Guardian.com

1. A MOVIE MIRACLE – HOW HOLLYWOOD FOUND RELIGION
Big news from the box
office: some people
released some
Christian-themed
movies that weren’t
completely terrible.
The terribleness of
Christian movies is, of
course, an article of
faith among film
critics, who reserve for
them their most
damning barbs
(“doesn’t even meet the standards of decent propaganda”; “doesn’t belong in a
theatre”). On Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, they garner basement-level scores
rivalled only by torture porn and holocaust-exploitation flicks. But not this year, which
has seen box-office success for studio-backed movies such as Son of God ($67m since
its debut in late February), Darren Aronofsky’s Noah ($359m), God’s Not Dead ($60m),
Heaven is for Real ($91m), and, soon Ridley Scott’s retelling of the story of Moses,
Exodus. In October, we can look forward to Left Behind, a remake of a 2002 end-of-
days conspiracy thriller starring Nicolas Cage. Also in the offing: a star-studded cast in
the long-awaited prequel to The Passion of the Christ (Mary, Motherof Christ) and a
Cain and Abel film set to star Will Smith. Some have christened this “year of the Bible
movie”.
“Having not just one do so well is a big deal, but having so many – Heaven is for Real,
God’s Not Dead and Son of God – all come along and do well in the space of this year is
unprecedented,” says Shawn Robbins, an analyst at boxoffice.com. “No doubt about it,
Hollywood has been caught napping.” He attributes a big part of this to social media.
“Thirty years ago you had network television, trying to appeal to everyone. Now you can
reach a niche audience with much greater ease. They have these grassroots marketing
campaigns for faith-based movies that start with churchgoers who are looking for
something they’re not getting from the movie theatre. And the better they do, the more
attention they’re getting from the studios.”
To anyone familiar with William Goldman’s dictum that “nobody knows anything” the
term “faith-based movie” will make zero sense: 99% of the time Hollywood works on

2. nothing but faith. But the term is usedmore specifically to refer to the mushroom patch
of independently produced, Christian-themedmovies that sprang up in the shadow of
Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ 10 years ago. Often released straight to video,
and promoted via viral campaigns by groups such as the American Family Association
and the ConcernedWomen of America, they induce a spooky sensation in the secular
viewer. It’s as if one has left one’s body and toucheddown in another, alternative
universe, full of actors you’ve never heard of playing characters with porn movie names
– Raymie Steele, Shasta Carvell, Buck Williams – who emote, soapily, to the kind of
music that you hear while on hold to speak to someone about life insurance. No one
smokes or curses. The men are usually cops, or firefighters, and often have a black best
friend, dispensing gold-plated advice. There is a higher-than-average chance of
encountering a mullet, or a cameo by a cast member from Duck Dynasty, or a product
placement for Chick-fil-A.
By contrast, Heaven Is for Real, released
earlier this year, came from a real
studio, Sony, and featured a real actor,
Greg Kinnear, playing a pastor whose
son claims to have visited heaven while
undergoing an appendectomy. To be
accurate, Kinnear suffers a fractured leg
and passes a roundof kidney stones
before his son suffers a burst appendix –
faith-based movies are big on hospital
visits – but the dilemma that follows is
the main event, as Kinneargrapples with the question of whetherhe believes his son or
not. The film backs the son all the way: heaven turns out to resemble a toilet-roll
commercial and Jesus looks like Rod Stewart in a bathrobe, with music that sounds like
the music you hear while on hold to check on your pension. Still, the film has irony,
doubt, humourand a moderately gripping drama of tested faith. “Not stupid in the way
you’re thinking,”concluded Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir. A backhanded compliment, but
still: a backhanded compliment! From a real critic! That’s an important milestone for a
genre seeking Hollywood gentrification.
In some ways these films are a straightforward response to box-office
disenfranchisement: a burp from the bible belt, ignored by an industry set on
manufacturing global blockbusters. On the east and west coasts of America, the
response has been to stay home and watch HBO, while the heartland turns out for The
Blind Side, in numbers that have necessitated a shift in the battle lines between
Christianity and Hollywood. As recently as 10 years ago, the news that a movie
adaptation of a story from Genesis, by atheist Darren Aronofsky, featuring CGI rock

