There is a question I find myself returning to again and again, and I suspect many parents share it: How do we build a generation that chooses peace, when the most celebrated figures in their world spend two hours a week glorifying war?

I am not speaking in abstractions. I am talking about the films our children line up to watch, the characters they dress as for Halloween, the actors they idolise on social media — men and women like Mark Ruffalo, Robert De Niro, and a long procession of Disney and Marvel performers who, on one hand, lecture the world about kindness and compassion, and on the other, portray characters whose every conflict is resolved with a fist, a blade, a bomb, or a bullet.

The contradiction would be almost amusing if the stakes were not so high. These are our children’s moral tutors — whether we intended it that way or not.

The Gospel of Violence

Let us be honest about what is happening on our screens. The Avengers franchise, which has grossed billions of dollars worldwide and is consumed by children as young as four, is fundamentally a story in which massive, city-levelling violence is the primary — often the only — answer to every threat. Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk, a character beloved by millions of young fans, is literally a creature defined by uncontrolled rage. His power is his violence. His violence is celebrated.

Robert De Niro has built an iconic career on roles saturated in brutality — from mob enforcers to cold-eyed hitmen. These are not fringe films watched in dark corners; they are canonical, award-winning, and culturally embedded. Children encounter them through streaming, through older siblings, through cultural osmosis. The message is consistent: power belongs to those who are willing to use force.

Disney, long positioned as the guardian of childhood innocence, is in many ways the most insidious offender precisely because of that image. The brand promises magic and goodness. What it frequently delivers, however, is a sophisticated curriculum of violence — wrapped in colourful animation and memorable songs.

This is the standard by which we must measure what our children are being taught. Not the standard of Hollywood. Not the standard of box-office returns. The standard of Christ, who told us plainly: love your enemy. Not defeat your enemy. Not destroy your enemy. Love your enemy.

When Simba avenges his father. When Aladdin slays Jafar. When every Avenger obliterates the villain in a climactic battle — the moral lesson absorbed by young minds is the precise opposite of this command. The enemy is not someone to be loved, understood, or even forgiven. The enemy is someone to be eliminated. And when that elimination happens, the music swells, the credits roll, and we all feel satisfied.

What the Research Tells Us

This is not merely a theological concern. It is backed by a growing body of research into how screen violence shapes children’s developing minds — and the findings are deeply troubling.

Justified “Heroic” Violence

Disney and Marvel narratives almost universally frame their heroes as morally entitled to use violence — guns, swords, bombs, fists, missiles — against “bad” characters. Research confirms what every parent instinctively suspects: when a child’s favourite hero wins through violent means, that child is more likely to believe such behaviour is justified in their own real-world conflicts. They are not learning conflict resolution. They are learning that if you are the “good guy,” the rules do not apply to you.

Relational Aggression — The Hidden Curriculum

Beyond physical combat, Disney films are saturated in what researchers call “relational aggression” — social exclusion, spreading rumours, humiliation, and manipulation. These behaviours occur, on average, 9.23 times per hour, and crucially, they are almost always performed by the most admired, attractive, and powerful characters in the film. Children do not observe these behaviours as wrongdoing. They observe them as the social toolkit of the successful.

Normalised Physical Force

From Merlin being struck on the head in The Sword in the Stone to Ariel being thrown violently in The Little Mermaid, Disney regularly uses physical maltreatment as comedy or as casual discipline. When a child laughs at these moments — as they are designed to — they are absorbing the lesson that physical force in relationships is normal, even funny. This is the architecture of a generation that struggles to recognise abuse.

The Erasure of Pain and Consequence

Perhaps most damaging is what these films omit. In only 10% of violent incidents do Disney characters show any visible pain or distress. Observers rarely react with empathy. The bombs fall, the swords clash, the blows land — and life goes on, cheerfully, immediately. Children are being taught that violence has no real cost. That the enemy feels no pain worth noticing. That destruction is consequence-free.

The Demonisation of the Enemy

One of the most spiritually corrosive patterns in Hollywood storytelling — and particularly in Disney films aimed at the youngest children — is the rigid, absolute division between hero and villain. Good and evil are never complicated. The villain is never human enough to understand, never suffering enough to pity, never redeemable enough to save. They exist solely to be defeated.

Researchers have found that repeated exposure to this binary creates what they call “demonisation” in young minds — a tendency to categorise real people in their lives as either wholly good or wholly evil, making peaceful resolution of real conflict almost impossible. When your little brother is “the bad guy,” you do not negotiate with him. You defeat him.

