PART I
The New York Times (Julia Jacobs)
How Much Sex, Drugs and Violence Can Be in a PG-13 Movie?
PART IV
Daily Mail (Chris Hastings)
God help us! Students given trigger warning about the Bible’s death and violence – including Christ’s crucifixion
The Morality of Movie Ratings: Christian Parents Need to Wake Up to How The System Works
Slow Down the Children’s Programming: Screen Time and the Fast Pace of Programming is Having Massive Negative Impact on Children
Should Pastors Use A.I. in Their Preparation of Sermons? – Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters From Listeners of The Briefing
What About ‘Trigger Warnings’ For Scripture? – Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters From Listeners of The Briefing
Did Judas Repent Before He Hanged Himself? – Dr. Mohler Responds to a Letter From a 9-Year-Old Listener of The Briefing
It’s Friday, November 21st, 2025.
I’m Albert Mohler and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
I think all of us know, all Christians know, all Christian families, especially all Christian parents know, that entertainment and morality are inextricably linked. We are making moral judgments and we are taking moral acts when we understand choosing the entertainment that we see, or that we allow our children to see, and frankly the very experience of seeing them. We understand as Christians that this is never value-neutral. We understand that there is no neutral ground. We understand that what we’re being presented with is either the truth or a lie. It is either the good, the beautiful and the true, or it is the absence of the good, the beautiful and the true. But we also understand that the ubiquity of entertainment, the omnipresence of entertainment all around us, the fact that it is such a large portion of our economy, it means that we’re a part of this conversation really whether we want to be or not.
But it does call upon Christians to be informed about some of the big worldview issues that are behind all of this. And one of them has to do with making moral judgments about motion pictures. Just to take one part of the big information and education economy, let’s just look at the ratings of motion pictures, but let me tell you why it’s news. It’s because just a couple of days ago the New York Times ran a front-page article of the headline, “Board Reveals What Can Pass In Rating Films.” Julia Jacobs is the reporter. And the big news here is that for the first time the Motion Picture Association has released the logic and judgments behind the ratings that are assigned to motion pictures. And so you’re familiar with G, and PG and PG-13 and NC-17 and R. And you understand that there’s a spectrum that is revealed there and a lot of moral judgment is revealed there and a lot of it puts ourselves and our children at risk, so let’s understand what’s going on here.
As Jacobs tells us, “For decades a board of parents established by the Motion Picture Association has rated movies based on their perceived suitability for children and teenagers. It has the declared mission of rating a movie the way, ‘a majority of American parents would.’ A tricky assignment in a sharply polarized country. Over the years some critics have painted the board as prudish, others as overly permissive.” Okay, so the Motion Picture Association itself, so this tells us the industry is supposedly here regulating itself. It appoints this nameless board of parents and they’re supposed to be representative of parents in the United States. And they’re supposed to be making judgments about what is suitable for children and for young people, adolescents, teenagers, on the basis of the fact that they are parents. They’re trying to make judgments, we are told as if other parents in America would. And then you’ll notice that this has led to no shortage of controversy. Some people see the board as prudish, that is too conservative. Others are saying that it’s permissive, it’s too liberal.
For the first time, here’s the news part, for the first time the Motion Picture Association has revealed some of the criteria or the guidelines. It is an official guide by the way, “The guide delves into the considerations around nudity and sex, so for instance in a PG-13 movie, brief background sounds are acceptable.” It is violent imagery we are told that is most likely to tip a film towards R. It turns out that there are other issues that are in the purview of this board and that includes guns, cannabis, crude language. Obviously the rating of different sexual issues is crucial here. I really on this program can’t go into some of the detail that is indicated here, but I just want to tell parents, “Hey, wake up. You need to look at this.” You can find the link to this article. I think you’ll be appalled by what gets by. And I think you generally kind of know that, and I think Christian parents in particular have for a long time been very suspicious about these ratings. I just want to tell you, if anything, you should be more suspicious than you ever knew.
