Josh Duhamel On Celebrities Expressing Political Opinions: "Just Because You Have A Platform Doesn't Mean That You Get To Preach To Everybody"
Josh Duhamel recently shared his thoughts on celebrities expressing political opinions and why he doesn’t share his strong opinions on various subjects.
In an interview on The Megyn Kelly Show, Duhamel shared, “It's a good message for a lot of people in the entertainment business these days. Just because you have a platform doesn't mean that you get to preach to everybody.”
Later, he shared why he doesn’t share his strong opinions on a range of subjects, “I have real strong opinions about things, but I don't really talk about it because it's like why? Why would I alienate half my audience? Because I respect their view on things, but I'm not going to preach to them. They can believe what they want to believe. I'm just here to make cool stuff."
When Megyn Kelly asked if it was a growing trend for celebrities to not want to share their political opinions publicly, Duhamel replied, “It should be. It makes perfect sense. If you really want to be successful in this business why would you make half of your audience despise you by your political beliefs? Maybe they don’t care? I don’t know.”
“I look at it as a business decision,” he continued. “I’m here to just make cool movies, cool TV. I’m here to make cool stuff. I’m the court jester. If I want to preach to you about what I believe politically, I’ll go run for office, which I’m not going to do by the way.”
While Duhamel’s comments come as a refreshing breeze in an age when so many in the entertainment world have mistaken their microphone for a pulpit and their fleeting fame for prophetic authority. Just because one stands in the spotlight does not grant one the right to preach especially when the ‘preaching’ is little more than the echo of the latest cultural fad or political passion.
To recognize this, as he does, and to call oneself instead a ‘court jester’ whose task is to make ‘cool stuff’ rather than alienate half the audience, shows a measure of prudence and even humility. In that sense, he is wiser than many of his contemporaries who have traded their art for activism and their popularity for partisanship.
However, the refusal to take sides on great moral issues is itself a decision. It is a silent acquiescence to evil. There is all the difference in the world between partisan politics—left or right, Democrat or Republican—and the eternal moral law written on the human heart. When the issue is not mere policy but the dignity of the human person, the sanctity of innocent life, the nature of marriage and family, or the freedom of the soul before God, then silence is not neutrality. It becomes complicity.
The true court jester in the Christian tradition, the holy fool, does not flatter the king or tickle the ears of the crowd. He speaks truth through parable, through story, through the mirror of drama and comedy, precisely so that the audience might see its own face and turn toward the Living God. The entertainer who portrays lives of courage in the face of temptation, mercy toward the broken, sacrifice for the weak, and joy that no ideology can manufacture is doing something far greater than ‘making cool stuff.’ He is cooperating with the Divine Dramatist who wrote the greatest story ever told upon the wood of the Cross.
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