"Can Jesus Save Hollywood?"

The latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly -- a great magazine, by the way -- has an article by the Washington Post's Hannah Rosin, "Can Jesus Save Hollywood?"  (ADDED NOTE: I forgot to say that the whole article is available to subscribers only; but pick up the issue at the newsstand, as the whole issue is well worth reading.)  The subject is how conservative Christians in Hollywood are moving from (1) outliers to freaks to (2) a noticeable sub-culture, especially as studios got more interested in "religious/moral" projects after 9/11, to (3) simply people who are working in the industry trying to make good films that reflect their worldview without making it the dominant subject of the film.  The focus of her story is on the meetings of Act One, "a Los Angeles program for aspiring Christian screenwriters," where "Bibles are as visible as the hundreds of videos lying around in stacks and on bookshelves, many of which conservative Christians would never let their children watch (American Beauty, Being John Malkovich, The Sopranos, Will & Grace)," and where "Mel Gibson's Jesus gazes down from a movie poster on the wall":

[This] generation makes up the third [wave of Christians in Hollywood as described above]. "They have no interest in this conversation" about how one reconciles one's Christianity with Hollywood, Nicolosi told me. "They think it's like asking why a Latino or a gay person should be in Hollywood." You can see the shape of this emerging generation of Christians in the hundreds of applicants to Act One: a pastor's wife and former teen country singer who wants to write "culture shaping, commercially successful TV shows and films"; an evangelical marooned at Harvard; a woman who used to work in the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. This generation grew up worshipping God and Quentin Tarantino (the latter sometimes secretly). They are the cinematic wing of what the sociologist Alan Wolfe calls the "opening of the evangelical mind," a cultural renaissance among conservative Christians. Though their parents may have taught them to take refuge in a parallel Christian subculture, the movies these people found in Christian bookstores bored and embarrassed them. To be accepted at Act One you have to believe that Jesus is a real presence in your life. But the worst insult you can deliver there is to say that a movie reminds you of such notoriously low-budget Christian schlock as the Left Behind series and The Omega Code, or that the dialogue sounds like "Christianese."

Rosin's pictures of the emerging attitude of younger conservative Christians in the film industry parallels what I know about the move by many in the same generation away from 70s- or 80s=style "contemporary Christian music" and into a broader and more subtle engagement with the pop music world.  Those of us who write about the relationship of Christianity and law, politics, and culture should be aware of developments like this, for they may be the model for how Christians relate to the culture in the next generation or two (and they may govern for lots of young Catholics as well as young evangelical Protestants).

There's a lot to be said, of course, for getting away from the cultural separatism, from the cultural separatism, and from the stereotype that a Christian film is limited to Christian subjects like demons or the end of the world (!).  At the same time, I think that Christian filmmakers had better have a continuing interest in the question "how one reconciles one's Christianity with Hollywood."  There's too much of a danger in any industry -- whether it's Hollywood, investment banking, or legal academia -- of being coopted by values of making money or enjoying success, of treating people as means to these other ends, of giving the audience what it wants, etc., for anyone to ignore the "how do I reconcile?" question for any length of time.

Tom