Sermon Tone Analysis

The Movies: Box Office Closed

By Bob Briner

 

Whatever happens, conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.

¾ Philippians 1; 27

 

The movies have made me a better person.

I really believe this.

As it was with many who grew up in the forties and fifties, in those halcyon pre-television days, movies were a big part of my life.

My mother was and is a true fan of the silver screen, and, since I was an only child, the two of us would take in several movies a week during my early childhood.

We often had to sell milk bottles and soft-drink bottles to get bus fare and the price of two tickets, but many summer afternoons found us escaping the Texas heat in a cool, dark theater, often enjoying that bygone two-for-one bargain known as a double feature.

There were even some days, much to my father’s chagrin, that my mother and I would take in two double features in an afternoon—four full-length motion pictures, plus “selected short subjects” in one day!

Not only did Mom and I see many movies during the week, my father almost always took the three of us to a Friday night movie.

Hamburgers, followed by a movie on Friday evening, was as close to being a ritual in my family as anything.

It was, unfortunately, much more regular than church on Sunday.

Because I saw so many movies as a youngster, I can relive much of my childhood through old flicks on television.

And, as I said, I believe I am a better person because of the movies.

In those days, almost every movie extolled virtue.

Good triumphed over evil.

There were absolutes.

There were real heroes.

Respect for women was lauded.

Courage, bravery, and sacrifice were qualities to be praised.

Love of country was promoted.

Helping the underdog was shown to be a noble pursuit.

True romance, extolling fidelity and loyalty, was almost the essence of the movies of that era.

Family life was depicted favorably, even idealized.

Education was shown as a prize to be sought.

Even love for and kindness to animals were regular movie themes.

God, the church, and those who worked for the church were never demeaned, though they usually were not drawn too clearly.

And, once in awhile, the big screen was used to bring powerful messages of God and even of Jesus Christ.

Certainly, /King of Kings /and /The Robe /were the first real, meaningful presentations of Christ and His message that ever impacted my life.

I really believe that it was because of those movies that I was more open and objective when the claims of Christ were presented to me from Scripture.

The movies of my childhood really did make me a better person.

Then something strange happened.

At age thirteen I was attracted (through sports) to a small church nearby, and almost immediately I was cut off from the movies.

All movies.

Even the basically wholesome movies described above were anathema to this church and were all but forbidden to its members.

The winsomeness of the church people and of the Christ preached in their church convinced me “to buy the whole package” and so, reluctantly, I virtually gave up the movies for most of my teenage and college years.

(It is ironic that now, with the movies almost indescribably worse in terms of values they project, this same denomination and its institutions have no hard and fast rules relative to attending the cinema, and most of its members are, one presumes, regular ticket buyers.)

Even though I was cut off from regular Hollywood fare, the big screen continued to demonstrate its attraction and power for me during my teenage years.

In those days, Billy Graham and his organization were producing quality dramatic motion pictures conveying a gospel message.

And they were giving these pictures significant distribution.

Most were shown in regular theaters, using the best available sound and projection equipment.

When a new Billy Graham picture opened in town, it was a big deal, particularly for the young people of a church that forbade them to go to Hollywood movies.

To take a girl to the premiere of a Billy Graham film was the biggest date of the year for many Christian teenagers.

In addition, many churches used the attractiveness of these films as one of their major evangelistic outreaches.

The idea, and a good one, was for church members to invite their friends, who might never go with them to church, to have a night out with them at the movies.

In the neutral setting of a movie theater, a quality motion picture would present the claims of Christ in a dramatic way.

It was a good idea.

Unfortunately, Billy Graham’s motion picture efforts came at a time when there was no after-market in television and~/or video­cassette distribution available to either extend the reach or help defray the production costs.

It has now been many years since the last Graham film was released.

And, more unfortunately, even tragically, Graham’s efforts were the last regular quality effort of the church to use this powerful, important, uniquely American medium to bring the salt of the Gospel to the world.

There are now almost no lambs roaring in Hollywood and anything close to a Christian message or theme rarely appears on the screens of the thousands of movie theaters across the country.

