Top Ten Most Flattering Portrayals of Christians in Film

As a part two bookend to last week’s “Unflattering” list, I’ve been thinking this week about the films that contain the most flattering portrayals of Christians. This was, predictably, much more challenging a list to come up with. Thankfully, however, I could come up with about twenty worthy candidates, ten of which are listed here. Interestingly, only one of the listed films (#7) was directed by an American. One important thing to remember is that these films by no means represent the most Christian or the most spiritual films (that list would be longer, and different)—only the ones that feature characters who are motivated or defined, in some favorable way, by their Christian faith. These are films that portray Christians as passionate, thoughtful, loving, and (in a lot of cases) sacrificial. Here’s my list. Let me know what you think.

10) Land of Plenty (2004): This little-seen, 9/11-inspired film by Christian director Wim Wenders features Michelle Williams in a rare role—a progressive young Christian working among L.A.’s homeless at a skid-row mission because Jesus would’ve done it.

9) Babette’s Feast (1987): Rob Bell is always saying Christians should re-discover the joy of “the long meal.” This film revels in it, as an effervescent group of aging Christians in Denmark prove that God’s grace is never more evident than in a long night of good food and fellowship.

8) Tender Mercies (1983): It was between this Horton Foote-penned film and The Apostle for the Robert Duvall spot on this list. Both films present imperfect people who find redemption through the loving community of the church. Yes, recovering alcoholic country music stars can (and often do) become Christians!

7) Dead Man Walking (1995): I had to include a nun movie in here, and Sound of Music seemed a bit frivolous! Seriously, though, Susan Sarandon’s portrayal of Sister Helen Prejean—a deeply compassionate woman who ministers to a death row inmate (Sean Penn) is a beautiful picture of Christ-like love.

6) Amazing Grace (2007): It’s too bad this film wasn’t just called Wilberforce or something, because it’s really just a biopic about the amazing Christian abolitionist who inspires Christian activism today. And as that, it’s more than enough to relay immense and beautiful truths about God’s guidance, strength, and grace.

5) Becket (1964): Richard Burton’s stellar portrayal of the unwaveringly pious Thomas à Becket (opposite Peter O’Toole’s Henry II in the famous church-state struggle of 12th Century England) offers one of cinema’s most principled and empathetic Christian characters.

4) Into Great Silence (2007): Not for the easily bored (but endlessly rewarding if you can sit through it), this nearly silent documentary probes the psyche of the uber-ascetic monks who live—and love living—lives of worship and solitude in a French Carthusian monastery.

3) Diary of a Country Priest (1951): French director Robert Bresson’s masterpiece of transcendent cinema, Priest charts the everyday struggles of a young priest trying his best to follow God’s will in shepherding a small parish in rural France. The ending will take your breath away.

2) Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (2005): This Oscar-nominated German-language film portrays the quiet subversion of Sophie Scholl, leader of a student resistance group during Hitler’s reign in Nazi Germany. Her profound faith drives her brave activism and strengthens her when faced with unspeakable horrors.

1) The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928): One of the best films of all time, this silent masterpiece from Danish director Carl Dreyer provides an amazingly artful and moving account of one of Christianity’s most inspiring figures. Shot almost entirely in close-up, the film’s striking images—especially Joan’s face—are imbued with the Holy.

Trivial Pursuit

When you get on the Internet, what are you there for? To find some piece of information, perhaps: movie times, train schedules, store hours, etc? Or maybe you are there because it is habit: every day when you wake up, and sporadically throughout the day, you must go through your cycle of websites (for me it is CNN.com, then my three primary email accounts, then Relevantmagazine.com, then occasionally I’ll make a stop at my fourth email account). Or perhaps you go online simply because there is nothing else to do—and there is EVERYTHING to do on the web.

It is this last motivation that I’m the most interested in. The Internet, beyond being the most useful information-getting resource ever to be at mankind’s fingertips, is also the largest and most wonderful playground we’ve ever had. You can go anywhere, watch or listen to anything, buy whatever your heart desires, and do scores of other things that may or may not be acceptable in the “real” world.