And I also think it tells us a lot about how sin works in a society and how sin sells in a society, that things are quantified as they are here, like some swear words. It’s not only where they’re used is by whom, in what context, how many times. The worst perhaps of these words you can use one time in a movie and have one rating. If it’s used another time, you get a different rating. Look, the movie producers and directors, they know this, they play to this and they play right to the boundaries of all of this. It also shows just how close to the boundaries so many movies are, so for instance, a movie of which I am not familiar at all, that was the movie known as Eighth Grade, it was given by this board an R rating, which meant that eighth graders shouldn’t legally be able to see it. We’re also told that adolescents were the intended first audience, so this tells you a lot about Hollywood. Hollywood doesn’t make news unless it is transgressing boundaries, and that’s the bottom line.
If Hollywood just stays within the boundaries, nobody talks about them, so they have to press the boundaries. In this case that movie evidently pressed them too far. But the reality is that the question is, okay, how much do we have to negotiate off of that to get a rating so that eighth graders could go and see the movie about the eighth grade? Among the things I’m just not going to cite with any detail, the number of sex acts, the number of violent acts, the number of things that no Christian parents should want to see or to allow much less their children and teenagers to see. The numbers are just massive. I think it’s still possible to shock Americans and this is the kind of, or at least American Christian parents or American Christians, I think this is the kind of story that does shock. It is also the fact that a lot of this gets traded off. And so you have the marijuana issue, you have the language issue, you have the sex act issue. A lot of this is just inherently subjective.
The subjective nature of this is why you have this rotating group of supposedly representative parents who are also anonymous by the way. And so you have the industry supposedly regulating itself, here’s problem number one. At the same time, they’re trying to increase their market. Scandalization is a part of that, pushing the boundaries as a part of that. They name this group, the group is made up of anonymous parents and they through their own system come up with this. But even as they are now revealing “how the movies get their ratings,” it really doesn’t tell us any more than they want us to know. And how all this fits into the calculation is still, it’s kind of like a computer, it goes in and it comes out, you don’t know exactly what goes on in between. I have to tell you also, just reading this, I think one of the things that struck me is that sometimes putting something into print concretizes it, focuses it in a way that we might otherwise miss.
And I think for instance, if you have a news program on television or on streaming and someone says something, it can be less shocking than reading it where the words just faces. And for instance when it comes to this rating system, what is allowable under and R rating is pretty stunning. I can just put it that way. It is pretty astounding, especially when they describe it in particulars. And then they were also told that moviegoers under 17 are to be accompanied by an adult. Well, what logic does that make? Is that adult supposed to be a parent? No, just as an adult. What kind of sense does that make? Who thought this was a smart idea? Who thought that this was a morally responsible idea? And what does accompanied by an adult even mean in moral terms? It really doesn’t mean anything. I think we all know that. And besides that it’s just a sense of where our society is going into cultural and moral insanity.
And by the way, remember that we’re told that these are the guidelines, this is how the board acts. But then it is also true that the woman who leads the board and has done so since 2019 will just hear this as reported by the New York Times, “She cautioned that the guide should not be viewed as a hard and fast rule book. The rating process is nuanced and rooted in a movie’s context, she said, and there will always be exceptions to what the guidance lays out.” In other words, all that I just told you, it could all basically be untrue in any given case because this group of anonymous parents appointed by the association itself, it comes up with these decisions and everything is within a context and within the context of a movie. And so all of us in particular as Christians, as individuals, as parents, as families, as young people, as churches, as pastors, we better be aware of the fact that we are complicit in this if we take it seriously. Now, I don’t mean that it’s not serious that there’s a difference between G and R, but I’m just going to take this board and its leader at its word, it all depends on the context.
The same woman again, who’s led the board said, “The beauty of the system is it’s not a perfect science. And the frustrating part of the system is it’s not a perfect science.” Of course, by the time you end the article, you begin to wonder, well then what exactly is it? I think the answer is it’s a fig leaf and a little more.
Okay, another big issue that comes up just before we go to questions, USA Today ran a headline this week, “Sesame Street Gets a Refresh and a New Address.” It’s now on Netflix and they’re releasing the first volume of four new 30 minute episodes, so you know about Sesame Street. You know what the controversy is about Sesame Street. I want to tell you the one thing that’s revealed in this article that I think parents especially need to pay attention to, and that is that this new version of Sesame Street, which is going to include animation and other things, Sesame Street’s always been laden and with all kinds of world view concerns.
