50 Christian Films - A Response By The Author

Back in mid-September, I wrote a piece for this website entitled 50 Films That You Wouldn€™t Think Were Christian, But Actually Are. In this piece I selected 50 films which I considered to be €˜Christian€™, avoiding more obvious allegories like The Green Mile, and briefly tried to argue the case for each film. The article has proved so popular and so contentious that I feel it only appropriate to address some of the comments made and to explain how my feelings on the matter have changed. I should start by saying a collective €œthank you€ to everyone who has commented on the piece. Some of the comments were offensive, or personal, or sarcastic, but I should have expected that. I was a little naïve, I guess, in expecting that I could write an article about religion and expect to come away unscathed, if that is the appropriate term. It would be easy for me to only thank the people who commented to agree with me, or the people whose comments were erudite or eloquent, but having reflected on the matter I am grateful for everyone who gave me their views. Heck, I€™d rather have 100 people calling me an idiot than to sit there completely ignored out of indifference. In hindsight, I am especially grateful for all the negative feedback. Some of the comments are still painful to read, not because they are especially insulting or hateful, but because they point to errors or mistakes in the article of which I was not aware when I was writing it, but which are now all too plain to see. While I cannot agree with or accept everything that has been said in these comments, there are a number of things about the article which I would have done differently, or which I would alter significantly if I were ever asked to write something along these lines again. For starters, I think I over-stretched myself at 50. Reading back through the article, some of my suggestions were pushing my already-loose definition of €˜Christian€™ to the limit. I will admit that my personal Christian faith is a little unusual, which in turn impacts on the way in which I perceive or understand cinema, and in how I perceive the potentially spiritual aspects of a given offering within the medium. It would have been more sensible to have limited myself maybe to 25, 20 or even 10 films, and presented cases that were longer and more substantial than a hastily composed paragraph. One of the drawbacks of journalism is the speed at which one has to write: what sounds good when it leaves your mouth can quickly look stupid on paper. I also made the mistake of being far too loose in my definition of €˜Christian€™. Rather than laying my cards on the table, and providing some kind of theological check-list of key Christian traits or beliefs, I attempted to crowbar different aspects of Christian imagery or teaching around films which I highly revere. I don€™t think all of my suggestions are spurious or asinine: I think my comments about Superman: The Movie, The Secret Garden and Whistle Down the Wind are mostly if not wholly justified. But others in hindsight were fanciful, if not ridiculous: I over-estimated the potentially spiritual content of The Clonus Horror and Eyes Wide Shut by quite some distance. I think the central and fatal mistake I made was to confuse allegory with imagery. Allegory is defined as €œthe representation of abstract ideas or principles by characters, figures, or events in narrative, dramatic, or pictorial form€, whereas imagery is €œthe use of vivid or figurative language to represent objects, actions, or ideas€. The distinction, as I see it, is one of narrative, and film is by nature a narrative medium as much as it is a visual one. In other words, I jumped to the somewhat irrational conclusion that if a film had a vaguely Christian image somewhere in it, it was automatically a Christian film. This in hindsight was foolish to the point of being insulting. In failing to make this distinction, believing foolishly that I could win the argument simply by stating as many examples as I could, I inadvertently offended a lot of people. In particular, I offended those who claimed that I was imposing Christian imagery or notions of morality on the work of Hayao Miyazaki, implying by extension that all Japanese anime was Christian. This was a terrible oversight and I apologise unreservedly for any offence I may have caused. I had no right to impose such a singular opinion on a culture and area of film which I am just beginning to explore, or to assume that this would be taken as a compliment. There are many different ways of looking at the same thing, and in my desire to express admiration for Miyazaki, I went about it in totally the wrong way. What the experience of this article has taught me is that I cannot be so presumptuous that my reading of an image or story is the correct one based upon my cultural or moral compass. It is arrogant for me to assume that something has to be Christian simply because it fits with my notion of what Christianity is, or might be. It is as arrogant as my opening statement about it being hard to be a Christian in the 21st century €“ another case of poor foresight and unintentional bad taste. I have become more aware of the validity of other interpretations which cast doubt on either my faith or other aspects of my beliefs, whether political, moral or anything else. It is not realistic or sensible for me to try and crowbar everything around a Christian label for convenience: not only is Christ not limited by my feeble conception of Him, but the world in general and film in particular is too multi-layered to restrict myself to such narrow and singular interpretations. For all the mistakes that I made in creating the article, I should state that I don€™t regret writing it. I stand behind the intentions of the article, which was to look at the way in which Christianity (allegory, rather than imagery, as I should have said) seeps through into seemingly secular aspects of filmmaking. I believe in encouraging dialogue about Christ€™s influence in the aspects of our world which we have designated as secular, not to mention through the people who may not recognise Him. This is an area which continues to fascinate me, and will probably continue to do so long after I have become more adept at communicating it. Neither has the stinging criticism of this article caused me to recant my faith and disown the whole project. You won€™t see me changing the name of the article€™s author to Alan Smithee any time soon. Just like any other discipline, writers only get better by people telling them how bad they are. The bad ones will ignore the criticism for fear that it would put them out of their comfort zone. The really bad ones will do this while heaping abuse on their critics. But the good ones will take such criticism on board, make the changes that are deemed necessary and hopefully improve over time. The response to this article took me outside my comfort zone. I had become so used to receiving positive notices for my work, that when the negative stuff came at me, I didn€™t like it. But it€™s exactly what I needed, and I hope that my future contributions to this site will demonstrate some form of improvement. It€™s the same principle with my faith. I wouldn€™t believe in God anything like as strongly as I do today if I wasn€™t in contact with people asking me all the difficult and often nasty questions, for which more often than not I don€™t have an immediately satisfying answer. Whilst I am not encouraging people to send me abusive emails on a daily basis, I am grateful that people took the time to pull me up in areas where I was naïve, or inconsistent, or just downright stupid. I hope that this article has helped to clarify my position and has shed some light on my feelings surrounding the piece. I apologise if there are any glaring issues or mistakes which I have overlooked; please feel free to point them out to me. If it has changed your opinion of me, or of my article, that€™s a nice bonus. But I hope more than anything that it demonstrates that I am more than happy to admit the mistakes I made, and to take your comments forward to become a better writer, for my benefit and for everyone who took the time to read what I had to say. Thank you.