Criminal dramas are becoming more popular today, but at what cost to a Christian’s conscience?
As a middle school girl, I enjoyed watching criminal dramas with my mom—especially Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. My father, however, believed such media ultimately created the kind of criminals they depicted. And while I didn’t become a criminal, I did grow up with a different sort of brokenness.
As a child, I had abnormal fears and paranoia about being kidnapped. I would lock the doors when my mother worked in the garden and check behind every door for kidnappers. Most of my childhood nightmares cycled through scenarios of rape, kidnapping, and murder. These images and scenes lodged themselves in my brain and replayed obsessively.
I didn’t consider this unusual until I found myself at 20 years old crying on the phone to my husband because a random car pulled into our driveway—and I assumed its occupants were about to break in, tie me up, and throw me in the trunk. In the following days, as I reckoned with reality, I felt ashamed for being so afraid of something I’d only ever seen on a TV screen.
Today, criminal dramas and true crime are becoming more popular than ever. A 2022 poll found that half of Americans enjoy consuming this kind of content—with one in three saying they consume it at least once a week—and 13 percent say it’s their favorite genre.
Of course, we’re not the first or only generation to be attracted to the macabre. People have killed for sport and glorified gore for millennia—from gladiator battles featured in the Roman Colosseum to public executions held in town centers that even children attended.
But treating evil as entertainment can impact an entire society, just as it takes a toll on individuals.
A reporter from …
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