan is as powerful as God, but this isn’t true. The trend is going to change. Jesus has won the victory because now the greatest artist that God ever created is working for him,” West said.