The Problem with Christian Films

The problem with Christian films is the same as with Christian music: If you're going out of your way to make specifically Christian entertainment, you're already handicapping the product you're making by limiting what it can be.

Hollywood doesn't make Secular movies. They make movies, which are usually secular but not always; depending on the needs of the story. So you can have a film like Raiders of the Lost Ark, about a guy hunting down a religious artifact which (spoiler alert!) ends up killing Nazis through the power of God (or something), and where even the Nazis believed the Ark was powerful. Yet nobody considers that a religious movie. It was just a movie. And if a Christian film were truly good, they wouldn't need to call it a Christian movie. It'd just be called a movie.

But by qualifying a film by saying it's Christian, you're basically admitting that it's not good enough to stand up against real movies, but that it's a special kind of movie and can therefore be forgiven for not being on par with the films Hollywood produces. Instead, it's about letting a certain kind of Christian know that this is a film that will make them feel better about themselves for being religious. And that merely by removing religious references, they'd no longer be interested in it.

And well, if that's what you want. Fine. Whatever floats your boat. But you've got to understand that the reason others hate it isn't necessarily because they hate religion (though that's true for some), but that the Christian references don't improve the film for them at all and might even be distracting, and so they're left with a film that really isn't that good. Because frankly, it sounds like this film could just as easily have been about Santa Claus merely by changing the names, and I'm sure the people who liked it would have liked it less had they done so. It'd have just been yet another of those terrible Hallmark TV Christmas movies that people watch when they want something inoffensive and don't really know what they're doing.

And if you disagree, ask yourself: If this was a film about Santa and a Christian pastor being skeptical about villagers who thought Santa would grant them a miracle, would you have liked it just as much? Or did the references to God make it better than if it had been yet another Santa film? Because if it's the God stuff that made you like it better, then you should understand why others disagree. It's not that we hate you or your religion. It's that it wasn't a good movie, and that you're just predisposed towards liking it.