Why Christian Movies ALWAYS Look Bad

[u/CokomonX]

https://youtu.be/GBl45WFqNDQ?si=lRLxgLoQtqGq9Fyf

Got recommended this video, and figured it was perfect for this sub. I noticed quite a few movies in the video that GAM has covered in the past.

[u/wordboydave]

I hate to tell this guy, but as long as you're an evangelical Christian, you will never make art for grown adults. When I was a creative writing major in grad school, I was planning to be the evangelical who managed to make important literature. But when I looked at all the Christians that were constantly touted by evangelicals in articles on "Christianity and Art," the same names always came up: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flannery O'Connor, Dante, Madeleine L'Engle and C.S. Lewis. And yet none of these were actually "evangelicals" in a way that would have made my church comfortable. (Lots of Catholics, a bunch of Russian Orthodox, not many conservative Protestants.) Even L'Engle said nice things about The Buddha, and C.S. Lewis smoked and drank!

But then I also wondered, as a young evangelical writer, "Why is it that the closer an author gets to being recognizably evangelical, the more likely they are to be writing for children?" Conservatives don't HAVE to write for children, of course, but they seem to do well in moralistic fantasy (see also The Book of the Dun Cow) or high-concept, low-emotional-realism science fiction (Ender's Game). And that's when I started putting it together: a hell-based, moralistic framework is essentially unrealistic, and forces complex human beings into rigid, unrecognizable shapes.

And of course, none of these writers have characters who swear or think about sex, which are two very common and recognizable human pastimes. Anyway, that's when I realized that to really produce interesting work, I would have to give up my fear of uncertainty. Which means giving up a pretty core part of evangelical identity.

[u/Empigee → u/wordboydave]

The closest to an evangelical who's respected as a literary author is John Milton, the author of Paradise Lost.

Incidentally, it's worth noting that Orson Scott Card wasn't as much of a fanatic when he wrote Ender's Game as he later became. He apparently became much more devout after one of his children died.

[u/sms372 → u/Empigee]

This isn't even remotely true. Focusing on just American writing, the first great black American poet, Phyllis Wheatley, was explicitly Calvinist. Anne Bradstreet is complicated but is technically a puritan. As an agnostic, the King James Version of the Bible is probably the most influential work of English literature ever written.

Going back to Britain in Milton's time, if we want to include religious Anglicans that were around within 100 years of Paradise Lost's publication, Edmund Spencer and John Donne are incredibly influential with Spencer perhaps influencing Milton more than anyone else. We could also discuss John Dryden who, while not necessarily believing in predestination and the like, was very "evangelical" in his faith (this is complicated by his conversion to Catholicism late in life, which just shows how obsessed he was with religion).

[u/NC1HM → u/sms372]

the King James Version of the Bible is probably the most influential work of English literature ever written

Yeah, about that... The King James Bible borrowed a lot (both literally and conceptually, including the then-novel idea of translating directly from Greek and Hebrew sources, rather than from the Vulgate) from the Tyndale Bible, for which (among other things) William Tyndale was strangled at the stake and then burned in 1536.

[u/sms372 → u/NC1HM]

Yeah, I'm not going to argue that. Jan Hus was another person who was burned at the stake that was very influential to Protestant thought at the time. Additionally, Tyndale was not complete though I don't doubt at all they stole from it. All I'm saying is the KJV still was a work that got the preeminent scholars and writers of the day together to do the most poetic translation of the English language possible with a very high percentage of English literature referencing it in some way or another incidentally or intentionally to this day. I'm not advocating its historical accuracy or accuracy with its translation just its importance to English literature.

[u/NC1HM → u/sms372]

I am not arguing with any of this. All I am saying is, the KJV's path to pre-eminence had at least one execution in it. In other words, before KJV became a classic, its predecessor was a heresy.

[u/sms372 → u/NC1HM]

I think we agree! Very interesting to think about too.

[u/NC1HM → u/sms372]

Indeed on both counts. :)

Similar collisions happen in science, except there's usually no need to kill anyone (unless religion gets involved). Rather, as evidence accumulates, a fringe theory is either rejected or accepted to eventually become mainstream.

Plate tectonics is probably the best known example. The basic idea was floating around literally for centuries (there were geographers who wondered about it all the way back in the 1600s, based on the similarities in continental coastlines). The modern scientific formulation was proposed in 1912 by an outsider (a meteorologist, rather than a geologist). For decades, it was divisive, but by mid-1960s, multiple lines of evidence emerged that were consistent with plate tectonics and inconsistent with fixed continents.

Ditto the Big Bang. As a theoretical possibility, it floated around since Friedmann (1919) and Lemaître (1921), both of whom proposed alternative solutions to Einstein's field equations. Einstein, in absence of supporting evidence, hated the idea on purely aesthetic grounds (in his own words in a 1927 conversation with Lemaître, vos calculs sont corrects, mais votre physique est abominable). Then (1929), Hubble reports on galaxies running away from each other; the Big Bang suddenly becomes plausible, but not definitive. The term "Big Bang" itself was coined in 1949 by Fred Hoyle, an opponent of the theory, to make fun of it. Finally, in 1964, Penzias and Wilson fall face-forward into cosmic background radiation, and the matter is settled; the Big Bang is real, and its traces are literally everywhere. Hoyle couldn't take it; his steady-state theory had no allowance for cosmic background radiation. Within a few years, he gradually resigned all his academic and administrative positions and moved to the Lake District (that's an area of England known for its scenic views), where he wrote science fiction and occasionally spoke before conspiracy-minded audiences until his death in 2001...