“Repeat them to your children. Talk about them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Children typically wind up looking like their parents. Now, this doesn’t always happen. Sometimes the relationship between fathers and their sons, between mothers and their daughters, winds up with their becoming completely different from one another, but that’s more of an exception than a rule. In most cases, the resemblance is striking – and I don’t just mean physically. In many cases, this is intentional. Parents themselves grew up really enjoying a particular hobby or activity, and as a result, they work rather diligently to teach their kids to enjoy it as well. Sometimes this results in a total whiff (like my attempting to pass down a love for cartoons to my kids which failed rather spectacularly as I am the only one in the house with any kind of an interest in pretty much anything animated). But sometimes we manage to knock it out of the park (like I did with my passion for Kansas basketball and Kansas City sports teams). I’m thinking about all of this today because I recently (and finally!) got to watch the latest installment in the Ghostbusters franchise, Ghostbusters: Afterlife. The movie itself doesn’t have much of anything to do with this, but it got me thinking about it all the same. Let’s talk about the film and I’ll explain why.

Let me start with a little rant. Columbia Pictures needs to get with the program. Near as I can tell, they are the only major film studio without an associated streaming service or a partnership with a major network in order to load all of their movies onto their streaming platform. I pretty much have access to all of the rest of them. All of them. But Columbia Pictures isn’t associated with any of them. As a result, I’ve had to wait for three years to get to see this movie. Yes, I could have paid for it and watched it a whole lot sooner, but I wasn’t willing to do that beyond what I’m already paying for way more content than I probably should be. Given that I have access to everything put out by Paramount, Universal, Disney, and Warner Brothers, I figure I don’t need to do any more than that. But even if I picked up another streaming service, it wouldn’t have mattered. Ghostbusters: Afterlife hasn’t been available on any of them. I got to watch about a quarter of it on a plane ride once when I discovered most of the way into the flight that it was included in their inflight entertainment package, but that’s it. It finally became available on the FX Network which streams on Hulu this week. I jumped at the opportunity. The moral of this story is: Columbia Studios needs to figure out their junk so I don’t have to wait so long to watch Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire when it comes out later this year.

The movie itself was fun. If you’re like I was and haven’t seen it yet, the basic story is this. Egon Spengler, the science guy from the original Ghostbusters movies, moved to a tiny town in rural Oklahoma several years ago and set up shop on a piece of land he bought there. He did so at the expense of all of his friends and family. He apparently didn’t ever try very hard to explain what he was doing or why and so all of them hated him for it. At the beginning of the movie he is on the run from a ghost which ultimately kills him. The scene shifts to his daughter and her kids in New York City. She is failing to make ends meet and is getting evicted from her apartment. Conveniently, she inherits the bit of land he owned and moves her family to the little town because she doesn’t have any other options. Once in the little town, all the members of the family find love or friendship, resolve issues with one another and with their pasts, and learn to find contentment once again. Essentially, it’s a bait and switch. You went to see a movie about ghosts and a Hallmark movie broke out in the middle of it. I’m kidding…sort of.

The rest of the story is about Egon’s nerdy and super smart granddaughter (get it?) discovering why he moved to Oklahoma and completing his mission with the help of the original three members of the Ghostbusters team. They had to write Egon out because Harold Ramis died ten years ago, although they did bring him back as a CGI ghost at the end which felt in the moment a whole lot more tasteful and appropriate than I expected it would.

Egon’s mission was to stop the return of Gozer, the Sumerian god who tried to return to this plane of existence and take over the world in the first Ghostbusters movie. Apparently, the billionaire owner of the skyscraper where the climactic conclusion of that first film took place had built the entire thing out of steel girders laced with selenium mined from a mountain outside this little town in Oklahoma. He did that in order to bring about the return of Gozer. When that didn’t work thanks to those meddling kids…I mean Ghostbusters, he returned to Oklahoma and set up shop in the ancient Sumerian temple that has been lying buried under the mountain for thousands of years. I know, but stay with me. When the kids go down into the temple, they discover his body lying perfectly preserved in a glass coffin. Except instead of being dead, he’s alive…sort of…some how…until Gozer does return and literally rips him in half as a thanks for bring him…her…it back. There were also brief cameos by Annie Potts’ Janine, and in a totally random post-credit scene, Sigourney Weaver’s Dana Barrett. Oh, and some otherworldly energy turns a bunch of bags of giant Stay-Puffed marshmallows in a Walmart into an army of tiny, adorable, and psychotic mini Stay-Puffed Marshmallow men. Seriously.

