Is Hollywood “a very Christian town?”

  • Oh dear. File this under “Watch out what you pray for.” There’s an arti­cle in this month’s Atlantic Monthly called “Can Jesus Save Hol­ly­wood? From The Pas­sion of the Christ to The Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia, the Chris­t­ian audi­ence is mak­ing spir­its rise.” It claims that after the suc­cess of “Pas­sion” and the pre­sumed suc­cess of “Nar­nia,” the movers and shak­ers in the movie indus­try are look­ing to get some of that sweet church-going mar­ket share.

    “The rea­sons are partly spir­i­tual, partly eco­nomic. The movie indus­try remains affected by post-9/11 national anx­i­ety, and now stu­dio heads want to make movies that “mean some­thing.” At the same time, it’s well aware of what’s known around town as ‘Pas­sion dol­lars’ — the pre­vi­ously untapped reli­gious audi­ence that made Mel Gibson’s inde­pen­dently dis­trib­uted movie The Pas­sion of Christ last year’s biggest surprise.”


    Well, this’ll teach me to com­plain about Hollywood’s treat­ment of Chris­tians. Now they’re going to notice me, they’re going to speak to me, they’re going to pay atten­tion to my “spe­cial” needs. Con­sider the oner­ous sound of this obser­va­tion from a for­mer nun who’s now a screenwriter:

    “‘When I first came [to Hol­ly­wood], I never thought I’d be on Inside Edi­tion,’ she con­fessed to the host before the show.
    “Didn’t you know?” he replied, “‘Chris­t­ian‘ is the new ‘gay.‘”

    I think I liked it bet­ter when they ignored us.

    Well, not to panic. For one thing, news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines love to pro­claim every slight change in soci­etal fads to be a trend in the mak­ing. You’ve got to sell copies, and head­lines that say, “There’s some evi­dence to sug­gest that some behav­ior might pos­si­bly change,” just don’t do the trick.

    For another thing, though the arti­cle ref­er­ences Chris­t­ian incur­sions into the film indus­try as if it were talk­ing about the attempts of an odd bunch of third-worlders try to nego­ti­ate a mov­ing walk­way, their own analy­sis seems to sug­gest that the Chris­tians that get very far in The Indus­try are almost unrec­og­nize­able from the non-Christians. After see­ing a prac­tice “pitch ses­sion” at Act One, a LA-based pro­gram for aspir­ing Chris­t­ian screen­writ­ers, the article’s author hap­pily talks with the direc­tor of the program:

    “After­ward I men­tioned … that the pitch ses­sion sounded like those at any other film school: peo­ple liked the “edgy,” “orig­i­nal” ideas and rejected the “tired” ones. [quo­ta­tion marks mine] If I hadn’t known this was a Chris­t­ian screen­writ­ing pro­gram, I told him, I never would have guessed. I meant it as a com­pli­ment, but he didn’t entirely take it as one. ‘That’s some­thing we really think about here,’ he said.”

    Not that that’s a good thing, but the last thing that the one holy Catholic and Apos­tolic Church needs is to do bad imi­ta­tions of TV and movie offer­ings with the name of some Per­son of the Trin­ity inserted from time to time.

    I have com­plained about the stereo­typ­ing of Chris­tians. I have hated being ignored, vil­li­fied or patron­ized by peo­ple that seem to think every­one who owns a Bible must either be Ned Flan­ders or the war­den from “Shaw­shank Redemp­tion.” But I wasn’t shap­ing my crit­i­cism care­fully enough. What I want from Hol­ly­wood is not rec­om­pense or polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness. I don’t want them to turn their Sauron’s eye to this “minor­ity” that escaped their notice before. What I want sounds more vague, but it’s actu­ally more hon­est, more human and even eas­ier than get­ting air-time and lip-service — I want them to let Chris­tian­ity in. Not a token screen­writer or a Maranatha group, but the idea, the real­ity that God was made man and came to save the world.

    I won’t get that of course. I’m not crazy enough to think that the entire fast-flowing cur­rent of the world’s cul­ture will begin to run back­wards — it always takes human­ity away from the truth of the Gospel, in a way that I’d think dis­cern­ing non-Christians would start to notice as being by design.

    I don’t think that some Chris­t­ian writ­ers, actors and direc­tors will trans­form Hol­ly­wood. I think they prob­a­bly will be sub­sumed by it.

    In the end, I sup­pose I believe the advice I heard on a John Mark Reynolds lec­ture CD: stop being con­sumers of the cul­ture and start being pro­duc­ers of it, but do it one house, one group, one town at a time.


    Related posts:

    1. The per­va­sive­ness of the Chris­t­ian idea

    November 27th, 2005 | Grace | No Comments |

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