But it is very interesting that the producers say that this new Sesame Street is intended in part to slow down and quiet children’s programming. And I think that’s pretty significant. Every once in a while, my wife and I are out and we’re in a context in which we see families out, for instance in a restaurant, it’s just shocking to us how many parents just put a screen in front of a kid. This isn’t a family meal. The children are just there in their own little, highly animated, very loud entertainment world. It’s a very sad thing I think, to see. But the one thing that shocks me about the programming itself is how loud it is, how noisy it is, and how fast it is. It says something that the producers of Sesame Street say, “We’re trying to slow it down a little bit.” I find that there’s the very real threat that a lot of young children and teenagers who were raised on this entertainment, they’re used to things so fast they can’t slow down.
I want to speak to pastors here. Do you ever wonder why the attention span of congregations gets shorter and shorter? I think a lot of it is because of entertainment that comes at them faster and faster. And so a sermon can’t appear to be just a very slow delivery of words because after all, it is a delivery of words. It is the preaching, the exposition of the Word of God. And when you have children conditioned to talking very fast with all kinds of entertainment and flashing noises and bells and whistles and all the rest all the time, and it’s one thing to another very quickly, I probably talk fast enough to begin with. You speed me up, wow, it’s a problem. Maybe this is something for Christian parents to think about, the entire entertainment context, but I really am concerned about the pace of a lot of this. I think you can see it showing up in students and they’re just used to things coming at them very, very, very fast, noisy and flashy. And you know what? A sermon doesn’t come across that way.
A conversation with a parent doesn’t come across that way. A teacher teaching in a classroom doesn’t come across that way. They’re having trouble processing slow and normal because they’re now conditioned to fast, loud and flashy.
All right, now let’s turn to questions. I find this interesting every single week, and I appreciate the questions that listeners send in. You can send your own by just writing me at mail@albertmohler.com. Artificial intelligence is a theme that comes up again and again, and I’m writing a book treatment on that right now. And it’s very interesting here you have a Christian who says that he’s blessed to be in a wonderful evangelical church that certainly centers in expository preaching and he sees the risk of artificial intelligence. He says, “I believe that some preachers and perhaps teachers of Sunday school will use AI to develop and write their sermons, and that increases the risk that they’ll end up preaching non-biblical doctrines.” I just want to say that’s the first time I’ve seen it put quite that way, and I appreciate this letter putting it just that way.
I do think that there’s the real danger of preaching non-biblical doctrines. I think the more common concern is that it’s just not personally generated. It’s not a sermon that comes through the labor of the preacher, but rather one that comes through the artifice of artificial intelligence. But I do think there is the great risk, and I want to tell you why. And this is again, a focus of something I’m really deeply involved in writing right now. When you talk about artificial intelligence and the current platforms, ChatGPT, you look at products and companies like OpenAI, you look at all of this and you say, well, what is it? Well, it’s generative to a degree. It puts things together, but it’s not generating them from nowhere. And so do you know where it gets the material? It gets it from everywhere. As a matter of fact, one of the concerns about the entire field of artificial intelligence is that it’s going to run out of material to analyze, to put into its vast language, large language models.
And I appreciate the honesty of the word that is used for gaining so much of this raw material is called scraping. And so these giant companies are scraping text, they’re scraping information, they’re scraping. They scrape up Shakespeare, but of course you have huge copyright issues. They’re scraping up the New York Times, they’re scraping up just about anything that is on the worldwide web, on the internet. They can scrape it up and put it in their vast bases, and that means they’re scraping up a lot of bad stuff. As a matter of fact, one of the concerns that has just emerged in artificial intelligence, is that a part of what is now being scraped up by artificial intelligence is the product of artificial intelligence, which is to say you really have a pool turning poisonous really fast. And so I want to say I think this Christian, this Christian man is really onto something here. I do think there is the very real risk that what’s scraped up is sub-biblical, sub-orthodox, problematic in every way, so add that to the list of moral problems connected to artificial intelligence.
