“In a world where vice is vanilla, virtue is spicy. In an age where amoral excess is the bland standard, disciplined restraint is the flavorful exception.”

This is my claim in my recent essay on holiness as the “new transgression.” As a longtime movie and pop culture critic, I’ve simply grown bored by Hollywood’s constant envelope-pushing and moral-boundary-transgressing. We’ve come to the point when shock-and-awe spectacles and explicit provocations are so common (and not just on HBO) that they’re no longer shocking, just sad and same-old. The new avant-garde is the art which celebrates virtue, healthy marriages, stable nuclear families, time-tested wisdom, heroic valor, and straightforward romance. Artists on the real vanguard are the ones making purity, holiness, and selfless love look attractive, while artists pushing a naughty/edgy/scandalizing aesthetic are the bourgeois status quo.

A recent Oscar-nominated movie captures the “new transgression” well: Living. While many of the other nominated films celebrate the boring excess of our age, Living is a celebration of a man choosing—in his final days of life—to be a good, selfless man (Bill Nighy, nominated for best actor). It’s inspiring and beautiful to watch, and I hope there are more films like this in the future. I pray the next generation of artists and storytellers sees the opportunity here. As I write in the article linked below, “Rather than stories that present sin as some sort of perverse currency of ‘relatability,’ we need narratives that challenge us aspirationally: to be better, more selfless, more humble, more holy.”