With all of this at our disposal, it’s no wonder so many of us go online when we have a spare moment. It’s no wonder we can easily drop 3 hours online when we only intended to check our email. It’s like going to a massive and wonderful amusement park with the ostensible motivation of trying out the new rollercoaster. Of COURSE you’re going to stay all day and ride everything you can, while you’re there!

So it is with the Internet. It’s built on links and ads and things to push and pull us in new, alluring directions. It’s all about movement, dissatisfaction, keeping you wanting more.

Because there is EVERYTHING on the web, it is almost impossible—if you don’t have a utilitarian reason to be there—to choose where to go. Thus we rely on links and pop-ups and “if you liked this, you’ll like…” recommendations to guide us along the way. Thus, a typical session online is a hyperscattered, nonsensical web of aimless wandering, dead-ends, backtracking, and rabbit trails. But I think we like it this way. How nice to not be looking for something, but to be finding wonders and pleasures by the boatload, so easily! The search bar is our pilgrim guide online. Give it any clue as to what you desire, and it’ll lead you the rest of the way. Hit the google button and get your surf on.

But what is it we’re pursuing? The vast terrain of the web is an amusement park in which information is the diversion. Collecting more useless knowledge and facts is the name of the game. Whether we are there to check sports stats, see what we can download for free, or watch the latest goofy clip on YouTube, it’s all a passing trifle. It draws our attention for a second, but only until the next interesting link pops up.

For all the great and valuable things the Internet provides us, I wonder if it has done irreparable damage to our ability to think critically—to really mull over questions (that don’t have easily-Googled answers), seek out the big questions and not be at the mercy of a marketplace that prefers to ask and answer the questions for you. We should live our lives in a state of search, I think, but the Internet all too often makes “searching” a trivial pursuit.

Top Ten Most Unflattering Portrayals of Christians in Film

Because top ten lists are fun, and because I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how Christians are perceived in culture, I thought it would be interesting to comprise a list of the most unflattering portrayals of Christians in cinema. On a future post I will probably do the same for the most flattering portrayals. Keep in mind that I am not slamming these films; several of them are actually very well made. I’m only pointing out that, for secular audiences watching these films, Christians come across as crazy, annoying, dangerous, stupid, or some combination therein. Thankfully most of these films were not seen by very many people. But even so, I think it’s important to be mindful that they exist—that for some people, this is the only picture of Christianity they have.

10) Why Should the Devil Have all the Good Music? (2004) Though less hostile than most documentaries about Christians, this incoherent exploration of a much-too-broad topic leaves the viewer as confused and cynical as the disparate talking heads that sound off in the film.

9) Night of the Hunter (1955) This classic kicked off the “fundamentalist Christian as psychopath” trend that has been a favorite in cinema ever since. “Leaning On the Everlasting Arms” has never sounded as disturbing as when Robert Mitchum sings it.

8) My Summer of Love (2004) More tragic than comical, this indie film portrays a group of British evangelicals as positively bonkers and dangerous to family dynamics, as one of the church’s leaders (Paddy Considine) pays more attention to prayer meetings than he does his own struggling family.

7) The Virgin Suicides (1999) Repressive Christian parents (James Woods and Kathleen Turner) in suburbia drive their innocent daughters to suicide. Because not being able to go to prom just does that to you…

6) Citizen Ruth (1996) It’s pretty gutsy to satirize abortion, but Alexander Payne did it successfully in this film, which lampoons both the firebrand evangelical pro-lifers and the equally insane pro-choice feminazis.

5) Facing the Giants (2006) Oops! I thought this was made by Christians!? Indeed, but this horrendous film (which we have Georgia’s Sherwood Baptist Church to thank for) is as embarrassing to Christians as anything Pat Robertson ever said.

4) Saved! (2004) This film relentlessly points out evangelical absurdities, featuring a command performance from Mandy Moore as the Christian school queen bee who spreads Jesus’ love by throwing bibles at people.

3) Jonestown: The Life and Death of People’s Temple (2006) To the uninitiated, People’s Temple appears to be just one more crazy sect of fundamentalist Christianity. Which makes this true story of delusion and mass suicide one of the most damaging witnesses to American Christianity in the twentieth century.

