When to give something up as a statement

DISCLAIMER: I do not actively pay for any streaming service right now. Between my parents and my brother, my family currently subscribes to several popular streaming services, and I'm granted access through them. I'm looking at the issue here as if I were the one paying.

So I haven't watched anything* on Netflix since the whole Cuties child exploitation controversy and the company's reaction to the criticism. I took this step after seeing E. Stephen Burnett announce that he was cancelling his Netflix subscription over the issue, and I felt convicted to not support the company, either.

However, it did help that there wasn't really anything I was super-interested to see on it at the time.

Since then, Disney and Amazon have both done things that have strongly rubbed me the wrong way, and I've considered turning Disney+ and Amazon Prime off, too. But both of these services have things that my daughter really likes to watch, and Prime actually has some good Christian-themed cartoons that I really want her to see. Also, the new Invincible animated series will be on there, and I want to watch the rest of Farscape eventually, too.

If I stopped all support for every business that went against my beliefs in some way, I'd have very few avenues of entertainment (or even of buying essential goods). I'm currently wondering where I should be drawing the line on these things. And I'm definitely not calling for a boycott right now.

*(aside from one Christmas movie that my Dad put on and I stayed in the room for)

This is tough stuff to sort through. I think you need to avoid violating your conscience and "whatever you do, do all for the glory of God" rather than any other motive that might creep in. That's the long and short of it, in my mind.

But since we like to dig in to topics a bit here, I'll add that, although I've revisited this topic myself many times, what I come back to is whether or not there is any indication in scripture that we should avoid paying for products or services that involve sin in their creation. I haven't run into anything like that, but would be interested in hearing about anything that anyone finds.

And although Paul does not advocate being mindless about meat sacrificed to idols, we do ultimately have freedom to at least consume that which was intended for evil, with no comment prohibiting us from purchasing such material either. Arguments from silence are only so strong, so I wish we had more in scripture. But it does seem to me that Paul and the Holy Spirit had the perfect opportunity in 1st Corinthians to tell us that "eating is okay, but not buying", and yet they didn't that I can see.