Barbarism posing as entertainment

In a recent monologue on Jimmy Kimmel Live, the host delivered an extended bit about a handful of his employees swooning over Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Kimmel chuckled while reading texts from staff members about how attractive they found Magnione and then played news footage of a Utah man who drove his car through the front window of a car dealership after it refused to give him a refund for what he considered a lemon. Kimmel noted that the Utah man, lacking chiseled abs and a defined jawline, didn’t get the same reaction from his employees or anyone else currently experiencing the Luigi vapors. The joke about his writers’ bias toward attractive people seemed very secondary to the larger point: Any CEO profiting off of healthcare is an enemy who deserves no sympathy if someone guns him down.

On the one hand, it’s not surprising that Kimmel is more interested in signaling to his viewers that he holds the correct leftist views than he is in being genuinely funny. Most late-night talk show hosts have been doing that for years, ever since Jon Stewart perfected the advocacy-with-jokes-masquerading-as-comedy template in his first run with The Daily Show. On the other hand, it’s a bit odd for Kimmel to assert himself as a bold defender of the moral order, considering his early on-screen career is loaded with bits of immorality—serial blackface and sexually exploitative pranks, just to name a few examples.

As a former creep turned leftist scold, Kimmel is similar to reformed shock jock Howard Stern, who has also spent recent years lashing out at Trump-supporting or COVID-skeptical conservatives. For decades, Stern never met a degenerate he wouldn’t platform or a special needs person he wouldn’t treat like a circus freak. His brand was doing anything to generate ratings. Now he says he doesn’t care if his leftist-defined support for purity and truth has cost him half his audience.

Why would these men risk bringing attention to their tawdry pasts by establishing themselves as the new decency police? Why not leave that task to another court jester, one who may have a skeleton or two in his closet but doesn’t have dozens of them strewn about his living room? I think for both men, the answer is clear: This is what happens when a prodigal son doesn’t know the way home.

In 2017, Kimmel’s son was born with a congenital heart defect. In that same year, Stern endured a cancer scare. In the subsequent years, both men took increasingly political and caustic turns, their versions of the wayward son coming to his senses after coveting pig slop. Just as the parable’s main character realized the folly of using his father’s treasure to buy the approval of fickle and fiendish friends, both Kimmel and Stern seem to have realized that building careers off of bikini-clad women and lazy innuendos acquired for them nothing lasting or honorable. Like the Prodigal Son, both men wanted to find a way to fill their bellies with a better legacy than what yukking it up with prostitutes and drunkards provided. But unlike the Prodigal Son, Kimmel and Stern didn’t know the way.

The Prodigal Son planned to take the road back to his father and say, “I’m no longer worthy to be called your son, let me be one of your servants.” But Kimmel and Stern have both found themselves stumbling around, picking up whatever leftist causes they could find, abortion, universal healthcare, sexism, Trump, Trump, and more Trump, and saying, “I support the good thing! Once I wasn’t worthy, but now I am! Look how I’m willing to sacrifice an audience for the cause! Look how I’m using my platform to denounce evil things! Now I’ve done something meaningful that gives me the right to be honored. Please let me be remembered for this and not my early 2000s transgressions.”

While it would be easy to condemn these men for such ugly, self-righteous behavior, sadness is perhaps a better response than anger. The woke religion is a brutal one. Instead of one straight path back to the arms of God, it sets a thousand crooked, twisted roads before you, all of them leading nowhere in particular, roads you’re told could possibly lead to absolution but are far more likely to lead to more condemnation if the Holy Mob decides it has more to gain from devouring you than embracing you. Follow them long enough and you’ll find yourself flailing about, running through the wilderness, and not so subtly celebrating the murder of an innocent man or laughing at the death of COVID vaccine opponents.

They’d find a much better road in Christ. The path home brought the Prodigal Son back into the arms of a father who instantly clothed him in the robe that erased his sins from existence. In the same way, the blood of Christ has given both Kimmel and Stern the right to walk away from their years of filth and humiliation and enter the arms of a God who will remember their sins no more, a God who will not make them show how much they hate certain neighbors before He gives them His love. The blood of Christ has paved a path to the God who will not change His mind about them midway home, a God who is already waiting to embrace them, a God who isn’t content for them to be servants but wants them as sons. Imagine what joy they would find if they left the chaos of the woke religion and found the true path home.