The Christian church, which had some time ago abandoned the motion picture industry as a place of ministry and outreach, now, for all practical purposes, abandoned the medium itself as a way to communicate the message of Christ to the world at large.

When the church and its people are absent, when there is no preserving salt and no roaring lambs, the same thing always happens.

It is just as sure as a law of physics.

‘When a vacuum is created, it is always filled.

When good departs, evil always fills in behind it.

If you remove the salt, the meat spoils.

It rots.

This is what happened to the movies.

To think that my children and grandchildren could be better people by ingesting a steady diet of movies today the way I did as a child would be ludicrous.

Once again, Christians left the scene, and, again, the scene was an important one.

The movies continue to play a big part in how America thinks and in what the world thinks about America.

The power of the silver screen is still there, but it is just not a power for good and right.

Michael Medved, the respected movie critic, host of /Sneak Preview /on PBS, and author of the recently released /Hollywood vs. America, /says that there is a definite antireligion bias in Hollywood.

In his now-famous lecture at Hillsdale College, Medved cited many instances when movie makers went out of their way, i.e., spent lots of their own money, to blast religion and religious values.

To make his point, he noted that almost none of the really religiously offensive films did anything but lose money for their producers.

These include such notorious bombs as /The Last Temptation of Christ, Monsignor, Agnes of God, The Runner Stumbles, True Confessions, Mass Appeal, /and /The Mission.

/By con­trast, films that in many ways conveyed a positive look at religion and religious values found large audiences and made much more money.

Those cited include /Chariots of Fire, Tender Mercies, The Trip to Bountiful, Witness, /and /A Cry in the Dark.

/Medved concludes that the moguls in Hollywood are so biased against religious values that they are ready to put significant amounts of money behind their beliefs.

He says,

 

Why hasn’t Hollywood /gotten/ the message?

The one thing this industry is supposed to be able to do is to read the bottom line.

Why, then, do savvy producers continue to authorize scores of projects that portray religious leaders as crazed conspiratorial charlatans, when similar films have failed so conspicuously in the past?

It is hard to escape the conclusion that there is a perverse sort of idealism at work here.

For many of the most powerful people in the entertainment business, hostility to traditional religion goes so deep and burns so intensely that they insist on expressing that hostility even at the risk of commercial disaster.

In this context, Medved cites the 1985 /King David /production, which cost $28 million to produce and attracted less than $3 million in ticket sales.

This film advanced the totally unsupported conclusion that the biblical king rejected God at the end of his life.

Medved gives this account of an interview he conducted on the film:

 

A few weeks before the film’s release, one of the people who created it spoke to me proudly of its “fearless integrity” “We could have gone the easy way and played to the Bible belt,” he said, “but we wanted to make a tough, honest film.

We don’t see David as a gung-ho, Praise-the-Lord kind of guy.

We wanted to make him a richer, deeper, character.”

In his mind, in other words, secure religious faith is incompatible with depth of character.

For our purposes here, the /most/ germane and compelling words of Medved’s powerful lecture are these: “It’s easy for most movie makers to assume a patronizing attitude toward religiously committed people because they know so few of them personally.

If most big-screen images of religious leaders tend to resemble Swaggart or Bakker, it’s because evangelists on television are the only believers who are readily visible to the members of the film colony.”

(Interested readers can obtain a complete copy of Medved’s lecture by writing to Imprimis, Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan 49242.

It is an important document and well worth having).

What Medved is saying is /that/ since there are so few Christians in the Hollywood film industry, can we blame the moviemakers for their errors when they try to portray religious faith?

We’ve left the interpretation of our faith, our church, and our Savior up to non-Christians.

Is it their fault if they almost always get it wrong?

Is it their fault if Swaggart and Bakker are the primary models they have for Christian characters in their films?

The answer, I believe, is obvious.

We left, and the world is paying a significant price for our abdication.

Remember, twenty million people go to the movies each week in America alone.

Millions more see movies on television and cassettes.

Only very rarely do they see anything that points them to Christ.

Our fault.

Typically, but unfortunately, our response to the sacrilege and blasphemy of modern movies is to whine, demonstrate, boycott, and keep score.

Again, as with television, we have almost no alternatives to offer.