the New Pantagruel

Hollywood’s Evangelicals Read Alan Wolfe, and lo! They Are Angry!

by Patton Dodd

he Transformation of American Religion : How We Actually Live Our Faith

by Alan Wolfe

If Hollywood knows anything about religion, evangelicals are mad as hell. And they aren’t going to take it anymore.

Those crazy evangelicals: they trash anything stinking of science; they thump their Bibles and worship their Ten Commandments monuments; they judge and condemn everyone. Worst of all—and really, this is the main problem—they’re prone to rape, pillage, and kill.

Evangelicals, especially the fundamentalist-leaning, tongues-speaking kind, are a murderous brood. America has gone wrong, and if Hollywood knows anything about it, the Christians are willing to shed blood to make things right.

Last year saw the coming out party of conservative Christians in Hollywood, as Mel Gibson rolled out the red carpet and welcomed believers everywhere to the inner-workings of his studio, Icon Productions. If the production of The Passion of the Christ was a pre-Second Vatican Council experience, the marketing of the film was thoroughly evangelical. Gibson may have attended a Latin Mass every morning before shooting, but in the months leading up to the movie’s premiere, he went ecumenical. He may have told the New Yorker that non-Catholics were doomed to hell, but he told evangelicals that The Passion was our kind of evangelistic sermon. (Wait a minute. Did that mean he was trying to evangelize us?) He visited our churches and conferences. He asked us to pray that he could find a distributor. And we welcomed him. We fought for him. We shook our heads at Frank Rich and The New Republic. We hadn’t even seen the film yet, but we were excited (and justifiably so) that a talented moviemaker had turned his eyes upon Jesus. And he had turned to us for help.

Public concerns about anti-Semitism notwithstanding (and I am sympathetic to those concerns), everything came up roses for evangelicals who supported the movie. The Passion was the third-highest grossing film of the year, largely as a result of church pastors who bought out multiple screenings and high-profile Christian leaders such as Billy Graham, who called it “a lifetime of sermons in one movie.” And even if the film does mostly preach to the converted, stories of new confessions abound.

But as soon as the movie was released, the terms of the debate largely switched from bigotry to violence in entertainment. And now that Gibson’s bloody epic has made the rounds, it has been a mystery to many that evangelicals so eagerly became associated with this decidedly brutal film. Millions of evangelical Christians supported the film before they saw it, but after seeing it they largely reported that (in the Pope’s purported words) “it is as it was,” a Saving Private Ryan for Jesus. Still, this is not the kind of Jesus movie one would expect from evangelicals. Gibson is no Warner Sallman, and his Jesus movie surely won’t replace Campus Crusade’s tamer version. Of course, evangelicals didn’t make The Passion; they just made it successful. And in doing so, they made it their own.

If we think for a minute about Hollywood films and the representation of evangelical Christians, the evangelical support of stomach-turning violence makes ironic sense. In the Hollywood representational rubric, evangelical characters are often contextualized by aggression. They are, in fact, forces of violence: they inspire it, enact it, relish in it. Hollywood films turn on shorthand, and the dominant trope for evangelicals is hostility: dogmatic and opinionated in the Falwellian mode, yes, but also ready to wield an axe. Watch a Hollywood flick with a conservative evangelical character, and the screen will splatter with blood — or at least a close ideological approximation.

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