My Top 5 Christian Films (That Aren’t Really Christian Films)

“I know that lying down on the wet grass is not a normal thing to do … Truth is, uh, I’ve been even more strange than usual lately, haven’t I? It’s God. I have ten thousand engagements of state today, but I would prefer to spend the day getting a wet arse, studying dandelions and marvelling at bloody spiders’ webs … I think [God] found me. Do you have any idea how inconvenient that is, how idiotic it will sound? I’ve a political career glittering ahead of me, and in my heart I want spiders’ webs.”

Amazing Grace (2006)

1)     Amazing Grace (2006)

Amazing Grace isn’t a Christian film. It’s a historical biopic and a political drama.

 

A portrait of William Wilberforce by a German artist called Anton Hickel, apparently.

The film is set in the eighteenth century and follows the career of William Wilberforce and the progress of the abolitionist movement. It’s basically a story about a bunch of young radicals with a righteous cause trying to change the world against seemingly impossible odds; you know how it’s going to end, but that supplies half the fun of getting there. Please don’t be put off by the trailer,¹ which you can immediately tell was made by Americans,² and also behaves as if the whole film were nothing more than an origin story for John Newton’s famous hymn; in reality it’s far more than that. The story is great, the acting is great (the most well-known stars of the film include Michael Gambon as Charles Fox, Toby Jones as the Duke of Clarence, and a before-he-was-famous Benedict Cumberbatch as Pitt the Younger), the aesthetics are great (who doesn’t love a good period costume?³), and the scripting is just so on point: every line is both purposeful and pleasing. The portion I quoted above is quite good, of course, but my favourite line has to be when the Duke of Clarence, speaking in Parliament, describes revolution as a ‘pox’, and Wilberforce answers with, “I bow to my honourable friend’s superior knowledge and experience in all matters regarding the pox.”

2)     Les Miserables (2012)

Les Miserables isn’t a Christian film. It’s a somewhat dark and depressing sung-through musical.

I once came home from a really convicting Bible study in a really intense mood and found my housemates watching Les Mis. Having joined them, I suspect that I may have slightly weirded them out by periodically yelling at Javert for having such terrible theology. But of course, Javert having terrible theology is kind of the whole point. Jean Valjean, on the one hand, understands the gospel: he knows what it is to receive grace, to be blessed without having done anything at all to deserve it, and to live life differently as a result. Javert, on the other hand, cannot even begin to cope with the idea of receiving something he can’t pay the giver back for. His idea of justice has no room for mercy, and so he accepts no mercy himself.

It’s a really moving story (well, except for the love story between Marius and Cosette, which I have absolutely no time for): soaring hope and searing tragedy collapse in on top of each other, and through it all, Jean Valjean is a hero you can really root for. And then of course there’s the music. Do you hear the people sing? Yes, I do, and it’s frankly sensational.⁴

3)     The Prince of Egypt (1998)

The Prince of Egypt isn’t a Christian film. It’s an animated musical hailing from the Renaissance era of American animation⁵ and based, like so many others of its genre, on a well-known traditional story.

The animation is gorgeous: the splitting of the Red Sea is a particular highlight, though there are plenty of stunning visuals throughout the rest of the picture as well, and we also see DreamWorks developing its own unique style, distinct from Disney’s, which colours it as rather a shame that we didn’t get more two-dimensional work from the studio before the rise of CGI. And that soundtrack, gosh, it’s spine-chillingly good. ‘Deliver Us’ and ‘Playing with the Big Boys Now’ and ‘The Plagues’ – all brilliant.⁶ The only thing that ruins it slightly is how theologically clumsy – scratch that, downright wrong – the lyrics of ‘When You Believe’ are. Who knows what miracles you can achieve when you believe somehow you will? Ahem – I think it was God that did the miracles, O Fictionalised Miriam.

