A Higher Standard

When I was in high school, I remember using a myriad of programs like Napster, Morpheus, Limewire… anything and everything that could build my music, film, and computer game library. If I could fit it on my drive, I tried to download it.

One day, in my 9th grade, I decided to download the Matrix. I didn’t have a car and my parents weren’t about to go out and rent it for me either.

At the “premiere” with my best friend Chris, I remember telling him how easy it was, though it had taken 3 days to download. We both marveled at the glow of the electric burning from the large monitor, practically jumping in our chairs from excitement – after sitting through three unfamiliar production title animations, we were growing impatient – so we started to fast forward through the video, but were surprised (and mortified) to find that the movie was NOT The Matrix, but was, in fact, some porn film – renamed as “The Matrix” in an attempt to hide it.

We screamed aloud, embarrassed and blushing. After realizing what it was, I desperately scrambled to hit Alt-F4 while blushing and laughing at the same time. We laugh about it still to this day, but I’ll never forget how stupid I felt.

Believe it or not, though – this moment didn’t stop my downloading habits.

In fact, it only made me more diligent and thorough in my vetting process of what to download, how it was rated, its size, and whether or not it was what it said it was. I discovered the trend of torrent sites and the (albeit somewhat still risky for porn and viruses) more reliable/quicker downloads that came with these trends.

I downloaded all kinds of stuff for years and years, gigabyte after gigabyte, terabyte after terabyte, archiving it in any way I could to save it for my library, in hopes that I might someday pass it down to my children (no, I’m not joking – nerds are weird like that).

But something happened to me when I was a year into marriage: I got called into ministry.

And the second I did, I realized that there was something wrong with the library I had been storing and sharing and archiving: it wasn’t mine, I didn’t buy it, and I had no right to own it.

I reached out to others in ministry, others who were just plain old Christians, and just about any nerd/geek that had done the same thing I had for years. But something happened when I talked to them about the library and I started to feel convicted.

So I began to purge all of the library, throwing away CD’s and DVD’s and external hard drives all filled to the brim with the illegal material.

It wasn’t a cheap decision and it made things more difficult/expensive to consume just about anything.

It didn’t make my job any easier in the first several years of ministry, either. Some of the previous people that helped make services at the church happen were rumored to practice the same kind of tactics – if they couldn’t afford a piece of software/music/video, they just… acquired it anyway.

Jason and I quickly declared: “We will be above reproach.”

And we were above reproach, much to the detriment of our legal team, our finance team, and frankly – my time resources. But I could sleep at night, knowing that we were doing the right thing in buying software and licenses and images and stock video and fonts – we believed it was more important to be honest than to have everything we wanted – whether it was to face the congregation and the money they had donated to our ministries or whether it was to face God himself, we wanted to tell everyone (with a straight face) that we were doing the best we could with the resources we were given.

To tell you the truth, it was a little annoying. It was so much easier when I had less conviction, so much cheaper.

But to tell you the truth, it felt freeing.

It felt like I was finally doing being obedient to God’s commandment not to steal.

I will say that (although not free) cheaper options out there have now exist:

• Netflix and Amazon Prime and Disney Plus and dozens and dozens of other film/television subscription services get you a ton of content with a click of a button.
• Spotify and Apple Music and Amazon Music have made listening to just about everything easier than ever, all within seconds.

Any yet, software piracy and music piracy and movie piracy all still exist. And people still use them, Christians and moral people included.

I have talked to some fellow believers over the course of time who do not subscribe to my “buy/stream legally or don’t get it at all” policy. Some can see the benefit but just refuse to participate in it for so many reasons:

• If I can’t find it legally/easily, I will get it anyway.
• Corporate America is not going to hurt from me doing what I’m doing. In fact, me downloading/streaming [insert illegal thing] will help temper/moderate their corporate greed.
• I am not hurting anyone.
• I am not making any money on it – what’s the big deal?
• If I buy it (even once) I can download/keep a copy of it because reasons.
• If I live in a locked/restricted region and [a game/streaming service] isn’t available, I should be allowed to find/use any illegal means necessary to do it because… I really really want it.

I feel like these are rationalizations to help justify potential guilt, and though I can empathize with most of the reasons (I did for years after the birth of the internet), I just don’t buy it, anymore. Stealing. Is. Wrong.

And I try to leave them alone in that – to sit with that tension, hoping and praying that maybe some day they’ll have a moment of conviction like I did – in hopes that they’ll feel closer to the moral standards we’re called to uphold.

And it doesn’t begin and end with illegal streaming/theft, either. What we do, what media we consume, who we do life together with, what we post online, what we think about and talk about the most, the way we spend our time and money and resources: it all should point to Christ, shouldn’t it?

I’m not saying everything Christ followers do always points to Christ or that we should be perfect, but I do think it’s a noble and worthwhile thing to strive for, don’t you?

All I can do is share my story and hope it benefits someone.

So what about you? Do you struggle with this or something like this? Is this even a thing anymore? Do you care? Do you think it’s an impossible standard to maintain? Is this a minor sin issue that’s being blown out of proportion? Do you like these questions?