In the entertainment you engage with, have you been allowing God’s word to shape the laugh track of your life—or has your laugh track been subtly shaped by the world? To help you answer this question, reflect on whether the things you are laughing at or approving of help or hinder your conscience, by asking whether they promote or undermine your sense of peace and comfort before God.

What was the first music you owned? For me it was a CD by Blink 182, The Mark, Tom and Travis Show. Well, when I say owned I mean permanently ‘borrowed’ from my brother when I was 10 years old. I enjoyed it so much that it became the only CD I listened to. ‘Enjoyed’ is really an understatement too. I listened to it and sang myself to sleep every night for six years—much to the annoyance of my brothers.

Wanting to relive the nostalgia of my youth, I went to sing a song from this CD at a karaoke night with Korean friends from my church. After displaying a rather remarkable range in pitch of which I was rather proud, my ballad was cut short as the sexually explicit content of the song I was singing became apparent. Recognizing its unhelpfulness and feeling embarrassed, I changed the song.

As I look back I can see that, through continual exposure during my youth, my conscience became desensitized to constant swearing and sexual references. It was not until this event many years later, as a Christian amidst other Christians, that I was able to rightly perceive the offensiveness of what I had spent so many nights of my youth enjoying.

For most of us, the normalization and celebration of sin has become so pervasive in the entertainment we grew up enjoying that it can be difficult for us to discern whether or not God is pleased with our lifestyle. There is often a cognitive dissonance between what we believe about God and his law and how we live. So, how are Christians meant to navigate this complicated issue?

Appealing to a conscience that has been informed by God’s word is the means through which Christians can honour God with entertainment and maintain the integrity of our witness to this fallen world. The conscience is the moral faculty given to all of us by God that enables us to pass moral judgements on ourselves.¹ Its intended function is to act as a mirror “so that we can determine our true spiritual state in accord with the mind of God”²³ Richard Sibbes, the Puritan theologian, compares the conscience to a divine court within the soul that works as a witness (2 Cor 1:12; Rom 2:15), as our guide (Acts 24:16; Rom 13:5), and as our judge and executioner condemning us and filling us with grief when our guilt is discovered (Rom 1:32).⁴ So serious is the role of the conscience that Paul can say that, though all food is clean, if anyone is convicted that to eat certain foods would be disobedient to God, such a person “is condemned if he eats” (Rom 14:14, 23). Why? Though our conscience is fallible, whatever we do that causes us to disobey our conscience is sin (Rom 14:23).

One way to understand the effect entertainment has on our conscience is through the concept of a laugh track, something you’ll hear on many sitcoms. Brian Patrick explains:

The laugh track is a social cue, a means of exerting group pressure. The viewer follows the group norm and thoughtlessly laughs along.⁵

All entertainment seeks to convey a particular world view, aiming to evoke a response favourable to the moral messaging they seek to promote. In one sense, our conscience can be viewed as an internal laugh track that influences our disposition towards what we watch, listen to or read. Albert Mohler describes how our internal laugh track is being affected by the morality of the shows we watch:

There is no way to watch entertainment, regardless of its media format without also receiving moral messaging. Sometimes that moral messaging comes directly to us in terms of something we recognize. But far more ominously from a Christian perspective this moral influence often comes in a far more subtle form. It is the rearrangement of our intuitions, sometimes even of the laugh track of our lives. That is a moral change that we might not so readily perceive that explains why we might laugh at something now we would not have laughed at just a matter of a couple of years ago.⁶

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