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God has only small Hollywood role

Originally published at Seattle Post-Intelligencer

 

Passover and Easter coincide this week and up to half the population of the United States may well appear in synagogue or church. Seventy-two percent of Americans surveyed by USA Today say they find God in prayer each day. His healing hand is experienced in hospitals, his hope in hospices. Victims of accidents and heroes of conflict praise his name. Clergy enlist him to encourage the millions of souls in their care. Sunday schools thrive and the Bible remains the permanent best-selling book.

But you have to look hard to find God in the movies or even on TV. He has been all but black-listed. When He gets a part, it usually is trivial, or ridiculous or even–amazingly–villainous.

Amid all the sex and mayhem, you do find the occasional film or TV program that tells of people combating gang violence or rehabilitating drug addicts. But you’d seldom know that in real life much of that work is done by religious organizations and that faith is the transforming motivation.

Rev. Del C. Maxfield of the Denver Rescue Mission, for example, asserts that “God is the only answer to the spiritual emptiness that drives substance abuse.” He claims that his  mission’s success rate in rehabilitation programs is 60 percent for men and 70 percent for women, compared with a government program success rate of 10 percent.

From building orphanages overseas to helping rescue teen runaways on our own urban streets, the churches are there, every day witnessing to their faith. In a century that has seen millions of Jews and Christians martyred under Hitler, Stalin and Mao, we still learn of martyrs in such places as the southern Sudan, Uganda and Mozambique. World Vision, the Christian relief and development agency, which recently located its headquarters in federal Way, has had its workers endangered–and some killed–in various countries around the world.

But seldom are the stories of religiously motivated people seen on either the big or little screen. The rare exception makes us grateful. The film “Dead Man Walking” just won an Oscar for Susan Sarandon who plays a nun trying as hard to save the soul as the life of a convicted murderer. Far more common are the films where God and faith are strangely absent from the stories of families and communities.

And all too frequent are the anti-religious movies like Disney’s “Priest,” described by the movie critic for PBS’ “Sneak Previews,” Michael Medved, as “the most unapologetically anti-Catholic film ever released by a major studio.” Says Medved, a practicing Jew, “Christians are the least major segment of the population that Hollywood feels it can offend with impunity and even take pride in giving offense,” 

Few people mind very much the teasing satire of stock characters like the bumbling minister or priest in so many film weddings or the silly rabbi with the thick Yiddish accent of, say, Mel Brooks’ films. What does raise hackles is the increasing use of religious people as sinister villains: the nasty rabbi in Woody Allen’s “Radio Days;” “the Preacher” in “Johnny Mnemonic,” who cries “Come to Jesus!” as he stabs his victims with a crucifix dagger; the Bible-spouting, cross-wearing prison warden in “Shawshank Redemption” who turns out to be a murderer and rapist; the fundamentalist madwoman who kills her daughter in “The Rapture,” the Orwellian Puritans in “The Handmaid’s Tale;” the Pentecostal psychopath in “Cape Fear” (who was not a religious figure at all in the original, 1950s version of the film); and the violent and corrupt papcy depicted in such films as “The Godfather III;” and on ad infinitum and ad nauseam.

Hollywood defends itself by saying we’re just giving people what they want. But Medved, whose book “Hollywood Versus America,” was published five years ago and is still in steady demand, proved that anti-religious bile is not what people want. Most of Hollywood’s anti-religious movies, trade figures show, have done poorly at the box office, while most of the biggest money earners, year after year ear, have been rated G or PG-13. 

So, why do they go on churning out those formulaic turkeys? Because, Medved says, people in the Hollywood of today care more about impressing each other than about pleasing the public. Largely disconnected from other Americans, their ideas on religion derive from a lazy mash of political correctness, New Age imagery and cinematic convenience. They may invent movie “angels” and helpful ghosts that come back from the dead–religious goodies without (dare we say it?) corresponding responsibilities. But they find serious religion offensive, or at least believe that cheap shots at religion will stamp them as true “artists.”

Epater les bourgeois (shock the middle classes) is a mandate that has motivated art for eh past century. Once, however, taking on bourgeois and institutional hypocrisies required courage. Not any more. Sneering at religion has become a profitable and even respectable enterprise. Today it is the fashionable pose that bad art strikes to disguise its exhaustion.

But if anti-religious themes lose money  and lack artistic authenticity, they can still do damage. Hollywood’s indifference to God and antagonism to people of faith cannot help but have an influence, especially on those who lack a compensating real-world contact with faith. Even films that bomb financially are seen by millions. 

Fortunately, Hollywood is in chronic financial trouble and the conglomerates that own the studios eventually may notice that offending the millions is not helping their bottom line. Moreover, a few producers, directors and artists are realizing that faith and the faithful are not necessarily their enemies. There are quiet Christians in Hollywood–evangelical Christians produces Disney’s “The Lion King” and TV’s “Home Improvement” series–and some are forming independent film companies.

And a few Hollywood artists are going through something like a religious conversion. The studies that the actress Kate Capshaw undertook as part of her conversion to Judaism reportedly also had a profound effect on her husband, producer Steven Spielberg, as he made “Schindler’s List,” the great Holocaust story that ends in an affirmation of brotherhood and faith.

At Splielberg’s new film company, the script for the first major picture–being written by a believing Christian–is “Moses, Prince of Egypt.”

To that, “Chag Sameach”–in Hebrew, Happy Holy Days.

And Happy Easter.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 5, 1996

Bruce Chapman

Cofounder and Chairman of the Board of Discovery Institute
Bruce Chapman has had a long career in American politics and public policy at the city, state, national, and international levels. Elected to the Seattle City Council and as Washington State's Secretary of State, he also served in several leadership posts in the Reagan administration, including ambassador. In 1991, he founded the public policy think tank Discovery Institute, where he currently serves as Chairman of the Board and director of the Chapman Center on Citizen Leadership.