Music superstar Taylor Swift deserves pity. But she also deserves love, for she is nothing more than a pitiable sinner like the rest of us.
On Wednesday, Time Magazine announced that it had named Swift 2023’s “Person of the Year.”
Also on Wednesday, conservative commentator Jon Root posted a 12-second clip from the music video for Swift’s song “You Need to Calm Down,” which depicted two men kissing in what appeared to be a marriage ceremony, followed seconds later by a close-up of five stereotypical “hillbillies” — one wore a cowboy hat, another wore a tank top with an American flag — angrily looking on in protest.
Swift used those “hillbillies,” of course, as stand-ins for anyone who holds the Christian view of marriage.
The song’s lyrics made that clear: “Why are you mad? When you could be GLAAD? Sunshine on the street at the parade, but you would rather be in the Dark Ages.”
“Here’s a quick reminder of what Taylor Swift thinks about Christians …,” Root posted.
Here’s a quick reminder of what Taylor Swift thinks about Christians… https://t.co/LfjzAhEBNp pic.twitter.com/nQBx5SF33E
— Jon Root (@JonnyRoot_) December 6, 2023
The full video for “You Need to Calm Down” amplified the anti-Christian and “pride” themes. In fact, the video concluded with that precise message.
“Let’s show our pride by demanding that, on a national level, our laws truly treat all of our citizens equally,” the message said.
As for “Person of the Year,” we should not begin by confusing that award with a moral endorsement. After all, Swift now shares that honor with the likes of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
Time’s annual acknowledgement merely gauges perceived influence. It recognizes those whom former Time Managing Editor Walter Isaacson called “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year, for better or for worse.”
How exactly Swift “affected” lives or “embodied” the year reveals much about the modern world.
For instance, in a lengthy article explaining the choice of Swift, Time’s Sam Lansky — the article’s author — employed telling language.
Swift’s impact, we are told, is “without a contemporary precedent.”
“She deploys the most efficient medium of the day — the pop song — to tell her story,” Lansky wrote. “Yet over time, she has harnessed the power of the media, both traditional and new, to create something wholly unique — a narrative world, in which her music is just one piece in an interactive, shape-shifting story. Swift is that story’s architect and hero, protagonist and narrator.”
She has become her own story’s “architect and hero” in a way that lacks “contemporary precedent.” So why do fans flock to her shows?
Well, if you traveled to a city in which Swift held a concert, you “made a pilgrimage.”
In fact, Lansky recalled attending one such concert in Santa Clara, California, “in a stadium with nearly 70,000 other people having a religious experience.”
And to what end, are these pilgrimages and religious experiences?
“She’s modeling radical self-acceptance on the world’s largest stage, giving the audience a space to revisit their own joy or pain, once dismissed or forgotten,” Lansky wrote.
To an untutored listener but careful reader, this sounds a good deal like worship of self.
And the bulk of Lansky’s article focused on precisely that — her story, her feelings, her.
To the Christian — or, frankly, to anyone who has contemplated the nature of the universe — an obvious question arises: Really? Is that all? She tells her story, models “radical self-acceptance,” and this amounts to a “religious experience?”
No wonder Swift has embraced “pride.” No wonder she denigrates the Christian view of marriage. If she took that view seriously, then she would have to consider its source, and that would lead her to something infinitely greater than herself.
In that sense, she commands our pity.
But we must not allow that pity to become a source of mistaken pride in ourselves. Swift has, in the words of Paul, “conformed to this world” (Romans 12:2). For all the times we have done likewise, we need God’s forgiveness.
In the meantime, God commands us to love Swift — and the millions of confused people who think as she does — the same way we love ourselves.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
