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.
We don’t hear much about this because these representations are conventional, not shocking. They fit squarely into the public imagination about conservative Christians as antagonistic types—reinforced in recent debates about the religious delineation of America evidenced by national events such as the presidential election and, yes, The Passion. Contra convention is the work of scholars such as Alan Wolfe, whose The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith (Free Press, 2003) amounts to a defense of conservative Christians as good democratic neighbors in spite of their public persona as vociferous Republican brutes. Wolfe’s book is an ethnography-informed survey of contemporary religious believers in America, including Muslims and Jews, but it is mostly devoted to evangelical and fundamentalist Christians (the two are not always distinct, and will not be throughout this essay, because the Christians in question are arguably both). His contention is that America has changed these Christians much more than these Christians have changed America. Wolfe’s Christian adherents are too narcissistic to get much beyond their own needs, too New Age-y to be judgmental, and too intimidated to evangelize. “The biggest challenge posed to American society by the popularity of megachurches and other forms of growth-oriented Protestantism is not bigotry,” Wolfe argues, “but bathos.” In short, evangelicals are nice, suitable members of a pluralist democracy. Wolfe shows several examples of this, including a Cincinnati megachurch pastor whose church evangelizes with random acts of kindness—cleaning toilets in a local mosque, washing car windshields. Such caring, says Wolfe, is the real character of American evangelicalism.
Wolfe knows he is swimming upstream. His version of evangelical Christianity is rarely reflected in the national media, popular culture, high art, or academic journals, and the election and its aftermath (which has been punctuated with hard-right comments from James Dobson and others) have offered little support for Wolfe’s thesis. Neither has the fallout from The Passion, because both the obstreperous public debate about the movie and the content of the movie itself testify to an essential cultural antagonism in evangelical Christianity—one that expresses itself through aggression, virulence, and even violence.
True to form, in 2004 Hollywood gave us an emblematic example of Christians chewing up the silver screen. In Brian Dannelly’s Saved!, moviegoers were introduced to evangelical vixen Hillary Faye, played with great relish by Mandy Moore. The queen of her Christian high school, Hillary struts and frets her hour upon the stage, using her Bible as a flamethrower to take down homosexuals, fornicators, cigarette smokers, and other members of the unconverted class. The movie, which was a mild critical and commercial success, was notable for its spot-on depiction of some aspects of evangelical culture: the praise-and-worship services and prayer groups of the high school were, if exaggerated, rooted in the kind of verisimilitude that could only come from a filmmaker who know what it’s like to be an evangelical insider (writer-director Brian Dannelly attended a Christian high school).
And from one who knows what it’s like to resent evangelicalism. As Hillary and the movie sail toward a ham-fisted ending, Saved! descends into a caricature of religious extremism: here’s Hillary vandalizing her school in an attempt to trap the infidels; here’s Hillary literally throwing the Bible at a wayward friend; here’s Hillary, crazed with religious fervor, crashing her van into a gigantic cardboard Jesus. She’s self-righteous and shrill, vindictive and violent, and completely dismissible.
But Hillary is good comedy because she is part of a tradition of representation. Take Bob Walker from The Big Kahuna (1999), a narrow-minded salesman-turned-evangelist (this movie wonders if there is a difference between the two). Bob, who is at a sales conference with decidedly secular counterparts, is a zealous Baptist who is willing to mix business with witnessing about the love of Christ, and he goes to blows to defend his right to do so. Or take Elmer Gantry, who, in the 1960 film of the same name, first appears on screen in an angry drunken revelry, yelling in a speakeasy about his masculine savior: “Jesus was a real fighter! The best little scrapper, pound for pound, you ever saw. And why, gentlemen? Love, gentlemen. Jesus had love in both fists!”
There are many more such characters, either as major roles or minor flashes on the screen — Christians whose most dominant trait is their belligerence. Each character may not amount to much alone — the Hillary Fayes may be mere hypocrites, the Bob Walkers mere assholes, and the Elmer Gantrys mere crooks — but their shared corrosive behavior amounts to a narrow representational groove that warrants attention. In Hollywood’s America, evangelicals are fanatics with a chip on their shoulders. These movies foreground Hollywood’s discomfort with evangelicals, and, as the characters unravel in movie after movie, they give audiences easy ways of dealing with that discomfort. That the depictions are stereotypical and predictable does not make them false, of course; it just makes them caricatures.
But these raging saints are mild compared to the harder edge of the Hollywood tradition for representing conservative Christians. In many films, evangelicals are not just socially aggravating; they are sociopaths.
When I mentioned this to a friend recently, the first thing he said was, “Cape Fear.” Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake of the noir classic features a Pentecostal slasher who is part missionary, part murderer. The story is about a paroled convict who hunts down and persecutes the defense lawyer who failed to get him acquitted, but the meta-story is about an evangelist who terrorizes sinners with the gospel. Robert DeNiro’s Max Cady is “from the hills” of North Carolina, “a Pentecostal cracker,” says Nick Nolte’s Sam Bowden. As Max taunts, pursues, and attempts to kill Sam and rape his wife and daughter, he invokes the language of evangelization. “I pray for your dad,” Max tells Sam’s daughter. He advises Sam to read the Bible, preaches on sin and judgment, and offers a path toward salvation. This paper-thin joke is carried assiduously throughout the film—even as Max prepares to rape Sam’s wife, he spouts Christian rhetoric: “You ready to be born again, Mrs. Bowden? A few minutes with me, and you’ll be speaking in tongues.” Such language abounds particularly throughout the climactic scenes, and when Max is defeated and is beginning to drown, we hear him shouting in tongues.
