Ask Pastor Mike Live

Pastor Mike: Jose asks a question about watching scary movies. Is it okay as a Christian to watch scary movies? He lists one, but I don't know what it is, so I'm not even going to mention it. I couldn't answer because I don't know the movie; it could be horrific, or it could be mild. Here is what I will say, and you could disagree with me on this.

Raising kids in my house, we didn't watch scary movies. This was in part because I didn't want to deal with the effects of scary movies in my home, which I thought were going to be nightmares. I remember as a kid stumbling onto a movie that was on. It probably wasn't even that bad, but walking through the den as I came in late to get a snack or go to the bathroom and seeing something I maybe shouldn't have seen, I had a nightmare. I don't want my kids to have that.

I sheltered my kids a lot by saying they were not going to watch scary movies. I prohibited that in part because of Philippians 4, which says my focus as a Christian should be on things that are lovely, of good report, honorable, and all the rest. That list starting in verse eight is a very helpful guide for me. I’d rather watch things where if there is going to be some violence or something negative, it has a purpose.

The Bible has plenty of violence and negative things, but there is always a purpose to it. Scary movies are usually for the sake of horror or gratuitous violence. The purpose is to entertain with the violence. The Bible's violence is to show some purpose. Even in the Book of Judges, which contains the worst of the violence in Scripture, it is giving us a purpose with two reprises of the theme: there was no king in Israel, and everyone did what was right in their own eyes.

That is how the book ends, and that was a reprise of something said in the middle of the book because this is the problem of people doing their own thing without recognizing the King, who was God Himself. I am not a big fan of scary movies. I don't watch them, and I didn't let my kids watch them. Some scary movies are just glorifying things that we're not supposed to glorify. I am sure you would have a lot of pastors who would say different, but with my entertainment choices, I just would not want to desensitize myself.

A lot of what is out there glorifies the demonic, and I don't want to do that. I would be careful about being too hardcore about those things, especially when it comes to fantasy. There are certain things I'm not going to be dogmatic about from the pulpit because there are purposeful reasons for some of the things done in movies. I might defer to 1 Corinthians 10 or Romans 14 as a liberty issue for you. However, I fall on a conservative side of that for my family and myself. My wife and I just don't do that. That is my answer on that one.