And I’ll just go back to preachers and say, your task is to get up every opportunity to preach, and then to open the word of God to read it and to explain it to Christ’s people. Expository preaching means exposing the congregation to the text and the text to the congregation, and that comes by the proclamation of God’s Word. And there are all kinds of things that can help us in that, biblical commentaries, all the language study, even seeing what other preachers throughout Christian history have done. But it’s a very different thing to preach someone else’s material. Even when that’s someone else is an else that’s not someone, artificial intelligence. I think the danger is incredibly high. The temptation is going to be very, very close. And as this listener to The Briefing points out, the moral complications are only going to grow.
I have another Christian man who sent in as a listener a question about the use of artificial intelligence for the preparation of Christian delivery, sermon preparation. This listener says, “I heard a pastor say it’s now common for pastors to use AI as a part of their research into a Bible passage or topic when preparing their sermon.” Well, there are pros and cons as reflected here. This listener says, “I’m interested in an analysis of the pros and cons of using AI for sermon preparation.” I don’t believe I have any particular insights into this when it comes to something that could be right around the corner or whatever. This is going to change very fast. But I would say that legitimate uses of AI is simply to sort material. And so in one sense, it’s a glorified search engine. I don’t see real ethical problems with a lot of the use of that. And so if you ask, give me eight commentaries on John chapter one, and it suggests, of course you’re going to have to know which suggestions to take and which ones not to take, but I think that can be useful.
And I think by the way, a lot of the internet searches that people do that they don’t know has anything to do with AI, AI is a part of what is informing that search. I think the assembly of background materials, it might be assisted that way the same way a search engine can provide that. But the engagement with the biblical text, the study of the biblical text, and the exposure and teaching and exposition of the biblical text, in the context of a sermon preached by a live preacher to a live congregation, I think AI has no place between the preacher and the congregation, none. It is the preaching of the Word of God by the man of God given that assignment to the congregation, to the people of God. And it had better be coming through his heart and his soul, not coming through the keyboard and the mediation of AI. AI can be a part of the background search for just about anything. When it turns by any claim, generative in terms of creating the material, I think we have a huge problem and I think we know it.
And congregations have every right to expect that what comes from the preacher comes from the preacher, from the Word of God.
Another very interesting technological question sent in by a listener who points to the fact that the Daily Mail in London recently released a news story saying that a college, a university there in the United Kingdom had warned through a trigger warning about Scripture, had labeled texts from the Bible as a deserving of trigger warnings. Let me back off the Bible for a moment and just talk about trigger warnings, so let’s separate the issue, trigger warnings and then trigger warnings about Scripture. And so let’s just say the trigger warnings about Scripture are just more urgent concerns about trigger warnings. The idea of trigger warnings is that you warn an audience if something is coming up that could be disquieting or troubling traumatic to someone. And the logic of this is, let’s just say it could be rooted in a very legitimate impulse.
Someone who is a survivor of a sexual assault, may have all kinds of emotions triggered by conversation about sexual assault, but trigger warnings are very limited way of dealing with that. And then I want to say part of it is just the illogic in one sense of it, because I was listening to National Public Radio just this morning and they came out and they said, a warning, this story includes references to blank, blank, blank, blank, blank. Well, you know that was a trigger warning, which could have triggered all kinds of responses. In a sinful world that’s just one of the quandaries we live in. But a lot of this is now filtered through political correctness or whatever you want to call it, the ideologies of the Left as well. And especially when you have warnings that make moral judgments. And you’re going to see liberals make all kinds of moral judgments against what’s found in Scripture. And by the way, the Scripture offers no trigger warnings for very explicit dealings with human sin and human behavior.
And this comes down to warfare, it comes down to violence, it comes down to sin in all of its manifestations. The Scripture is never salacious, but it is also not evasive. It tells us what sin looks like, the forms that sin takes. But you’ll notice also the logic, and I think that’s why this listener sent it in, I think he’s onto the second part of this, which is trigger warnings about Scripture or trigger warnings addressed to Christians. It is because the Christian gospel, the proclamation of the gospel, the preaching of the Word of God is going to hit all kinds of triggers everywhere. And it is because it gets right to the heart of identifying the reality of sin and the promise of the gospel, which comes exclusively and only through the saving work accomplished by the Lord Jesus Christ. I think we’re not far from some of these liberal regimes declaring that the preaching of the gospel needs to be accompanied by a trigger warning. And of course, that’s just a step from saying it shouldn’t be permitted speech. And I think there’s some Americans saying, oh, that will never happen.