The film takes some artistic licence with the original version of the story, as you’d expect from a piece of this genre, so it’s very important not to let it muddy your knowledge of what actually happened: for instance, Moses was in fact raised by his own mother as his wet-nurse, and he doesn’t ever seem to have been ignorant of his Hebrew origins. Plus, the entire brotherly-conflict narrative on which the film hangs is completely invented.⁷ But I hasten to stress that that’s not a problem. I expect the creators of an essentially fictional film to be more interested in good filmmaking than in strict adherence to the source material. I want them to be more interested in good filmmaking than in strict adherence to the source material. Because, as obvious as it sounds, otherwise they’re probably not going to make a very good film, are they?

4)     Ben Hur (1959)

Ben Hur isn’t a Christian film. It’s an epic. A proper epic from the era of proper epics, when films came with an overture and an interval and a sense of genuine grandeur.

The 1959 film was not, of course, the novel’s first outing as a live-action adaptation. This is a poster for the 1899 Broadway production of the story.

The extremely popular book that the film was based on is called Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ, but at least in this version of the film, Jesus is really only a background character. And you never see his face, which I really appreciated as a decision: first off, artistically, it’s more impactful, and second, I’m a bit of a puritan when it comes to the second commandment, and so anything that attempts to actually depict Jesus makes me uncomfortable to say the least.⁸ In Ben Hur, you don’t really see Jesus, you don’t really hear him, and you have to interpret what he’s like from how other people react to him, which I’d say is basically as good as you’re going to get in terms of plausible ways of portraying the ineffably excellent Lord of the universe in the limited and fallible medium of film.

But as I say, the film’s not even about him. It’s about Judah Ben Hur, who goes through an absolute rollercoaster of life experiences that make for some really dramatic (and properly epic) scenes, including a harrowing sea-battle, and of course the famous chariot race, made all the more compelling when you realise that it was all achieved without modern special effects: they are actually driving those chariots, and, fun fact (and sort of a spoiler, I’ll warn you), the bit where Judah gets thrown right over the front of his chariot was a total accident that some lucky cameraman managed to catch.⁹ It’s also about Judah’s childhood-best-friend-turned-sworn-arch-enemy Messala. And it’s about finding out that vengeance isn’t what you needed to make everything better after all.

There’s a nice hint at the gospel in the paralleling of the scene where Jesus gives Ben Hur a drink of water when he’s practically dying of thirst while being marched to work as a galley slave, and the one where Ben Hur tries to give Jesus a drink of water when he’s being marched to the cross, but is prevented. Jesus is the spring of living water, and he gives us life, and there’s no possibility of ever giving him something he needs in return.¹⁰ But as I say, it’s only a hint. You have to know the gospel already to find it.

5)     Luther (2003)

Luther isn’t a Christian film. It’s another historical biopic.

If you’re looking for a balanced and objective portrayal of Martin Luther, Luther isn’t the place to get it. The film turns him into an almost undiluted hero, and of course sweeps On the Jews and Their Lies and his other antisemitic work entirely under the carpet.¹¹ But if you’re looking for a blooming good film, well, you’ve got one.¹² Luther is a story about a man who starts a revolution almost accidentally, and then finds that revolution spiralling out of his control. It’s about how deep people will go in corruption and falsehood and abuse of the weak in order to hold onto their power, and it’s about how they can nonetheless never succeed in silencing the truth. It’s beautifully scripted and acted. And I suppose it does actually articulate the substance of the gospel once or twice. Perhaps it really is a Christian film after all.

To be fair, I never specified any criteria for what counts as a Christian film and what doesn’t. Maybe, when it comes down to it, I don’t believe there’s actually any such thing as a Christian film. The point of a film is to tell a story. Some films tell stories that align more closely with a Christian worldview than others. But if a film makes it its mission to privilege the perpetuation of a Christian message over the creation of a compelling piece of cinema, I’m not sure that makes it a Christian film. I think probably, as I also alluded to under The Prince of Egypt above, it just makes it a bad one.

