Sometimes, even the Moral Guardians have to accept that The New Rock & Roll isn't going away. They can't stop people from watching, reading, playing, or listening to it, and even if they succeed in instituting a Censorship Bureau, it's still not likely to be up to their uncompromising standards.

Well, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. If those works aren't up to their standards, they will make works that are. And they can even throw in a message about their beliefs and views in these works. Thus they make The Moral Substitute. So now all those children can have their fun, while their responsible parents don't have to worry about that strange new music they didn't grow up on. Everybody wins and nobody loses, right?

If everything works out, sure. However, almost by definition, creating the Moral Substitute means directly competing with what it is the substitute of, while explicitly targeting a more specific demographic. Imagine creating a competitor to Coke and Pepsi but targeting only middle-aged mothers at the expense of appeal to the general population. If that sounds like a troubling investment to you, then you see why production values tend to be lower with many of them having No Budget. Adding to the complications of course is the need to produce absolutely nothing even mildly offensive to the specific demographic you are targeting. Put it all together and the Moral Substitute suffers from a reputation of at best being an overly bland case of Follow the Leader with very obvious Black-and-White Morality, as moral substitutes don't allow room for any moral ambiguity. And those that weren't offended by the original are very unlikely to embrace this product (even if they are technically part of the target demographic). At worst, many of these Moral Substitutes enter the So Bad, It's Horrible territory, regardless if its target demographic likes it or not.

Of course if you are in the target demographic you just might appreciate something catering to your particular mindset. Cue possibly small but reliable following. Enough of this exists to keep the phenomenon going as new media fads emerge. All too often even some of them feel pandered to, since all too often someone tries to do "the [x] version of [y]" they push the "x" far too hard and don't pay enough attention to what made "y" successful in the first place.

As one might expect, these works may end up coming across as Totally Radical and/or a Poor Man's Substitute, and might give the impression that morality is Popularity Power and breed the message that moral acts are worth performing only if they're "cool". Not only will that make even the most moral people cynical about morality, but kids who have already declared themselves or have been declared by others as uncool will not be deterred — and in fact might even be encouraged — to do bad things, especially if they wanted to be bad in the first place.

This trope was codified by American fundamentalist and conservative evangelical Christians. They are often vigilant Moral Guardians, they represent an enormous market, and their sheer doggedness has turned the idea of a "Christian alternative" into an entire subculture with its own music, movies, books (including booksellers), and video games, some of them of genuinely high quality and able to compete with "mainstream" works toe to toe. But it is not limited to them not by any stretch of the imagination. The global spread of American popular culture (just maybe funded by the CIA) forced the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact to work very hard at this. They created their own Boy Scouts, their own pop music, their own action movies, their own Westerns, even their own chewing gum, in a valiant but unsuccessful attempt to keep out that decadent bourgeois stuff from the West. There are even Nazi examples of this trope, from both the original article and from neo-Nazi groups.

This is a Super-Trope of Christian Rock, but less so than you'd expect, especially as time has gone by. While it may have been true in the genre's early days, since then Christian Rock has evolved in different directions from the rest of rock and carved out a separate identity, and the genres usually don't match very closely; they have fairly little in common today beyond the name and the use of guitars.

Not to be confused with Good Counterpart, or Morally Superior Copy, which is when a clone or other sort of duplicate proves to be morally superior to their original template.

Compare and contrast Religious Edutainment, which similarly aspires to teach morality but doesn't necessarily mimic secular works. See also Religious Redub, when a secular show is repackaged to have religious content.

Examples

Fictional Examples