2) Hell House (2001) A truly scary documentary about a Pentecostal church in Texas that uses Halloween, buckets of fake blood, and scenes of abortion, suicide, and AIDS to scare hordes of lost kids into accepting Jesus.

1) Jesus Camp (2006) In addition to its portrayal of six year olds speaking in tongues and praying over a cardboard George W. Bush, this film boasts the honor of having grade-A ironic footage of Ted Haggard talking smack about gays just months before his own admission of having solicited a male prostitute.

The Search Circa 1992

I just finished Jon Krakauer’s fantastic book Into the Wild, which I wanted to read before the film version (directed by Sean Penn) comes out this September. The book tells the story of Chris McCandless, who graduated college in 1990 and went on a two year trek across North America in search of raw, transcendent experience. Tired of a predictable, bourgeois existence in suburban D.C., McCandless decided to “escape” from the real world that frustrated him. He drove his car out into the Mojave desert, abandoned it, burned all his money, and proceeded to live as a wayfaring tramp and hobo for the next two years.

Into the Wild is a fascinating account of McCandless’ adventures as he travels throughout the American West—from South Dakota to the Salton Sea, Las Vegas to Astoria, Oregon, and finally to the Alaskan wilderness, where his Jack London-inspired quest came to a tragic end.

McCandless wrote in letters of his desire to break from “a life of security, conformity, and conservatism” in favor of “unconventional living.” As he writes:

“Nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future… The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”

McCandless longed for a richer, more natural and grounded existence than what his middle-class lot had outlined for him. I can’t help but compare him to another tragic, alienated soul of his generation—Kurt Cobain—who famously rebelled against the comfortable establishment he was born into.

Whereas Cobain vented his frustrations through drugs and music, and McCandless through communion with nature, both men epitomized the “grunge” rebellion and disillusionment of Generation X in the early 1990s. Call them slackers, or neo-hippies, or whatever—but they made explicit the “search” that haunts all generations.

Writer Douglas Coupland, who has come to be the literary voice of Generation X, described in 1995 the mindset of “X-ers” as being the desire “to hop off the merry-go-round of status, money, and social climbing that so often frames modern existence."

I think we all can relate to this desire at some points in our lives—when the weight of success and the expectations of family, society, and self become too heavy a burden. Whether McCandless and Cobain are to be respected or pitied (for their searches both ended in solitary deaths, in 1992 and 1994, respectively), I’ll leave to you to decide.

But regardless of their failures and ultimately tragic ends, McCandless and Cobain were earnest in their longings—and through culture (music, movies, books, etc) their rupturing of the status quo lives on for future wanderers to ponder.

Harry Potter and the Christian Fear of Imagination

“Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?"

Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry’s ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure.

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"

I love this quote from The Deathly Hallows, which comes from the final lines of the “King’s Cross” chapter (aptly titled, considering the not-so-subtle Christian metaphors of the book). I love it because it’s a sort of justification for the whole Harry Potter phenomenon—for all fantasy literature, I suppose. These books are complete and utter whimsy, fantasy, fiction, make-believe, etc. They are fun to read, fun to immerse oneself in, but nothing more, right?

There is a bias towards this kind of literature that assumes—because it is so fantastical and un-like reality—there can be no relevance or bearing on the real world. It is the same bias that dismisses abstract painting because it doesn’t represent anything. People are afraid of the unknown, the imagined, the make-believe.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Christians are so hard on Harry Potter. In addition to being about—gasp—witches and wizards, these seven books are simply a waste of time, they might say. Whereas The Chronicles of Narnia and Lord of the Rings can be justified as time-well-spent (because of their much-publicized, if a bit over-emphasized, Christian allegorical elements), Harry Potter is just a lot of hocus pocus frivolity.

I spoke with several Christians after I finished Hallows last week, and told them how explicit and wonderful the Christological elements were in the last hundred or so pages. Most of the Christians (who were not Harry fans) responded to this with a quick dismissal, saying “Oh…” or “that’s neat,” or “well, isn’t that how all epic literature ends?” The overwhelming sentiment seemed to be that surely Harry Potter could not end up being Christian—after all these years of polemics between Harry and evangelicals…

But the truth is Harry Potter does indeed have much to say about Christianity—the end of Hallows especially. I can honestly say that J.K. Rowling, like Lewis, Tolkien, L’Engle, Shakespeare, and many others before her, has illuminated the sacred through the mythical, the real through the fictitious.