The point of a film is to tell a story. It isn’t to tell the truth. The Prince of Egypt’s artistic licence, Luther’s whitewashing of its title character – they’d be crimes in a courtroom, but in cinema they’re just part and parcel of the process, because each film is telling a particular story, and in that story, there isn’t room for everything that’s true. If you want to communicate a message to someone – if there’s something important that you want her to know – you don’t make a film about it. You just tell her, plainly. You make a film, on the other hand, because you want to tell a story. There’ll be messages somewhere in there, sure – I stand by what I’ve previously argued, that all fiction inevitably encourages its audience to buy into a particular set of ideas¹³ – but they’ll be subtler. There’ll be different ways of reading the thing, different possible emphases. People will be able to draw out all sorts of headcanons and theories and wild implications. Just look at me ravaging the world of secular cinema for analogies by which to better understand God and the gospel.

And that’s the role that I think films can have in the Christian imagination. We can watch them, ‘read’ them, analyse them, critique them, map aspects of them onto the truth of the gospel and note the divergences, find those hints of the gospel and extrapolate them, and in doing so, develop new ways of reflecting on the hope that we have – and maybe new ways of communicating it to others. But the point is not that the motion picture in front of us is a ‘Christian film’, but that, as Christians, we take the gospel wherever we go. We take it into the cinema, and the theatre, and the library, and the virtual world; we carry it in every encounter, every conversation, every moment of private thought; and we don’t engage with anything without engaging the gospel too. The point is not that such-and-such is a ‘Christian film’; the point, adelphoi, is that you, or I, or whichever brother or sister of ours it is, is watching it as a Christian.¹⁴

Footnotes

¹ You can watch it here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6Cv5P9H9qU, but I wouldn’t bother if I were you.

² I hasten to reassure my American friends that I don’t at all mean to imply that all things made by Americans are bad; what I’m getting at is that there’s a particular American mode of making film trailers that basically treats the audience as if they’re stupid and won’t understand what’s happening if there’s any deviation from the expected format. By way of evidence, I submit to you the following Blimey Cow video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g--WPsnqoHA, and as a case-study, the British trailer for The Pirates! In an Adventure, with Scientists, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWOFLtsDvbw, as compared to the American one, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzddJ-yxaqY. You’ll spot that they also renamed the film The Pirates! Band of Misfits for the US market. It’s just depressing.

³ People who are into period costume are fun to follow on YouTube and Instagram. I have recently started following Zach Pinsent, Bernadette Banner, and Karolina Zebrowska. Here’s Ms. Zebrowska’s video ‘100 Years of Beauty – Poland’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrEPujmWufU, which is literally one of my favourite things on the Internet.

⁴ Fancy a rewatch of the ‘One Day More’ scene? Of course you do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv-BxH3SVS8.

⁵ The Disney Renaissance refers to the period between 1989 and 1999, when Disney went back to producing films based on well-known traditional stories, and did extraordinarily well out of it. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that when DreamWorks Animation came on the scene in 1994, they tried the same tack, and it’s for that reason that I don’t mind lumping their stuff together with Disney’s in a broader Renaissance of American animation.

⁶ This scene though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJleW4TCQM0. Chills.

⁷ Don’t take my word for it: check out the story for yourself: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=exodus+2&version=ESVUK.

⁸ You have J. I. Packer to thank for persuading me round to this view a few years ago in his excellent Knowing God: https://www.10ofthose.com/uk/products/1782/knowing-god.

⁹ Here’s the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frE9rXnaHpE.

¹⁰ That’s John 7 I’m alluding to there: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+7&version=ESVUK. Or alternatively John 4, but John 7 seems to me to be less regularly taught, so I thought I’d send you there first.

¹¹ I think Adam4d probably captures the sentiment best: https://adam4d.com/hang-with-martin-luther/. Mind you, I gather Luther was pretty antisemitic during his earlier career as well. Christian antisemitism, I tend to feel, is one of those things that’s kind of so inherently ludicrous – I mean, we literally worship a Jew, where is the logic here?! – that it would be laughable if it hadn’t proved itself so terrifyingly potent over the centuries.

¹² You can actually get the whole thing on YouTube, so that’s nice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAACMptKD-c.

