Defacing the Giants: A Journey through Christian Cinema

By Jonathan Strawn

Even before I started a podcast reviewing Christian movies, I had seen what might amount to an unusually large number of Christian movies.  Going to a private Christian high school, attending church youth groups regularly in the 1990s, and having grandparents who were missionaries all put me in a lot of circumstances where someone would pop in a VHS with a “Worldwide Pictures” or similar logo on the box.  When the films would end, there would often be an uncomfortable moment when the person who put the movie on asked me what I thought of it.

“Interesting” was a common answer.

After one low budget post-apocalyptic altar-call too many, I did my best to avoid Christian movies.  Then one sunday at church one of the men in our bible study pulled me aside.  He was a friend of my parents and leader in my church and he had an urgent message.  Knowing that I was the “movie guy” getting a film degree from the local university, he asked me if I had seen Facing the Giants. I had to see it, he said; it would “change my life.”

My lifelong friend Don attends my church and shares my love of movies.  We attended the same school and endured many of the same Christian movies foisted upon us in Bible classes or church groups.  So we took notice when there was a lot of buzz in our church and in the Christian press about the success and quality of Facing the Giants. There seemed to be a rising tide of Christian movies.  We started talking about these movies and the universally positive words we were hearing from other members of our church, and suddenly we hit upon what we thought was a million-dollar idea: to start a podcast giving a frank look at Christian movies without cutting slack for good intentions. Maybe even in 2007 podcasts were no longer cutting edge and were quickly becoming over-saturated.  Even so, we knew of few quality Christian podcasts and none that focused upon Christian movies.  We later learned that this niche was unfilled for a reason.

We started with a simple mandate: to be honest about the quality of Christian movies. For too long we had experienced people praising films simply because they talked about Jesus or didn’t have any foul language. The quality of the art must stand on its own, separate from the fact that a given movie was made with “good intentions.” I was inspired by a review of Left Behind that called out Christian art for being mediocre and lazy, playing to its audience and never attempting to be great art in and of itself. The review made the point that the Sistine Chapel is a work of Christian art, and no one needs to say that it is “pretty good for a Christian painting.” With this as our goal, we named our podcast the “SuperCandid Podcast,” not only because the domain was available but also because it reflected our desire to be frank about Christian movies.

In our previous experiences with Christian movies, we had generally seen films that served to either reinforce what Christians already know (sinners go to hell) or scare them with dramatic applications of prophecy to current events (credit cards = number of the beast?).  Our first episode was on the subject that sparked the podcast, Facing the Giants.  It was difficult to avoid turning the podcast into a new spin on the joking riffs from Mystery Science Theater 3000.  The acting ranged from passable to laughable, the filmmaking was excellent for the football sequences but strictly home movie quality for the dramatic scenes, and the plot hinged upon divine coincidence and miraculous fulfilment of all desires.  From the perspective of a film lover, there isn’t much to recommend Facing the Giants, except that it displayed some potential in its better scenes. There is one sequence of the coach motivating an injured player near the midpoint in particular that is quite good for a sports film. Unfortunately, for every bold step the film takes, (they don’t even qualify for the championship game!) it moves two steps in a cliched, schmaltzy direction (they make it to the championship anyway!). What is worse, is that Facing the Giants seemed like a great movie in comparison to some of the others we would review.

Doing the podcast quickly became more difficult that we had anticipated, and not just because producing a podcast itself is a lot of work. We were savvy film watchers, and not adverse to watching a bad movie to revel in the awfulness.  We had parties to watch The Room.  I was also in my final year of college studying for a film degree. Studying film history and criticism will quickly numb you to the overall quality of a film, as you wade through hour after hour of tedious and terrible films to pluck out a nugget of interest for a paper. We even had a joke in our department that if a film was popular enough for a non-film major to have even heard of, it was too “mainstream” to have any hope of being the subject of published academic criticism.

For our podcast, we defined a general format that helped guide us away from rambling on without structure.  First a basic description, then the high and low points of the film, and a final thought or two.  In some cases, the high points consist of a charitable praise of the filmmaker’s Christian intentions.  We also discovered that Christian film was more of a marketing term than an objective category.  Don worked at a Christian bookstore that carried everything from the latest Hollywood appeal to Christian audiences to low-budget independent productions.  When we look at Christian movies, we saw a few basic genres that they fell into: the Cash-In, the Sermon, what we called the Christian Bookstore Film, and the Indie.

The Cash-In

Some of the films we watched were easy and fun to riff on, and we enjoyed mocking their transparent attempts to cash-in on the success of something like The Passion of the Christ. When they were blatantly exploitative it was easy to laugh at their awfulness or marvel at the lengths to which the filmmakers went to be both appealing to Christian audiences and inoffensive to everyone else.  In the worst of these it was plain to see the cynical marketing at work, and we felt free to respond with equal cynicism.

The Sermon

Then there were the sermon-illustration films that have obvious messages and unimaginatively flat characters. You can guess the plot to most of these from just a description of the characters.

Hollywood actor = sinner in need of redemption.

Actor’s wife = long-suffering Christian woman who doesn’t know how to connect with her unbelieving husband.

Hollywood agent = the devil who argues that the actor is ruining his career.

Actor’s best friend = happy and well-adjusted Christian who will provide an abridged version of the gospel at a key moment.

Just like a sermon illustration, in a best case these films could be a good starting point for a Bible study or discussion.  In the worst case, they are obvious to the point that your eyes may be in danger of rolling right out of your head.

