My wife and I just finished watching two seasons of the NBC show New Amsterdam on Netflix. It’s a medical drama spotlighting a fictional public hospital in New York. Featured cases often give the show the opportunity to display the moral superiority of left-wing causes. I’ve been told that our culture doesn’t tolerate self-righteous preaching, but given the prevalence of self-righteous preaching in much of current media, I’m not sure that’s the case. It would seem that the issue is more whether the preaching already agrees with the cultural zeitgeist or not. Anyways, none of that came as a surprise, given the times we’re living in. But there was a plot line in a recent episode that did surprise me.
Dr. Iggy Frome is the chair of psychiatry at New Amsterdam, and is one of the paragons of progressive ideology in the show (married to a man, has four adopted children from disadvantaged areas of the world, and eminently likeable). One day, a couple enters his office with an issue. They are engaged to be married, they have had a storybook romance, but suddenly everything has cratered. Why? As an engagement present, they had received a DNA kit and discovered that they were in fact siblings. Different mothers, but the same anonymous sperm donor. And ever since, the woman has been unable to look at her fiancé the same way. They are no longer living together and the wedding may be called off. Because, you know, she found out that her fiancé is her brother.
What does New Amsterdam do with this? Dr. Frome spends the episode trying to get the woman to see her fiancé the same way she did before the discovery. He is convinced that, while they should not have biological children together, their status as siblings should not stand in the way of romantic love. This should not be a legitimate barrier. Is it a nuanced case? Of course. But objectively, it’s incest. And at the end of the episode, Dr. Frome has succeeded. The couple walks out of his office, hand in hand, with beautiful music in the background, as Dr. Frome looks on with a smile on his face. A primetime network show has declared that an incestuous romantic relationship is a win worth celebrating.
I guess this should be expected to some degree. The farther our western culture departs from any kind of transcendent basis for morality, the less any old boundaries will matter. It’s the same basic movement Paul traces in Romans 1. God has not left the world without a revelation of Himself. However, people have lived in willful ignorance, exchanging worship of the Creator for worship of created things. This has resulted in immorality in all directions. This is particularly evident, according to Paul, in the realm of sex. So, in our current cultural climate, why should there be any barriers to consensual sexual activity? What would keep any taboo or boundary from being torn down? People continue pushing against the limits, and what was unthinkable a few years ago becomes mainstream, leading the way for the next conquest.
To my “progressive Christian” friends, I hope and pray you would be careful what you hitch your wagons to. If your moral framework is no longer based on the Scriptures, but instead on the prevailing winds of our culture, what can you say about this? You’ve wedded yourself to a juggernaut that will not slow down until every boundary has been transgressed. Are you ok with that? Do you genuinely believe God is ok with it? If the Scriptures are not your basis for morality, how can you stand against the spirit of the times? New Amsterdam and other shows like it are a peek into the future. This is where we’re going as a culture. If you’re not sure that’s where you want to go, this might be a good opportunity to get off the train. (How many transportation metaphors can I mix in one paragraph?)
And to anyone else who is troubled by this, you’re right to be. I want to say, though, be careful about your posture and heart in this. Our culture accurately despises prideful self-righteousness, even if it’s a half-hearted rebuke. The witnesses in Revelation 11 (which I believe represent the church through the ages, but that’s for another time) do their work of testifying in sackcloth (v.3). In other words, they mourn. Peter “pleads” with the crowds in Jerusalem to repent and to come out of a corrupt generation (Acts 2:40). Jesus, when gazing at Jerusalem in Luke 13 and knowing what will happen there, “longs” for that city to be willing to receive his comfort.
Our message only has power if it is done from a place of authentic love and compassion for the people of our society. Maybe that still sounds self-righteous, but any Christian knows that “but for the grace of God, there go I”. Any Christian knows they are saved only by grace and not because of anything they have done. Any Christian knows that the abundant life we might experience in Christ is all his doing.
Look, I know it’s just one plot line from one episode from one show. Maybe it’s nothing. But big picture, given where we’ve come from and where we are morally as a culture, it makes complete sense. And so maybe this is an opportunity to ask people if they’re still sure about the direction we’re headed, and what we’ve left behind. And to invite them to establish their lives on something- Someone– eternal and lasting.