¹³ Check out ‘The Disorientating Nature of La La Land and Life’, under July 2018 in the box on the right, if you want to see me make that case.

¹⁴ And before I go, a tip of the hat to Scripts for helping me out with those Amazing Grace quotations: https://www.scripts.com/script.php?id=amazing_grace_2638&p=4.

Better, Not Back

“It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo – the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end, because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was, when so much bad had happened? … But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come, and when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer.”

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)

The sun shining ... trees will also prove somewhat relevant in a moment.

Samwise Gamge knows a thing or two about how stories work.¹ You’ve got the setup, which tells you The Way The World Is. Then there’s some kind of complication; some threat rises that needs to be dealt with; great demands are made on our heroes that they rise to meet the challenge; a heck lot of bad goes down. And after all that, how can the world go back to the way it was? Well, it can’t. It doesn’t. It isn’t supposed to. All that suffering wins something better than a return to the way things were; it wins victory over the threat. Whereas before evil was just dormant, now it’s defeated. When the shadow has passed, the sun shines out the clearer.

The world didn’t go back to the way it was after the Ring was thrown into Mount Doom and destroyed; it was better, because there was no possibility of anyone ever using the Ring for evil again. The world didn’t go back to the way it was after Voldemort was killed at the Battle of Hogwarts; it was better, because there were no Horcruxes left and no chance that he might return from semi-death as he’d done once before.² The world didn’t even go back to the way it was after the Avengers used actual time travel to snap the half of the universe’s population that had turned to dust back into existence; it was better, because this time around they successfully defeated Thanos. Heavy prices were paid, in all cases, certainly, but the peace they bought in the end was worth more than the peace there was at the beginning, because, as consistently demonstrated, that first peace was susceptible to disruption by evil, whereas the second peace, evil having been permanently dealt with, was not.

Well, not to the same evil, anyway; when we’re talking about fictional realms, there’s almost always room for a sequel where something else goes wrong. But nevertheless, you catch my drift. A happy ending is worth more than a happy beginning, because it involves evil being defeated rather than merely dormant. All the suffering in the middle, grievous as it may have been, turns out to be worth it for the sake of securing that happy ending. Plus, it’s the key vehicle of character development, whereby our heroes actually become heroes rather than merely main characters. In the best stories – or the ones with the most satisfactory endings, anyway – the world doesn’t go back to the way it was. The world going back to the way it was is something that belongs to cartoons and the ilk: things might get pretty crazy within the ten- or twenty-minute runtime of an episode, but they invariably all go back to normal at the end of it, and hence we always know that none of the struggles and successes and sufferings of our poor two-dimensional heroes are ultimately going to have any significance or worth. In the great stories, by contrast, the ones that really matter, the ones that stay with you and mean something, the world doesn’t go back to the way it was; all those struggles and successes and sufferings get to count for something; the cause is won, and the world ends up better.

And so it is too in the greatest story of all.

Has it ever occurred to you that the Garden of Eden wasn’t actually perfect? I mean, I’m sure it was really nice and everything, but let’s be real here, there were some pretty major issues. The fact that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was there at all is an obvious one. Then there was that talking snake going around advocating disobedience of God’s command. And most vitally of all, the human and his wife were of such a disposition as to start thinking that, now you mention it, Mr. Serpent, disobedience sounds like a really great idea.³ When the prospect of immortality is on the table, if you can’t be relied upon to do your job successfully every single time ad infinitum, then sooner or later you’re bound to get it wrong. The fact that the fall happened at all, in other words, proves that it was inevitable. And if the fall was inevitable, then we can hardly say that the original setup was perfect. It wasn’t. Creation wasn’t perfect. Humans weren’t perfect. Eden was the beginning-of-the-story peace, where evil was dormant; it was the equivalent of Bilbo keeping the Ring in an envelope on his mantelpiece, of Voldemort going about currently deprived of physical form and so powerless, of Thanos not having got hold of the infinity stones yet. There might have been peace for the moment, but it was never going to last, not while the potential for evil existed.

