Here at True Education, we often note what a challenge it is for our teenagers to navigate the murky waters of entertainment. Movies, television, video games, books and music have all become increasingly degenerate, and access to those things is easier than at any point in the history of mankind.

What if we were to rewind the clock, say, 50 years? Of course, you could do that, simply restricting yourself to entertainment produced in 1964 or earlier. That’s the year the Beatles came on the scene, and the reaction was epic, even by modern standards:

“Visually they are a nightmare, tight, dandified Edwardian-Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair. Musically they are a near disaster, guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony and melody. Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’) are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments …” (Newsweek, Feb. 24, 1964).

“They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music, even as the imposter popes went down in history as ‘anti-popes’” (Boston Globe, Sept. 13, 1964).

“The Beatles’ vocal quality can be described as hoarsely incoherent, with the minimal enunciation necessary to communicate the schematic texts” (New York Times, Feb. 10, 1964).

“Just thinking about the Beatles seems to induce mental disturbance. They have a commonplace, rather dull act that hardly seems to merit mentioning, yet people hereabouts have mentioned scarcely anything else for a couple of days.” (Washington Post, Feb. 13, 1964).

This is just a small sample. The adults representing the news media at the time were appalled by these people who, as John Lennon once famously declared, thought they were more popular than Jesus Christ.

Go back 10 more years, and we come to 1954—the year Elvis Presley began his career. Ten years before that, Frank Sinatra was just starting out. In 1980, Mr. Armstrong wrote about the link between Presley, Sinatra and the Beatles:

“It picked up what had been started by Frank Sinatra, when teenage girls ran screaming half out of their minds for his autograph. It was revived and intensified by Elvis Presley. Then the Beatles delivered Satan’s knockout blow to any public sense of social values in the world” (Worldwide News, Dec. 22, 1980).

Mr. Armstrong, writing when many of your parents were still children, said that the sense of social values in the world had been knocked out. Society’s morality never woke up!

Consequently, you now face a glut of filth produced by an entertainment machine with no moral center. And society would have you believe that what it is producing actually matters—that your social identity should be defined by what music you are listening to, what movies you watch, and what celebrities you follow on Twitter.

The entertainment this world produces is often debased—and spiritually dangerous. How, you might ask, can a teenager in God’s Church be equipped to deal with spiritual danger?

You might remember an article by Ryan Malone titled “Are You Listening to the Right Music?” and certainly you should read it—but I have an interesting observation for you: That article was never printed in True Education. Neither is it posted on the Youth section of pcog.org. And here, from the article itself, is why: “Obviously, you young people must trust your parents and obey them. With most of the youth in God’s Church, your parents or guardians have God’s Spirit. They need to be involved in the judgment and discernment of the music you listen to because of these spiritual components.”

That’s the answer: You alone are not equipped to deal with the spiritual dangers society regularly places in front of you. But God has given you the best possible tool a young person could have: minds led by the holy spirit to discern good from evil (Hebrews 5:14).

When your parents came in the Church, they faced the same problem you face today: living in a society that dispenses its perverted values through television, movies and music—and that grossly misrepresents how important it is that we engage in these activities in the first place. And they chose God’s way of life over what Satan offers.

Certainly True Education will always produce articles helping you distinguish between right entertainment and wrong entertainment, but never forget: Entertaining yourself should never become your primary focus! Your parents can help you distinguish between when you are living the God Family lifestyle and when you are placing too much importance on what the media has to offer. Don’t let the influences this world offers distract you from a way of life that works beautifully every time it is tried. Instead, turn to your parents, both for guidance in selecting what you allow to enter your mind and as older, wiser voices to tell you that you really don’t need society’s influence all that much in the first place.