Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging

truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

In a recent interview, legendary Hollywood actor Tom Hanks reminisced about his role in

a 1993 movie called Philadelphia, and that film Hanks played a gay lawyer fired because

he had contracted AIDS.

Hanks character Seuss and wins a discrimination case before tragically dying just after

the verdict is delivered.

For the movie pushed all kinds of cultural boundaries at the time, it's long been criticized

for not showing more explicit scenes of homosexual behavior.

But according to Hanks, the real power of that film was in showing people that there's

really, and I quote, nothing to be afraid of.

If you're going to go and see a movie that's essentially a polemic about how things must

change, he said, that feels like work.

This movie, however, convinced people because it didn't try so hard to be convincing.

It didn't ask its audience to change too much too quickly.

Now, I'd question just how important Philadelphia was in the history of our culture's embrace

of sexual brokenness.

But Hanks is correct.

Cultural change follows a change in the public imagination.

And more often than not, that change happens in many quiet ways.

In fact, cultural change requires at least three ingredients.

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