A great take on what the movie didn’t cover:
In Unbroken (released this Christmas), Jolie got all the big cinematic elements in: Louie’s wayward youth, his Olympic glory, his harrowing 47-day ordeal at sea during World War II, his bitter imprisonment in Japanese POW camps and, most critically, his battle of wills with the sadistic guard known as “The Bird.”
And yet the movie stopped just when Louie’s life was getting interesting.
A year ago I read a story about how a former Seventh-Day Adventist pastor was going to try out atheism for a year, see what it was like to live without God. And to no one’s surprise after this year he’s declared himself an atheist. If someone is inclined to try on atheism, chances are their belief in God is already lost. Given the larger currents of American culture it’s not surprising that some people see God as implausible.
In 1967 sociologist Peter Berger wrote a book called The Sacred Canopy in which he described the idea of a plausibility structure, or something that seems true to a person. Whether it is true or not isn’t the point; the person may think sincerely what they believe is true, but they tend to think it’s true more based on it seeming plausible to them than on evidence. American and Western culture make belief in God less plausible, make God seem more like Santa Clause than the eternal creator and ruler of the universe. Why is this?
Unless children have a strong religious presence in the home (Notre Dame professor, sociologist and author Christian Smith has found through very extensive research that the religious orientation of the parents is the number one factor in whether children grow up to embrace religion or not), they will be influenced by an education system where under the guise of secularism God is persona non grata, and if they go to a typical college or university, they may get open hostility to God, as I did as an undergraduate at Arizona State. God is also typically not a big topic in Hollywood or entertainment in general, unless of course you are a Woody Allen fan (his latest Magic in the Moonlight was the most overt in your face metaphysical fight he’s had with himself in a movie yet), and American media in general is devoid of God as well.
So for many Americans these cultural influences build in them a plausibility structure where God is irrelevant if he even exists at all. Although I’ve been a Christian for a very long time, in my 40s I went through a bit of a plausibility structure crisis. I don’t call it a crisis of faith because believing that God doesn’t exist is simply impossible for me. I know deeply in my being what the Apostle Paul states in Romans 1, that “God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.” Everything in the universe shouts, God! I could no more doubt his existence than I could doubt my own existence.
Yet, I could see how others could see this God thing as kind of strange. You could probably say I could relate to someone like this newly minted atheist. But something changed for me several years ago when for Lent instead of giving something up I decided to commit to reading the Bible and praying every day. I haven’t done this perfectly, but it’s been pretty close. Then two or three years ago I found the Apologetics 315 website and started availing myself of all the apologetics resources there, especially MP3s I could download to my player and listen in the car or while I walked. I also started reading books defending the Christian faith. I’ve been amazed that even though I’ve known this all along, that God has given us an incredible amount of evidence for the veracity of Christianity.
Which leads me to a trope many modern atheists use in their polemics against Christianity. They are fond of saying that Christians believe what they believe in spite of the evidence, which is how they define faith. Nothing could be further from the truth. Biblically defined faith is having enough evidence to trust in the character of God, to believe in him, not just that he exists. Christian faith depends on evidence. Even a cursory reading of the Gospels makes this clear. When Jesus rose from the dead he showed himself to his disciples, ate with them, and famously invited the doubting Thomas to touch his wounds. Reading Acts and the other New Testament letters makes it even clearer.
Actually from the very beginning, God has been a God of evidence. I’ve found it interesting as I’ve been reading and writing my way through the Bible that God revealed himself to his people via physical manifestations, over and over again. He never asked the people of Israel to trust in him because he demanded it, but encouraged them to trust him, to have faith in him because of what he showed them, or the evidence. Read the Pentateuch sometime and see what I mean.
I recently read a book by Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek called I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, and immediately thought of the book when I read the piece about this newly minted ex-pastor atheist. He says:
I’ve looked at the majority of the arguments that I’ve been able to find for the existence of God, and on the question of God’s existence or not, I have to say I don’t find there to be a convincing case, in my view. I don’t think that God exists. I think that makes the most sense of the evidence that I have and my experience.
I’ve always thought that atheists do what they accuse Christians of doing, believing in spite of the evidence. I think a careful read through the Geisler and Turek book would likely fill this new atheist with profound doubts about his new-found faith.
Now having seen Unbroken for myself, I can see what the reviewer was talking about that I linked to in my previous piece from Christianity Today. The problem the author had comes from the tagline, “Survival. Resilience. Redemption.” The movie focuses 99% of its time on the first two, and some words on the screen at the end of the movie about the third. Certainly as Christians we would have made a different movie and given “Redemption” much more screen time, especially because it was the gospel preached by Billy Graham that changed Louis Zamperini’s life.
This as I say in my piece is why we need more directors and writers and producers who work in and are well respected in Hollywood and can get hired to do the work. But in another way, there has been some progress in the way Hollywood portrays religion, especially Christianity, because conservative Christians, be they protestants or Catholics, are a very large portion of the American population and thus bring a lot of spendable dollars to the table. When Christians are respected, they vote with those dollars, and when they are not they spend those dollars elsewhere.