 

Of course, the fact that the serpent was cursed to crawl on its belly as a consequence of its deceit makes you wonder what it used to do before that. My personal favourite theory is that it flew. But that’s by the by.

It’s not as if God weren’t aware of that, either – as if he hadn’t ordained it. We know that the cross was always the plan. It was before the foundation of the world that we were chosen to be holy and blameless through the blood of the Lamb who was slain.⁴ That’s the happy ending God’s always had on the agenda. And so it wasn’t some kind of oversight that Eden was corruptible; indeed, it was necessary. The illusory peace at the beginning of the story, followed by the complication and the threat and our heroes’ striving and suffering, is necessary in order to land on the better peace of the happy ending.

And a better peace it is. Eden had two significant trees, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, whereas the new creation will only have one, the tree of life. In Eden, the snake went about telling untruths, whereas nobody who does what is false or detestable shall have a place in the new creation.⁵ The first humans were susceptible to corruption and hence to death, whereas we are to inherit eternal life having been made perfect in Christ – who is God and so incorruptible, and moreover who was made perfect through his human suffering.⁶ As in every story, our hero becomes truly heroic through his persistence in service of good in the face of adversity; Jesus did so perfectly, and we are gifted his virtue as if it were our own, and in order that we might grow into that identity, we share in his sufferings.⁷ Think of it as character development. You don’t emerge from suffering and go back to the way you were; in God’s hands, you emerge from it better – refined like precious metal.

The first humans in Eden could have sung the throne-room song of Revelation 4 – worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honour and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created – but they couldn’t have sung the new song that replaces it in the following chapter: worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth. And then a moment later, worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honour and glory and blessing.⁸ That’s seven things, as opposed to the earlier three. The Son is worthier, more glorious, more excellent and more deserving of devotion, because of what he did for us on the cross. When he died for our sins, he didn’t merely put things back the way they’d been before our first ancestors ate the fruit; he created something better than that. Our first ancestors didn’t even know the difference between good and evil; we are granted to know and love the greatest example of good that there could ever possibly be.

We are not trying to get back to Eden, any more than Frodo and Sam were trying to put the Ring back on Bilbo’s mantelpiece. That was an illusory peace. Where we are heading is so much better. Evil shall be defeated, not merely dormant; there’ll be no possibility that we’ll ever be subject to it again. And the one who defeated it, and through his endurance of suffering in that endeavour was perfected as the best hero of any story ever, will live with us forever and ever. When the shadow of this life and this age is over and God himself shines as our sun, surely, indeed, our sun will shine out so, so much the clearer.

Footnotes

¹ As so often, thanks to Springfield! Springfield! for their extremely useful archive of film scripts: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=lord-of-the-rings-the-two-towers-the.

² Barring – Cursed Child spoilers ahead – mucking about with Time-Turners. Does anyone else feel as if … the Cursed Child reads like fanfiction, or a kind of weird midrash thing trying to account for points of contention and apparent flaws in the original series? Ah well, it’s still a properly stunning bit of theatre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzD3qlnhVZA.

³ I hardly need to tell you that you’re looking at Genesis 2 and 3 for this jazz, but heigh-ho, here’s a link: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gen+2-3&version=ESVUK.

⁴ Ephesians 1:4 and Revelation 13:8, which I’m pretty sure I reference a lot on this blog.

⁵ Check out Revelation 21-22, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rev+21-22&version=ESVUK, one of very few passages in the Bible which actually tells us anything at all about the nature of the new creation.

⁶ Yep, Jesus was perfected; Hebrews 2 and 5 are pretty explicit about that: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Hebrews+5&version=ESVUK. Doesn’t mean there was any flaw in him to start with, but what he went through for us made him yet more excellent than he was.

⁷ There are quite a few places I could have taken you for that, but I’ll give you Philippians 3, because it’s great: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Philippians+3&version=ESVUK.

⁸ Last Bible link for today: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rev+4-5&version=ESVUK.