3. monsters and a homicidal Noah, would have prompted outrage from the evangelical
right, maybe even a boycott, certainly a placard or two. But despite efforts from the
likes of Glenn Beck to drum up controversy, the film’s release, via an internet-savvy
promotional campaign from Paramount, was met with a noticeably nuancedresponse
from Christian groups – mixed to be sure, but not giving off the night sweats of a belief-
system underseige.
“Noah is not poorly made or shoddy,” ran a seven-page review in Christianity Today. “It
is not political. It is not evangelistic. It is not a theological treatise.” Furthermore, the
writer meant that as praise. For its qualities as a movie.
“As a Christian I worship
the creator of creativity,”
says Marcus Pittman, a
Christian documentary film-
maker working in Virginia,
who released his guide to
dealing with atheists, How to
Answer the Fool, on the
internet. “There used to be
this attitude of well, they’ve
made this terrible movie, but
it’s all in the name of Jesus
so we shouldgo. People were
happy to have at least
something. But this idea that
Christian movies as a genre – this kind of Joel Olsteen, chicken-soup-for-the-soul
version of Christianity, ‘the numberone inspirational movie in America’ where
everything has a happy ending – it’s kind of insulting. Bad movies are kind of
blasphemy to the image of God. A lot of Christians I know watch Marvel movies. There’s
good versus evil, there’s a hero, they’re clean. They’re very Biblical. Superhero movies
have a massive Christian fanbase. I see kids coming to church dressed as Superman all
the time.”
This is a far cry from the paranoia that has characterised the relationship between
Christianity and Hollywood in the past. In 1913, there was a ban on building cinemas
within 200ft of a church in some American states. “To make money by lying to people
when one is in the consciousness business is a particularly serious perversion,” wrote
American theologian Harvey Cox in 1962, whose objections to Hollywood went far
beyond the normal objections to its lifestyle and morality – although he did, like most,
view it as the second coming of Sodom and Gomorrah – but cut to the very issue of
cinematic representation itself. “To lie with an artform is all at once to have another
god, to make graven images, to steal, and to bear false witness. The theological

4. judgment on such efforts as Ben-Hurand The Ten Commandments shouldfind its
inspiration in the reaction of Moses to the Golden Calf.” That is: condemnation, death
and destruction.
As shrill as some of this sounds today, Christian fears that the movies would usurp the
church’s role as a place of worship have been largely proven correct. No other medium
is as well placed to offertranscendence. “The cinema has done more for my spiritual life
than the church,” wrote John Updike. “My ideas of fame, success and beauty all
originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and
losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths
and action-controlling images. During a certain phase in my life film was a substitute
for religion.”
The rivalry between the two masks a lurking kinship, though. “Motion pictures were not
born in religious practice, but instead are a totally profane offspring of capitalism and
technology,”writes Paul Schrader in his landmark book, Transcendental Style in Film,
in which he isolates two strains of religious film-making: the epics of Cecil B DeMille,
presenting religion as spectacle, with teeming hordes, VistaVision, shafts of light, and
strangely subdued orgies. “Give me any couple of pages of the Bible and I’ll give you a
picture,” boasted DeMille. The second stream is that of the austere transcendentalists of
the arthouse – Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer – who, recognising the over-
abundant, material “fallen” nature of the medium, pursue an aesthetic of scarcity,
sparseness, abnegation. “The sparse means,” said Jacques Maritain in Religionand
Culture (1932) are the “proper means of the spirit”.
The austerity of Bresson
and Dreyer is hardly the
model many contemporary
Christian film-makers have
in mind – Terrence
Malick’s The Tree of
Life bypassed evangelicals
almost completely – but to
bemoan the terribleness of
Christian movies is, in
some ways, to miss the
point. Their terribleness is
the point – a badge of
independence from
Hollywood’s corrupting glamour, the very paltriness of their artistic ambitions a
reassuring sign of the sincerity of their belief. There is a kind of bonkers integrity to a
film like Left Behind, Kirk Cameron’s end-of times conspiracy thriller, which sold 2.8m
video copies in 2002. Who even knew there were 2.8m VCRs left in America? In its

5. valiant attempt to link the Biblical rapture, a global currency meltdown, the rise of the
Antichrist (through the UN, naturally) and war in the Middle East, using an abandoned
quarry in Ontario (“whoever this Antichrist guy is, he’s going to have a huge war on his
hands”), the film is propelled by the same mad belief as Ed Wood’s doomsdays-on-the-
cheap. It’s so artistically bereft that only a belief in a higher power could explain its
existence.
Left Behind: the movie
Hence the suspicion on Christian social networks that has greeted the news that Nicolas
Cage was to star in the remake: is Cage even a Christian? Some claimed he was “not a
believer”, others that he was a Scientologist and that the film would be “a big
deception”. Others pushedback: “He’s not making this movie, he’s acting in it. Please
do a little more fact-checking.”
There is a distinct danger, some say, of Hollywood moving into the market too fast, with
too little understanding of the dog-whistle finesse with which Christian groups
communicate with one another. “Like any good trend, there’s a danger of moving too
fast,” says Robbins. “If they do move too fast they’re going to destroy whatever goodwill
they’ve built up so far. It’s just like anything else, there’s a sweet spot to it. Mel
Gibson made The Passion of The Christ independently but pulled off the perfect
marriage of a film that looked and felt like a Hollywood movie but wasn’t. If Hollywood
gets too involved the target audience will disperse pretty quick.”
Or as Luke (16:13) puts it: “No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and
love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God
and money.”