Tolkien wrote in “On Fairy Stories” of creating fantasy as a “human right” that is endowed to us through the incarnation: “we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.”

Lewis went even further in his defense of myth. He eloquently wrote of the gospel as a myth become fact:

Now as myth transcends thought, Incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens--at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle.

~C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock, "Myth Became Fact" (1944)

So, I urge you to read Harry Potter, and other books like it, and not feel guilty for wasting time in childish worlds of superfluous fiction. There is much value in the imaginary, and in the mythical. After all, there is much more going on in this universe than our non-fictional, scientific, empiricist minds can articulate.

The Search

I wonder how many web searches I’ve undertaken in my life. A million? Nowadays we live our lives through searches. Is there a question you need answered? A product you need to find? Simply type in a word or two into the Google searchbox and off you go. Pages and pages of potential answers are only a click away.But this instantaneous “searching” is not really what the search is all about. In fact, our technological capabilities to search and find anything and everything in just a few easy steps has quite possibly damaged the search as it exists in modern culture. Increasingly, we are losing our capacity to think critically, to mull over a question without ready access to its answer. The Search goes deeper than the zeros and ones of Google-brand fact transaction, however. At its heart, the search is a way of being. It is a state of wonderment, curiosity, and awareness of something other. It requires the tension of the unknown and the unease of the unknowable. It inspires both deep and broad thinking, and a commitment to making connections where ideas, postulates, and observations allow.

The Search is also about finding connections with other people. Ironically, we are ever more isolated in our hyper-connected digital society. We yearn for the physical presence and emotional resonance of our fellow man, whose camaraderie we long for above all else. As George Steiner writes in Real Presences, “we are monads haunted by communion.”

The Search is about filling these absences, feeling the specter of otherness, finding communion and connection with others on the same journey. If this blog could be about anything, I would hope it would be about this. I’m not any farther on the journey than anyone else, but none of us are going to get anywhere without dialogue.

To be human is to long for understanding. We all want to “be onto something,” as Walker Percy writes of the search. To not be onto something is to be mired in despair; stuck in the mindless and mundane of the “one-click” universe of Google. Let’s be done with that. Let’s rediscover what we’re really looking for.

Welcome to my antiblog

I never, ever thought I’d have a blog. It just always seemed so frivolous, self-indulgent, and annoying. And it’s not like I’m starving to self-publish or anything. For the last 4 years I’ve been able to write whenever and whatever I want on Relevantmagazine.com, among other websites.

So why am I caving now, in 2007 (the year the “blog” turns a decade old), and starting my very own “web log”? Well, I suppose there are a few explanations:

1) I’m intellectually interested in the “experience” of blogging (as a grad student getting a masters in Media Studies, blogs are unavoidable as subjects of study),

2) I like the idea of being able to endlessly publicize what I think deserves attention, and go hog-wild with hyperlinks (I LOVE hyperlinks)

3) Everyone’s doing it. But to keep in line with my pseudo Luddite media ethic that tells me to avoid things like blogs, I’ve decided to make this “site” as un-bloggish as possible. Thus, as a sort of founding manifesto, I’ve decided to draft a list of dos and don’ts to govern this silly exercise in narcissism:

First, the DON’Ts:

1) No blog entry will detail events, persons, or problems from my personal life, unless used as literary devices or otherwise in service of some more substantial point. In fact, the use of the first-person pronoun in general should be used with discretion.

2) This will not be a “news” site that pointlessly reiterates stories as seen on CNN, TMZ, ESPN, or other such widely seen sites.

3) No crappy, late-night ramblings or sub-par filler writing. Only high quality and serious interrogations of issues, ideas, art, etc.

And now, the DOs:

1) Link to the best stuff on the web (articles, mp3s, videos, etc) that might otherwise be lost in the ridiculous glut of information out there.

2) Write about (and link to other writing about) anything and everything, as long as it is done with an earnest curiosity and minimum of irony. The world needs more earnestness, I think.

3) Provide more questions than answers. There’s a reason the blog’s called “The Search.” It’s always ongoing.