“As a Christian could I mention a couple things to you? The first thing I want to say is that we
in the Christian community have not always done well in interacting with and
responding to Hollywood. I’m not
an official spokesman or anything like that but I would offer my apologies for
some of our behavior. We haven’t
always appreciated true artistic beauty.
Even when our moral instincts about certain movies have been correct we
have not always responded in a reasoned and effective manner. We serve and worship a God of infinite
creativity but we, as His people, are sometimes close-minded and dull. We are getting better, I think, at
engaging with the cinematic media and some in the Christian community are even
trying their hand at movie making but we have more work to do.
“Second, I hope that Hollywood will not pander to the
Christian community. There can be
a temptation to think that Christians only enjoy Bible-centered stories or
moralistic tales where everyone has a happy ending. The irony is that movies attempting to capture a biblical
narrative rarely work well. The
reason is that we see the Bible as God’s revelation to us and it functions in
profoundly shaping ways in our communities. There is both a theological and existential engagement with
the text of Scripture among most Christians so our expectations are already
very high when we go see a movie centered on a biblical story or
character. To be honest, we are
often disappointed by the dissonance we experience when we see how Hollywood
treats our sacred text. Also, we need
more than trite morality plays. I
say this not to demean you or your profession but, rather, to encourage you to
challenge us, the Christian community.
Our recent forays into movie making are often of the
moralistic-everything-ends-fine type.
We need to be challenged to something deeper.
“If I had to put the challenge we need into words it might
be adequately expressed this way: Give us that which is True, Good, and
Beautiful. There are
movies that debase the viewer and there are movies that enliven and ennoble. This doesn’t always mean that the
ending is happy. We need to see
the truth of a broken world—the Bible doesn’t shy away from this reality. This doesn’t mean there won’t be
violence but there are movies that glorify and perpetuate violence and there
are movies that, although they depict violence, render the viewer moved to
morally stand opposed to injustice.
By “beautiful” I don’t mean only sunsets and daisies. There can be a stark beauty in a barren
landscape artfully filmed to produce in the viewer a sense of abandonment or
aching breathlessness. We need
truth, goodness, and beauty. I
submit that all of humanity needs such virtues displayed and enacted in front
of them. Give us what we need—not
simply what we want.”
