The One Where Everyone Was Indoctrinated: Friends and the Cult of Carnality

There are truths about the human condition which run throughout these seasons. The problem is that they are ugly truths about our condition as a fallen people in a fallen world

The cult sitcom Friends had a running ‘gag’ based on the haphazard relationship between characters Ross and Rachel. The two had been fornicating for some time before Rachel said ‘Maybe we should take a break’. Within a few hours of this ‘break’ Ross had sex with another woman and justified it by appealing to the fact that they were ‘on a break’, thus meaning it was morally legit. Rachel who had been giving herself to Ross sexually for many months before calling for this break was annoyed, she didn’t appear to want him to have sex with anyone else during that break. Who was right and who was wrong became the subject of this long running gag, as the phrase ‘we were on a break’ was repeated over the course of the following seasons. It was funny, see?

Most recent data in the UK shows that approximately 50% of marriages end in divorce, this doesn’t include the breakdown of the many relationships in which people are unmarried but having marital relations as if married. The number of people who have sex before marriage is so high that a person is considered very odd indeed if they haven’t done so by the time they hit their 20s.

Friends helped to normalise sexual immorality with otherwise All-American nice guy characters, ‘hooking up’, saturating conversations with sexual innuendo, watching porn, purchasing babies, and celebrating gay relationships and broken families. The whole show (which groomed a generation) was written by two Jewish friends (Marta Kaufmann and self identified homosexual David Crane) who were said to have drawn on their own experience. It begins with a bride running away from the bridegroom in order to make it on her own - let the Catholic understand.

The agenda to normalise sexual immorality and promote homosexuality and gay marriage to the audience continues through all 10 seasons. That’s 11 years of indoctrination all done through that most pernicious medium - the screen.