John Nolte at Big Hollywood shows how this is playing out with two movies currently in theaters, Unbroken and Exodus. Through yesterday Unbroken has earned almost as much at the box office as Exodus although it’s only been in the theaters since Christmas and Exodus since December 12. The reason? Exodus, directed by atheist Ridley Scott completely distorted the Biblical message, as did the movie Noah earlier this year. Both movies earned a fraction of what was expected. With Unbroken, although not the movie I and many Christians would have made, religion was treated respectfully throughout. As the title of Nolte’s piece puts it, “If you respect the faithful, the faithful will come.” Angelina Jolie did, and they are coming.
Why is it that big budget movies based on Biblical stories are directed by atheists, like Noah and Exodus: God and Kings? Or movies with Christian themes targeting large audiences, like Unbroken, are directed by those who don’t embrace the Christian message? The answer goes back quite a ways, but the simple answer is that there are no Christian directors with the experience and credibility to get such jobs in Hollywood. No wonder Christians get frustrated by such portrayals of their faith.
Back in the early 20th Century when historic orthodox Christianity was on the defensive, conservative Christianity and its followers decided to withdraw from American culture. Some just decided to practice their faith in private while others decided to create a Christian counter culture which had no influence on the wider culture. For those of us who are passionate about Christian cultural engagement, it is easy to sit in judgment of believers in that time, but the situation is not so simple.
A large portion of the then dominate Church, as seen in what we call the mainline denominations, began to embrace the assumptions and conclusions of what is called higher criticism. For them the Bible was just another historical, man-made document, which meant that what we see as miraculous, like the virgin birth and the incarnation, or the resurrection, were no longer considered historically viable. Any miracles in the Bible were simply made up by either the deluded or the delusional.
It wasn’t until I read not too long ago a biography of J Gresham Machen that I realized how difficult a time that was for thinking orthodox Christians, which means Christians who care if their faith is demonstrably true. Simple answers like just believe, or believe because you were born into a Christian family are simply not good enough. Machen himself, the founder of Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, which broke from Princeton Seminary over these issues, went through a significant crisis of faith. With the explosion of apologetic resources today, I’m confident Machen would never have gone through such a crisis today. Once he overcame that crisis, he felt he had no choice but to break from Princeton, which became part of a lager movement of orthodox Christians disengaging from the increasingly hostile American culture.
Fortunately in the middle of the 20th Century, some Christians began to realize that cultural engagement and bringing God’s truth to bear upon all of reality was not an option for the follower of Christ. Such thinkers as C.S Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, and Carl F. H. Henry, the first editor of Christianity Today, among others, began to break out of the Christian cultural ghetto. The Christian right that came alive in the late 1970s was another manifestation of this desire to make their cultural voice heard, even if it too often confused politics with genuine cultural engagement.
Today conservative Christians are as culturally engaged as at anytime in the last one hundred years, but the Church has a very long way to go. If we ever want to truly compete for the hearts and minds of the American people, a large portion of this battle must be done in the broader culture. Christians need to do better at telling stories and raising up story tellers who can compete at the highest level in Hollywood, which is every bit the mission field as that of far away continents or inner cities in America. Christian entertainment often comes off as cheesy or preachy, and that simply has to change. Competing in Hollywood based on excellence is where Christians need to be, so that sometime in the future, Christian directors and writers and producers can tell Biblical stories, faithfully.
My first Engage the Culture Christmas wish. I often think that even though Christianity is on the retreat in American culture, it is amazing that during this season the name of Christ is everywhere, whether he is believed to be Lord and Savior or not. The wish of many secularists to turn this into a holiday devoid of Christ is simply not possible. For those of us who believe, we can take comfort that Jesus will always be the reason for the season, and we can proclaim that Christ the Savior is born!
The demise of Christianity as a cultural force is overstated even if the Christian faith is no longer ascendant. A wonderful piece in First Things argues that that American people for the most part still get it:
A recent Pew study has found that instead of being at war with Christmas, Americans love it. Three-quarters of Americans believe that Jesus was born to the Virgin Mary, and that angels appeared to shepherds to tell them that the Savior would be born in Bethlehem. Over 80 percent of Americans believe Luke’s account that Jesus was laid in a manger. The study found that about 65 percent believed in all the historical aspects of the Nativity—about the same percentage who will attend church this Christmas.
Of course, these statistics can be misleading. They don’t tell us whether people really believe in the Incarnation. They don’t tell whether all this Christmas cheer is manufactured by moral therapeutic deism, or simply the gods of commerce. But the statistics do tell us something. Namely that, when pressed, Americans don’t think that Christmas is about Santa, snowmen, talking reindeer, or even shopping. Americans aren’t terribly reflective about what they believe about Christmas, but they are certain that it celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ to a virgin in Bethlehem roughly 2,014 years ago.
The angel of the Lord appeared to stunned Joseph, Mary’s betrothed, in a dream to tell us what this season is really all about:
“Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”
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