Well, I think it’s less likely in the United States. I think one of the things we should be thankful for is very robust First Amendment protections, but we need to know that even going across our northern border to Canada, it is not exactly the same. More troubling, you go to places like the United Kingdom, and a lot of this is becoming just an ongoing matter of daily conversation. You also have some other European countries where you’ve had members of parliament even and members of the government, not to mention others who have been accused of violating hate speech laws or any number of other things. It’s all tied together into a logic here. But again, I go back to where I was this morning just listening to a National Public Radio report with a trigger warning, and I just wondered, do they think they’ve really accomplished something because they’ve warned about triggering, and then they say all the things that might trigger. I think the strangeness in all of that at least ought to be noted.
Finally, for today, a very interesting question from a nine-year-old boy, and it’s kind of a nine-year-old boy question, but let’s face it’s a question that all Christians of all ages have thought about. And this little boy asked straightforwardly, “Did Judas repent before he hanged himself?” And that is a key question. The role of Judas in the Gospels is so clear. And of course we read as Christians, we read Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the so-called synoptic Gospels. We read them already knowing who Judas is and what Judas is going to do. And that really colors the way we read the identification of Judas even early on. And it’s because his role, his singular role as the betrayer of Jesus from inside the circle of the 12, it is just so absolutely shocking. There is no biblical evidence whatsoever that Judas repented. There’s absolutely zero evidence that he repented. I think there’s evidence that he didn’t. And I think for instance, in the Gospel of John, the reference is to Judas as the devil. It’s a very clear sign that this is not a man in whom repentance was evident at all.
The circumstances of his violent death and all the rest are indications not of repentance, but of judgment. And it’s a good question. It does come to us, and I think there are some who’ve tried to turn it this way throughout church history. There’s some people who’ve tried to say, look, the gospel is so powerful even Judas could be saved. That’s just not the kind of question I think Christians should think about. Instead, we take it the way the scripture presents it to us.
And so I want to say to this little boy who asked this question, there’s absolutely no evidence in the Bible that Judas repented. And I think my young friend, that this is a good, wonderful warning to each of us as sinners, that we must repent of our sins and come to saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And without that, there is absolutely no hope. The very clear teaching of the New Testament is, don’t be Judas. And I think that’s probably the biggest lesson to learn here.
As always, thanks for your questions, and I look forward to receiving even more in days to come.
I’m really thankful that my Christmas devotional book, Recapturing The Glory of Christmas is out and it’s available to churches, individuals, families. I want to tell you I wrote it in particular for Christian families to use as a devotional guide, 25-day guide leading up to Christmas. Of course, I also had the focus on individual Christians, and I also think it can be useful as a gift to non-Christians because in it, the gospel is so clearly presented because in Christmas, the gospel is so clearly presented. This 25 day devotional, which is entitled Recapturing the Glory of Christmas, you can find out more about it by just going to the website, recapturingtheglory.com. Recapturingtheglory, all one word .com. And my great hope in writing this book and making it available to Christian churches and Christian families and to Christians, is that every single one of us at this strategic time of the year would recapture the glory of Christmas, as is revealed in the Holy Scriptures, pointing us to the eternal glory of Christ.
Thanks for listening to The Briefing.
For more information, go to my website at albertmohler.com. You can follow me on X or Twitter by going to x.com/albertmohler. For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com.
I’ll meet you again on Monday for The Briefing.
PART I
The New York Times (Julia Jacobs)
How Much Sex, Drugs and Violence Can Be in a PG-13 Movie?
PART IV
Daily Mail (Chris Hastings)
God help us! Students given trigger warning about the Bible’s death and violence – including Christ’s crucifixion
R. Albert Mohler, Jr.
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