Politics & Power Quote by Michael Medved

Medved’s line is less a critique of Hollywood politics than a reframing device: he turns an industry’s creative worldview into a moral failing with downstream consequences. The key move is diagnostic. “Dominates” implies not merely prevalence but enforcement; “instinct” suggests something reflexive, almost biological, making liberal secularism feel like an unexamined tic rather than a reasoned stance. By the time he lands on “deny the spiritual dimension,” he’s built a binary where Hollywood isn’t just wrong on policy or taste, it’s missing an entire register of reality.

The subtext is strategic: if your opponent’s framework is spiritually impoverished, you don’t have to litigate individual films, narratives, or labor practices. You can bypass the messy particulars and argue the root is metaphysical. “Every problem” is the tell. It’s totalizing on purpose, casting liberal storytelling as structurally incapable of understanding suffering, redemption, family, sin, or meaning except in flattened psychological or sociological terms. That also smuggles in a theory of art: movies shape the nation’s conscience, so a secular movie culture doesn’t just entertain; it mis-educates.

Context matters. Medved built a career in the late-20th-century ecosystem of culture-war commentary, where Hollywood functions as shorthand for elite power, coastal values, and secular modernity. “Profoundly compounding the difficulties” reads like a warning shot: the cost of excluding religion isn’t neutrality, it’s escalation. The line invites religious audiences to see themselves not as one constituency among many, but as the missing solution Hollywood refuses to acknowledge.