Really, if you spend much time thinking about the plot of the movie, it’s absolutely ridiculous. I mean, bonkers crazy. There are holes big enough to drive a fleet of Echo-1’s through, and enough convenient discoveries and skills that the whole group should probably play the lottery. Except, in the context of watching it, it’s wrapped in enough nostalgia from the original that it all just feels good. It’s fun. And there’s pretty much nothing original about it. It is, in short, a perfect movie for the state we are in as a culture. I enjoyed it thoroughly, and if you liked the original Ghostbusters movies, you probably will too if you haven’t seen it. (But act quickly…it probably won’t be on FX on Hulu for long.)

That’s all about the movie. Here’s what got me thinking, though. As a culture right now, the great majority of the movies we are making – at least the popular and successful ones – are almost all sequels or prequels or reboots of old stories from the 80s and 90s. Now, on the one hand, this trend is a symptom of our cultural decadence. We have grown fat and lazy and are living off the successes of our past rather than working hard to achieve new successes for our future generations to enjoy. We are the cultural version of the spoiled son of a rich father who is indolent, selfish, and perfectly content to live off his father’s wealth rather than trying to produce any on his own. His father came from nothing to be incredibly successful. Because he never wanted his children to struggle like he did, he has provided them everything. Yet in the process, he created this monster that gives no thought to the future, but only gives attention to consuming what he wants in the moment. It’s not a good look for a person or a culture. We have become Adam Sandler’s character from the movie Billy Madison. The thing is, he eventually grew up a bit and got his act together. We seem to be going the other way.

That’s the more pessimistic take on our current state of affairs, and it is certainly not without its due warrant. I think there’s another view, though, and one that might be a bit more fruitful for us if we learn to harvest it properly. The people in the cultural driver’s seat right now are mid- to late-Gen Xers, and the earliest group of Millennials. From a storytelling standpoint, we grew up in an incredibly rich environment. Our culture then was coming out of the chaos of the 60s and early 70s and was settling down to get to work. And work we did. We began to create everything everywhere. From arts and entertainment to technology to business and finance and even to politics, we were dripping with creative energy. And while everything was by no means perfect, many folks from my generation look back on their childhood and remember being happy. Even if that memory is only a nostalgia-fueled fever dream (it certainly wasn’t in my case, but I can’t speak for everyone), that’s still the image that we have.

Well, with that image in mind, when we look around the world at how things are today and how much harder life is for children – our children – now, we can’t help but want to give our kids what we so enjoyed. And if our sharing our childhood joys with them means we get to relive some of those joys in order to get our own little reprieve from the stresses and pressures of the modern world, all the better. I would even go so far as to argue that this trend is especially pronounced among men today who typically get a pretty bad rap from the relatively small, but exceedingly loud hyper-feminist, anti-male wing of our culture, and who are looking for a way to reconnect with a time when everyone didn’t hate them, and they were told they were terrible just for being boys.

Now, this trend itself comes ripe with pitfalls and problems, but there’s a Gospel kernel here that has great potential if we will learn to develop it. We like sharing things we once loved with our kids. That’s natural and normal for parents to feel. And at its healthiest point, it can be a really good thing. It can certainly get unhealthy and out of balance (here’s looking at you Dance Moms and Ball Dads), but that’s not the whole of the story. This desire to share what we once loved can be a really good thing if what we loved was a good thing. This sharing doesn’t have to only come from the past either. Generally speaking, it is a good thing for parents to share their passions with their kids. It creates bridges between our world and theirs that provide rich opportunities for bonding and the kind of stable, healthy relationships kids need in order to grow up to be well-adjusted, properly-functioning members of society.

If you are a father or mother who happens to follow Jesus as Lord, let me give you some encouragement: Share that love with your kids. The Christian faith is passed most effectively along family lines. This is how God designed faith in Him to be passed on from one generation to the next in the beginning. Children will learn to love the Lord best and easiest when their parents love the Lord in front of them and with them. If you are a parent who enjoys sharing your passions with your children, this is the most important passion you can share. As you consider the things you are passing on to them, many of them will be incidental, a few will be entirely accidental (like bad habits or wounds from your own parents), but some will be intentional. Make sure your faith in Jesus is sitting firmly in this last category.

But just so we’re clear, this isn’t something that will happen by dropping them off at church. Don’t “give them religion” out of a sense of nostalgia. That will likely do more spiritual harm than anything particularly good for them. Go to church with them. Be involved alongside them. Encourage them to find their own ministry passion and support their pursuit of it. Study the Scriptures and challenge them to do the same. Pray for them. Pray in front of them. Pray with them. Teach them how to give and talk to them about your own giving. Let them see your doing it. Talk with them about the struggles of being faithful to the Christian life. Share in the joys with them. Teach them how to answer questions about their faith. If you don’t know the answers, find them out with them. Encourage them to thinking critically about it and not to just accept it because you believe it. Make sure they own their faith because they are convinced of its truthfulness and not just because they want to win your approval. Share with them the reasons you believe. In other words, do all the same kinds of things you would do to invite them into another passion you have. If you do this faithfully and well, the odds are pretty good they’ll share in this passion with you too.