My Response to: Why Are Christian Movies So Bad

Yesterday morning, I went down to Overland Park Cinemas in Boise to watch a free showing of, “Faith Like Potatoes.” Donations were collected to help a young woman go over to Uganda to minister to children who suffered as part of the Child Soldier situation.

Now, Faith Like Potatoes was an okay movie, but there were a few flaws in it. This led me back to a blog post at Big Hollywood about how Christian films have been bad for decades. Dallas Jenkins asks why Christian movies are “so bad” and says they’ve been so for decades. He identifies Christian abandonment of Hollywood and lack of encouragement of young people to be great artists. Fair enough points that I wouldn’t dispute, but also it fails to answer the question. Most of the Christian movies over the past few decades were not made by young people who were not encouraged to be great artists.

These movies were made by middle-aged men often as amateur efforts. Two of the more prominent professional Christian film-makers of the period, Rick and Dave Christiano were not raised in the church, so it hardly seems fair to blame the church for any perceived deficiencies in their work.

So let’s take Jenkins’ question and give it a proper answer.

1) Many Christian Films are not “bad” just different

To begin with the whole comparison of Christian and Secular films is really off particularly if one wants to go back 20 years. Comparing particularly early Christian films to Hollywood blockbusters is simply unfair.

Most of these films were made with different purposes than Hollywood movies. To judge a Christian film (particularly an early one) by Hollywood standards would be as silly as judging an instructional video by the same standard we judge a movie. In our current culture, we expect to be constantly entertained, but many Christian movies are made with the purpose of ministry first, with concern for entertainment value of secondary importance to touching hearts and providing a message. It used to be and perhaps in many places, it still is the situation that Christian films are used for outreach in a very direct way.

There’s a place for subtlety if the goal is to entertain a wide audience, but what if your goal is instead to touch the hearts of people? Maybe your approach will be a tad more direct. Of course, it’s pretended that if one wants to use cinema to share about God, one must very discreet and subtle about it. I’d disagree. Many people are tired of being spun by politicians and now being spun by religious people who won’t be real enough to say what they really believe.

Yes, these type of ministry films may not entertain you. They may not be the type of films you feel like having a “blockbuster”night with to which I say, “Get over it.” Everything doesn’t have to be about your own amusement and if people have come to Christ through films that may not be up to Hollywood standards, God bless the film-makers. 

I think that even through today, Christian films put a high emphasis on the actual story and the message of what happens. Secular critics are impressed with films when every actor on the screen portrays a total sleezeball who learns that they need to live to actualize their own sleeziness. (This isn’t to say all Hollywood films are bad, but the sleezefests that so many critics praise are.)  Christian films are different in both the moral focus of the characters and the meaning of the story.  

2) The Second Coming  of Christ as a Cheesy Spy Story

Since the early 1990s, many Christian films have begun to seriously compete with Hollywood beginning with the Omega Code, a movie starring Michael York (yes, Michael York) as the anti-Christ. Michael Ironsides plays the false prophet-wannabe who pouts like a four year old when the anti-Christ offers the job of false prophet to a hyper religion professor. “You said I could be the prophet.”

Overall, the movie wasn’t too bad if one likes somewhat cliched action flicks. Of course, there’ve been a glut of end times films ranging from the totally awful Six: The Mark Unleashed  to the far more tolerable, Judgment (I pity the foo who don’t like an end times movie with Mr. T. in it.)

Six was an incredibly depressing film. I love Stephen Baldwin but he was downright creepy in this film and not in a good way. The film had all the worst tropes of end-times movies including a message, “There’s nothing that can be done.” This may be true in the end times but send a horrible message about today.

The End Times genre is done to death because I think some people imagine that’s the only way they can portray Christians as being cool and doing cool things.  However, Christian films have ultimately got to rise above the level of schlock.

3) Books Chosen Poorly As Film Sources

More of the most recent Christian films have been based on Christian novels, unfortunately with mixed results. Adapting a novel to film is tricky and it seems to be especially true with Christian novels.

“The Visitation” was an okay book by Frank Peretti turned into a really stupid horror movie. “The List” may have made sense as a book but on film it was a real mess.

4) Projects that Are Too Big

I think that one of the biggest mistakes Christian film-makers make is taking on too ambitious of a project, particularly in first efforts.

Carman made a film called, “The Champion” as his first and heretofore only silver screen effort. The film featured a boxer coming out of retirement to win a last big fight to save his rec. center. Oh, by the way, he wanted to include a romantic sub-plot. Oh, and then for kicks, they had a scene where you had a gratuitious car chase followed by a pick-up truck bursting into flames.

The Judas Project was a film I didn’t even make it thirty minutes through. One of the big turnoffs was a Transfiguration Scene that was so cheap it was practically high school. It’s a fair enough request to ask that a film that is going to portray God’s miracles try and make them look good rather than shortcut it and make it look cheap.

Aother big example of this is Christian biopics of which “Faith Like Potatoes” was one. A good biopic takes time, usually about 3 hours to pull off right. I’ve seen people try to cover the life of Fanny Crosby in forty-six minutes. Far more sensical, but still anecdotal and somewhat disconnected was a Bob Jones University production on the life of evangelist Robert Sheffey. I think the one thing I didn’t like about Faith Like Potatoes  was that it not only jumped around, but did so in a way that made it hard to judge the passage of time. It told an incredible story of faith and God’s faithfulness, but because it was in such a rush, it didn’t take the time to tell the story as well as it could have, and the viewer spends much of the movie going, “What just happened?”

I think Christian films do far better when a first film is somewhat less ambitious. And of course, there have been some good Christian films and hopefully in coming weeks, I’ll be able to blog about them soon.