“This is the happiest day of my life!” So says Maci Bookout, according to a recent cover of OK! magazine, where the 19-year-old Teen Mom star and rumored bride-to-be flashes a beauty-queen smile. Sharing cover space with Bookout ”” and sporting a bikini, plus a baby on each hip ”” is Leah Messer, 19, whose dream wedding was featured in last spring’s season finale of Teen Mom 2. (One month later, she filed for divorce.) Elsewhere in the celebrity mediasphere, one might find Teen Mom’s Farrah Abraham, 20, staging a photo op for paparazzi on a Florida beach, or Abraham’s castmate Amber Portwood, 21, posing for photographers outside her latest court hearing; she was recently sentenced to probation after pleading guilty to felony domestic battery against the father of her child.
A spin-off of MTV’s popular reality series 16 and Pregnant, Teen Mom recently entered its third season. With more than 3 million viewers each week, it’s the network’s top-rated show after Jersey Shore, and its subjects provide endless fodder for the tabloids.
This is ugly on so many levels, it is hard to comprehend [for me]. These are probably the folks we never reach with our churches. Whatever excuses can be offered, these folks are probably going to run through a very rough patch of life before they reach bottom and hopefully will be led to Christ. But if they aren’t on our radar screens, or some Christian radar screen, that may never happen which will be the greatest tragedy. How many are dying to life, how many are just dying, who might have had the potentiality of a better life if they could see Christ as the path not only toward eternal life, but life abundant and free of the prison of sin.
Proof positive of a culture in precipitous decline.