This question, most unfortunately, is the title of a piece in the online publication Vox, which is mainstream liberal in its coverage. Knowing that, which I did, it would have been easy to write off such a sentiment as biased. But deep down we all know “Christian” movies are not very good. If you want to know why, reading this article is a great start. But to really understand the dynamic of mediocrity in Christian movies and other cultural pursuits, you have to go back to the development of the Christian subculture in the 20th Century.
What exactly is a subculture, and why can it be a bad thing? The basic definition goes something like this: “a cultural group within a larger culture, often having beliefs or interests at variance with those of the larger culture.” And it can be bad because in trying to isolate ourselves from the larger culture ironically we come to be defined by it. The Vox article does a good job of explaining how that happens. The development of the Christian sub-culture is a long, complicated story, and we can only very thinly scratch the surface in a blog post.
It is kind of difficult for 21st Century Christians to imagine how difficult a time it was for thinking Christians in the early 20th Century when by all outward appearances America seemed like a predominantly Protestant Christian country. We seem to be in a much more precarious position today, but looks can be deceiving. The story starts with what came to be called “The Enlightenment” (there were actually many Enlightenments), which of course tells us supposedly how unenlightened everything was that came before. This brought a sea change in Western thought, and runs roughly from the later 1600s to the early 1800s; where once God and divine revelation in scripture were the driving force of intellectual and cultural life, autonomous reason became the ultimate arbiter in the search for truth. Cultural elites saw this as an opportunity finally break free from the dogma and tradition of the Church.
The rise of science, driven by Christians in the middle ages, eventually led to Newton, whose physics became the dominant paradigm of the age; the universe, now demystified, was seen as a mechanical object to be manipulated to man’s ends. Science slowly displaced religion as the driving narrative of society, especially among Western cultural elites. It wasn’t long until a Deist God emerged, one who created everything, and like a clockmaker let it all run on its own, no divine intervention needed. Such a world of course needed its own creation story, and Genesis just wouldn’t do, so Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was a perfect fit.
Since the Bible no longer provided the foundational worldview of Western culture, by the middle of the 19th Century someone like Karl Marx could develop a theory of dialectical materialism which imbued reality with a force that made God superfluous. Very long story short, out of this mix rose German higher criticism which treated the Bible as just another man made historical artifact to be explained in purely human terms.
Ideas have consequences, and over time this bubbling cauldron of intellectual foment made the biblical view of reality less and less plausible for many people; if we can effectively explain everything in natural, material terms the supernatural becomes superfluous. This is the zeitgeist that confronted Christians as the 1900s dawned. As a result many Christian denominations, those we now call mainline, embraced the social gospel, where the concern for the material welfare of people overtook the concern for their eternal souls. This “liberal Christianity” eschewed orthodoxy and completely embraced science and reason as the ultimate authority and pathway to truth.
I didn’t realize what an existential challenge this was to orthodox Christians until I read a biography of J. Gresham Machen, the founder of Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. Machen struggled for years with his faith because he could not honestly reject out of hand the assertions of the higher critics. In due course he overcame his doubts, but the denomination he belonged to, the Presbyterian Church, and the seminary he taught at, Princeton, slowly but surely embrace “liberal Christianity,” and he felt he had no option but to start Westminster.
This is a very simplified version of how the Christian sub-culture got its start. As the broader contours of American culture increasingly embraced the secular, Christians retreated into the relative safety of their own culture: their own schools, entertainment, bookstores, news, radio, TV, and yes, eventually their own movies. The problem with this from a cultural perspective is that Christians don’t have to engage with the best in their respective fields, and worse they end up only communicating with and influencing only other Christians most of the time. For much of the 20th Century Christians lived in their sub-culture, and slowly but surely any Christian influence in the wider culture practically disappeared.
When I became a Christian in 1978 I was “born-again” into this sub-culture, and the Christians I hung around had no interest in “non-spiritual” things which were perceived as unimportant. Going to church, reading the Bible, doing evangelism, etc., these things were deemed important, everything else not so much. Fortunately somewhere before I graduated from college I read Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who is There, and I would never be the same. God’s truth applies to all of reality, every square inch; there is no secular/sacred dichotomy. Thus we don’t make “Christian movies,” we make movies, period. We engage every art form and every aspect of life for Christ, we embrace and reveal goodness, beauty and truth in everything, and because our God is the creator of the universe we can reflect his glory and excellence in everything we do. Only in this way will we engender respect among non-believers and influence the culture.
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