Max has many friends. He is, in fact, a direct descendent of Harry Powell, Robert Mitchum’s preacher/serial killer in The Night of the Hunter (1955). With his hands tattooed with the words “love” and “hate” so he can use them for sermon illustrations, Powell is the inspiration for the similarly tattooed Max Cady. Mitchum also played Max in the original Cape Fear, and his cameo appearance in Scorsese’s version is a reference to both classic films: “I don’t know whether to look at him or read him,” Mitchum says when seeing DeNiro’s tattoos. Not surprisingly, Scorsese’s Cape Fear is religiously inflected in ways that the original is not, but while other Scorsese films seek to do justice to the affectional (if often traumatic) depth of religious belief and behavior, Cape Fear parodies religious extremism as a specifically fundamentalist horror show.
Consider also: Robert Duvall’s Pentecostal preacher in The Apostle, whose murderous rage bubbles just underneath his zeal for the Lord’s work, Bill Paxton’s enraged demon slayer in Frailty, and Benicio Del Toro’s guilt-ridden hit-and-run murderer in 21 Grams. Some such characters are repentant of their violence, but all are inexorably drawn to it—aggression and violent behavior is their mode of engaging the world.
Quentin Tarantino, who never filmed a scene that wasn’t in quotes, makes reference to this representational tradition in Pulp Fiction (1994), where Samuel L. Jackson’s gangster character Jules Winnfield delivers a fire-and-brimstone sermon before executing victims. With his black suit and tie, well groomed Jheri Curl, and, most importantly, crescendo-laden speech, Jules resembles nothing so much as an African American preacher. He misquotes scripture as he guns down a victim, but he also quotes — verbatim — a black Christian tradition by way of a Hollywood stereotype.
These are Hollywood’s conservative-evangelical-fundamentalist Christians: given to violence not in spite of their faith, but because of it. These are also — it seems crucial to point out now — Blue State depictions of Red State inhabitants. Cape Fear’s Max Cady has two bumper stickers: “You’re a VIP on EARTH—I’m a VIP in HEAVEN” and “American by birth, Southern by the grace of God.” Saved!, 21 Grams, The Apostle and most of the rest are set in the hinterlands, and they are inherently us-them movies, striving to reinforce the aggrieved differences between religious and secular perspectives.
Now, what say we get these characters in a room with Alan Wolfe, lock the doors, and, you know, see what happens? Wolfe’s book has a lot to teach Hollywood about conservative believers, and a lot to teach conservative believers about themselves. Wolfe gets some things wrong—in one chapter, he defines “spiritual warfare” as treating nonbelievers as enemies, misreads marginal Christian rock bands such as Stryper and Steve Taylor, and, most fatuously, claims that the media is not embracing “Christian themes as a way of tapping into new sources of advertising revenue”—but he gets one big thing right. Major sections of evangelical Christianity increasingly mirror the world around them; the strong, often uncritical desire of evangelical institutions to be attractive to the greatest number of people threatens the evangelical character of those institutions. So far from reacting against the world aggressively and violently, argues Wolfe, many Christians find themselves quite at home in the world, protecting the status quo, not railing against it. “We are all evangelicals now,” says Wolfe, because evangelicals have become just like everyone else.
Wolfe’s thesis seems quaint when “Meet the Press” features roundtable discussions (okay, insensible debates) pitting Jerry Falwell against Jim Wallis and Al Sharpton against Richard Land, and when evangelicals vehemently defend a violent Passion Play against the cries of their secular neighbors. But just as Hollywood does not speak for Christians, neither do all conservative figureheads. Wolfe’s thesis has the virtue of breaking through the morass of typical representations and describing evangelicalism from the perspective of those practicing it rather than from the perspective of the New York Times. And in fact, his characterization is the more disturbing one, the one more challenging for anyone who cares about the sustainability of evangelicalism. As Slate reported recently, marketer Paul Lauer, who helped design the marketing apparatus for The Passion, followed that job by aiming a new marketing campaign at Christians—this time for The Polar Express, a saccharine movie about a little boy who does not believe in Santa Claus, and a movie that did not have Jesus on its mind until the marketers decided it should. That Christian radio stations and churches agreed to take part in the campaign (really, we should see the movies we choose to support), is testament to the validity of Wolfe’s claim that some Christians adapt to culture—in this case, crass consumer culture—more readily than they change it, or even question it.
In the months and years ahead, we might prefer violent caricature to sentiment, faith-crazed murderers to Christians made complacent by shopping and self-fulfillment. Coming soon to a theater near you: tame evangelicals. They could be scarier than anything we’ve seen so far
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel 2.1.