This is the precise inversion of the biblical command. Jesus did not say “love the neighbour who agrees with you.” He said love your enemy — the one who persecutes you, the one who seems irredeemably “bad.” Hollywood, and Disney in particular, spends billions of dollars every year training our children to do the opposite.

The Hypocrisy of the Celebrity Conscience

What makes this especially difficult to stomach is the brazen disconnect between the public personas of these actors and the work they produce. Mark Ruffalo is, by all accounts, a thoughtful and earnest man who speaks publicly and passionately about peace, justice, and human dignity. He tweets about the dangers of political violence. He attends rallies. He lends his voice to progressive causes.

And then he returns to set and spends months embodying a creature whose entire narrative purpose is to smash, destroy, and obliterate.

Robert De Niro has made his personal political convictions extremely well known — loudly and repeatedly. He speaks of empathy, of democracy, of moral courage. His filmography, taken as a whole, is one of the most sustained celebrations of organised crime and lethal violence in cinema history.

The children who look up to these men — and they do look up to them — are not parsing the fine distinction between the actor and the role. They see a powerful, admired adult using violence as power. That is the lesson. The celebrity’s personal politics are irrelevant to a six-year-old watching the Hulk tear a helicopter apart with his bare hands.

The Theological Crisis at the Heart of It

We are living through a profound theological contradiction that most of us are too entertained to notice. Our society claims, broadly, to value peace. Our political leaders invoke it. Our celebrities campaign for it. Our churches preach it. And yet we have constructed a multi-billion-dollar entertainment industry whose primary product is the celebration of violence — and we funnel our youngest children through it from the time they can sit upright in a cinema seat.

The Bible does not equivocate on this. “Do not repay evil with evil,” Paul writes in Romans 12:17. “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.” The command to love your enemy is not a suggestion for the particularly spiritually advanced. It is the cornerstone of Christian ethics — and it is being systematically dismantled, one Marvel film at a time.

The tools of violence that fill our screens — the guns, the knives, the swords, the fighter jets, the missiles, the bombs — are not neutral props. They are instruments with a single purpose: to destroy human life. When we place them in the hands of beloved heroes and surround their use with soaring music and cheering audiences, we are not just telling a story. We are performing a liturgy of destruction and teaching our children to worship at its altar.

What We Must Do

I am not calling for the banning of action films or a sanitised entertainment landscape devoid of any conflict. Conflict is the engine of story. But there is an enormous distance between stories that grapple honestly with the cost of violence and stories that gleefully celebrate it — and we must begin to recognise that distance and teach our children to see it.

Here is what I believe we owe our children:

• Watch with them, not alongside them. Passive co-viewing is not enough. Engage with what they are watching. Ask questions. When the villain is defeated, ask your child how they think the villain felt. What led them to this point? Could it have ended differently?
• Name the contradiction. When an actor speaks publicly about peace and then portrays violence, point that out to older children. Help them develop the critical thinking to hold that tension.
• Introduce the biblical counter-narrative. The stories of Joseph forgiving his brothers, of Jesus blessing those who cursed him, of the prodigal son received with open arms — these are not less dramatic than the Avengers. They are more. They are stories of a harder, costlier, more extraordinary kind of victory.
• Hold studios accountable with your wallet. The most powerful language Hollywood understands is money. Seek out, support, and celebrate films — including animated ones — that resolve conflict through courage, wisdom, empathy, and forgiveness rather than destruction.
• Speak up publicly. We are far too polite about this. We must be willing to say plainly and publicly: what our children are watching is causing them harm, and the people profiting from it bear moral responsibility.

A Final Word

We cannot build a world that reflects the Kingdom of God while feeding our children a daily diet of violence dressed up as heroism. We cannot stop wars in the street while we wage them on our screens every Friday night. We cannot expect our children to love their enemies when every story we tell them teaches that enemies exist to be destroyed.

The actors and studios who produce this content are not monsters. But they are participants in a system that is doing genuine, measurable damage to the moral formation of our youngest and most vulnerable — and their fame, their talent, and their good intentions do not absolve them of that responsibility.

Nor does our own love of a good action sequence absolve us.

The question is not whether Hollywood can change. The question is whether we, as parents, as communities of faith, and as citizens, are willing to demand something better — for the sake of the children sitting in those darkened theatres, watching and learning and becoming.