Have you bought your ticket to Sausage Party yet? It’s only the #1 comedy in America right now, certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. What’s that you say? Watching animated food engage in perverted sexual orgies doesn’t sound like a barrel of laughs? Well, clearly you have no taste. Pun intended.

Yes, inexplicably, Seth Rogen’s R-rated tale of a wiener and his hot dog bun girlfriend appears to be a smash hit. But this is not your garden-variety glorification of hedonism starring talking food. It’s a relentlessly preachy glorification of hedonism … starring talking food. Dare we say, it’s a message movie about talking-food sex.

Wait, wait, stay with me, I’m going somewhere important with this, really.

As I was saying, Sausage Party is a message movie. Apparently, it’s not enough for us to be subjected to talking-food sex. We also have to be subjected to talking-food talking-self-importantly-about-sex. You see, the framework of the story is that some of the food objects innocently worship the god-like humans who come to transport them from the supermarket to the Great Beyond. But they will lose their destination ticket to this pseudo-heavenly realm if they lose their “freshness,” i.e., if they break free of their packaging to have talking-food sex. Thus, they are kept in a perpetually repressed state for fear that their god-masters would send them to hell throw them away otherwise.

But then, but then, one brave voice dares to challenge their faith. That voice, of course, belongs to Frank, whose only fault is that he can be a little too brash when boldly proclaiming his enlightened philosophy of life. In the end, he realizes he will win over his fellow food-stuffs only by offering a positive, purposeful alternative to human-worship: human-murder. Plus the aforementioned talking-food sex, which Frank frames as a transcendent, self-actualizing act by which they are awakened to the glory of “our bodies” and “our lives.”

And yet, the same media outlets hailing this film as “subversively sincere,” and “pro-reason, pro-knowledge,” called the God’s Not Dead franchise “ham-fisted,” “sick filth,” One outlet even called the latter “an orgy of delusion.” Yes, the latter. No, I couldn’t possibly make this up.

It smells like hypocrisy in here. Actually, it smells like something a little stronger.

It would be one thing if critics just came out and admitted that they only certify a screed like Sausage Party fresh because they are the target audience to which it’s pandering. It would be one thing if they admitted that they don’t care when a film is ham-fistedly, overtly religious, as long as it’s the religion of their choice.

You are permitted to giggle-snort at this time.

But, alas, this is nothing new. Remember Pleasantville, a film which couldn’t be any more obnoxiously on-the-nose if it portrayed its repressed characters in black and white and its sexually enlightened characters in color (oh wait)? It’s sitting pretty at 84% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. Or consider the Scopes drama Inherit the Wind, the photo negative of God’s Not Dead 2: every last bit as stagey, long-winded and melodramatic, merely hailing from the opposite side of the political spectrum. The verdict? “Powerful,” “an all-time classic.”

Of course, bias can cut both ways. Christians should be permitted to cringe at shoddy art without having their faith questioned. One of The Stream’s own voices created a list of ten Christian movies that are better than the first God’s Not Dead (which somehow managed to win ChristianCinema.com’s March-Madness-style knockout contest for “Best. Movie. Ever.”)

And maybe if our worst enemy was old-fashioned, ponderous liberalism, one could make a fair parallel between critics on both sides who embrace pandering only in the entertainment of their choice. Maybe then we could sit down and have a conversation about two pieces of art whose worst sin is that they offer cheesy propaganda as a substitute for an artistic experience.

But a sexual revolution spans the gap between Inherit the Wind and Pleasantville, and a second spans the gap between Pleasantville and Sausage Party. Hypocrisy is no longer harmless when the taste-makers of our day begin to serve rat poison. Shrugging it off with smug tu quoques simply will not do.

So let the self-appointed arbiters of our entertainment scatter the last vestiges of their credibility to the wind, if they choose to do so. As Christians, we will continue to call out their hypocrisy, without hesitation and without apology.