Mixed Feelings

I will clarify my feelings about PureFlix:

The idea that anti-Christian sentiment is behind the mixed feelings is a misunderstanding. It wasn’t because I don’t like films to mention faith, but rather that, as a person faith (former evangelical, now Catholic), I care deeply about how I see faith presented.

My concern was less that a Christian filmmaking company was working on the film than that Pureflix in particular had the job. My opinion has been that they do poor characterization. I want to see real, complex three-dimensional human beings who are Muslim and atheist and Christian, all of them with their virtues and flaws and doubts and everything that colors in our humanity. Not stock people. That’s not what I see when I go out into the real world and so it feels to me like characters like that are written to make life’s narrative simpler.

A lot of these beliefs also come because Rachel Joy Scott deeply inspired me during my high school years. At the time, I had never known another Christian who simply befriend people and tried to understand them, not as potentials for conversion, but as actual people. I am heartened to hear from other reviewers that the film is more akin to a “film about a Christian girl” than a “Christian film” and that her struggles and darker moments are indeed portrayed (as I had worried they would be sanitized out of the film).

For example, PureFlix was behind the film God’s Not Dead and I had a lot of problems with the film.

For instance, I did not like it’s treatment of Muslims. The father character was said to mention how, to paraphrase, “nobody worships God the way he demands” which struck me as something very similar to how conservative Christians feel and we have so much in common with being monotheistic religions that revere God the Creator and Abraham as their father in faith; Jesus is considered a great prophet in the Qur’an; Mary, his Mother, as the mother of a prophet. When I think of the Muslim people, I think of people who sincerely seek God and follow the voice of their conscience. But the film had this stereotypical view of a Muslim father kicking his daughter out of their home after she admits to converting to Christianity. The father is shown to grieve his decision, though not relent, but it struck me as odd because I know that most parents raising their children in the Christian faith wouldn’t respond well. I had a coworker and friend of mine whose parents kicked him out when he came out to them as gay and it was their Christian faith that compelled them to do so. Any faith or viewpoint be can be used to drive a wedge between people. So I felt curious as why the filmmakers felt the need to perpetuate Islamophobic stereotypes. After all, these characters were the only representations of Muslims in the film and only the converted Christian is painted in a positive light.

I also felt disquieted in how the atheist characters were treated. Something that I enjoy is reading the writings of atheists who used to be Christian and their explaining why they deconverted, what their problems with the church are, and so forth. (Godless in Dixie is one of my favorite blogs and the author felt near exactly the same way I did about God’s Not Dead and while we obviously come to different conclusions about the existence of God, I think he has many insights worth wrestling with and we have a lot of the same attitudes toward life, such as the belief that atheists and Christians are really more alike than different and that we could be allies in terms of wanting to good in the world, having positive friendships, and so forth, de-emphasizing that sense of “otherness.” I also like talking to my friends who are atheists and they talk about why they don’t believe, what teachings they may have problems with, or whatever. One of such friends is remarkably intuitive and eloquent. None of them are people like the Professor who just want to argue people out of faith or the reporter who seem to pick on religious people for gratification. As the film continued, it bothered me how the atheist characters were treated. The reporter had cancer and no support and my personal impression was that the film seemed to be all “That’s what you get.” I didn’t feel like the film had real empathy for her character and it seemed more like a way to convert her and then we all get to pat ourselves on the back like we were proven right. The professor was just killed and his death was shown from four different camera angles like it was supposed to be a cool action sequences. Others apparently perceived it differently, but I did not sense like the filmmakers had any actual sympathy for the professor at his death. Nor do I believe that Christians would accept it if a film presented a judgmental holier than thou Christian who died at the end of the film, even if they learned a valuable life lesson right before they croaked. I also know that if I were an atheist and this is how I saw myself represented in Christian media, I would be deeply frustrated. I would feel caricatured and like these people who want to convert me don’t even really know me or, apparently, care to.

But I don’t believe in that. My conviction is that the main virtue and goal of a Christian is to love. I think it is a disservice to my faith to make a group “other” because they are atheist, Muslim, gay, or any other label. I think it is a disservice to Jesus Christ if I don’t’ see the dignity and humanity in every single person. I believe that when you encounter God you feel *seen* and loved. My feelings at the time was that God’s Not Dead was not a movie that taught us how to love our neighbor. It didn’t encourage us to have a dialogue and love each other. It was just another movie about how Christians have to worry about godless people who want to persecute us.

This concerned me about PureFlix doing Rachel’s movie because Rachel was someone who professed to virtues of friendship and compassion, forgiveness, love, helping others and doing acts of kindness, standing up for what is right, showing mercy, seeing the best in others. I believe you cannot promote these values while also holding up the common bogeymen that haunt Christian movies (atheists, liberals, etc) and I wasn’t convinced that PureFlix wouldn’t find a way to work it in somehow.

My belief is just the culture war is dead (if you want it). We don’t need to be red state vs. blue state, Christian vs atheist, etc. I feel like there are people in both camps who benefit from seeing that war narrative continue, but as I am in the Christian camp, that is the one that I speak up about. And so I challenge what stories we tell ourselves. And I feel deep concern that the stories PureFlix tell (possibly not I’m Not Ashamed from reviews) can make us fear instead of love and that isn’t the heart of my faith.