These were the first types of film that we had trouble reviewing because of our Christian guilt.  We got our first taste of why these films are so popular with Christians and we discovered the reason no one really called them out for being so awful: they had a church-play type quality to them. When a film ends with the alcoholic responding to an altar call, a Christian who has seen and heard that story a million times will find it cheesy and obvious.  But saying that outloud can make you feel like a monster.  Coming from a Christian high school, Don and I had that special kind of irreverence that comes from long familiarity with the tropes of Christian culture, but still being devoted Christians.  Our Christian guilt often turned into a lot of hemming and hawing about the effectiveness of a Gospel message in a film that only appeals to Christians in the first place.

The Christian Bookstore Film

These were some of the hardest to watch because the types of fiction that are popular at Christian bookstores have little to appeal to young-men in their late 20s.  Popular tropes in these included Pioneer-Era Romance, Bad-Boy Being Redeemed, City Person Learning the Plain Honesty of a Country Town.  Basically, these films were romance novels and the movie Cars, in Christian form. Just throw in the occasional “thriller” from a Frank Peretti or Ted Dekker as an attempt to appeal to the men in the pews and that about covers Christian Bookstore Films.  Most of these films suffer from poor adaptations, often ending up with a plot that makes little sense and an abrupt ending.  The most baffling part of these was the tightrope that the films (and presumably the novels) walked with Christianity.  Often the plot would have little or nothing to do with anything remotely Christian until one of the characters turns out to have been a Christian and prays for help at a dire moment.  We found these movies to be more boring than actively awful, providing little fun for us in reviewing them.  Say what you will for The Room, but it is rarely boring.  Podcasts about these films often ended with a caveated review that while we were obviously not the intended audience, but even so a bad film is a bad film.

The Indie

Finally, we discovered a whole world of independent Christian cinema. These filmmakers often work from home, making movies on nights and weekends out of a passion for filmmaking.  It sounds inspiring, sure, but if you have attended any sort of film festival you’ll know that there is a reason that most of these films never leave the festival circuit.  These were the most difficult of all to review because we formed personal connections with many of the filmmakers.  Most of these films we had to purchase direct from the filmmakers, and many of them began listening to our podcast or became our friends on social media.

In some cases, these films were wonderful discoveries.  In others, it was like watching home movies from a distant relative; it mostly just felt uncomfortable.  I still tell people that the best Christian film I have ever seen is one of these independent movies, Steve Taylor’s Second Chance, starring Michael W. Smith of all people. Then there are the movies in which these filmmakers insist upon casting a younger sibling as the precious kid, doubling down upon the awful tropes. There was more than one of these films that left us struggling to find a high point of the film to comment upon.  A 67 minute run-time can be a great quality for many movies.

These categories are admittedly reductive and snarky, but there are a few films good enough to give you hope for even these reductive categories of Christian films.  The Nativity Story, marketed heavily but unsuccessfully to Christians, has a powerful portrayal of Joseph by Oscar Issac. Powerplay seems like a schmaltzy bad-boy redemption story straight off of the Christian romance bookshelf. And it is, but it is also a surprisingly well-acted and funny film that manages to be sweet without being saccharine. End of the Spear takes a well-known story of modern martyrs and tells the much more important story of what happens after. And Second Chance is a genuinely important film about the role of prosperity for a Church called to be “poor in spirit.”

I’m leaving out a lot for the sake of not simply going through the list of Christian movies we watched. Documentaries are hard to mess up, unless you are going for something as silly as Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Christmas movies are also a sure-fire choice and guarantee at least a good soundtrack and some nice Christmas lights and snowy scenery to look at while you doze through another rehash of The Gift of the Magi.  But it was a Christmas movie that was the final straw in this podcast.

From the beginning, making a podcast was a lot of work.  We spent hours recording, editing, and writing blog entries.  I tried to blog at least 2-3 times a week with news about Christian filmmaking, pushing my Google-alerts to the limit to seek out tidbits of news on productions that don’t exactly have marketing departments.  Then there was the cost.  We were able to get a few of the movies from the Christian bookstore where Don worked, but for the most part we had to purchase any movie we wanted to review ourselves.  An odd fact about the Christian film world is that the movies are expensive, probably due to the limited production run.  Over the two years that we did the podcast, I came to dread the process of watching the bad movies.

In the end, we were faced with two kinds of movie reviews we kept coming back to: the truly awful cash-grab and the “OK for what it is” review of an independent film produced in the spare time of some well-meaning fellow Christians.  It was difficult to review these independent films because we felt that we couldn’t have any fun talking about how bad they were, and being bad, we also couldn’t enjoy watching and reviewing them on their own merits.  As for the cash grabs, when The Passion of the Christ turned out to be the outlier rather than the rule these became much more scarce.

One day, as we were preparing to record our 50th episode, we discussed future films to review.  A set in our que was the trilogy(!) started by the film version of The Christmas Shoes, an awful, awful movie based upon the worst Christmas song of all time.  Literally as we were recording our podcast, a look back at Facing the Giants, we canceled our future episodes. The prospect of spending 6 hours of my life watching, and then another 5-10 hours producing a podcast on The Christmas Shoes trilogy was not something I was willing to live accept.

I can’t say that I regret watching all these movies. If anything, it was a positive experience for the gems that we found among the mud. I first saw Benedict Cumberbatch as the electrifying prime minister in Amazing Grace.  I discovered that The Gospel Road, a Jesus film narrated by and with a soundtrack by Johnny Cash, is terrible and awesome simultaneously. I made new friends from my contacts with Christian filmmakers.  It wasn’t all bad.  It was just, oh, the 43 out of 49 movies that were unbearable.

I still want there to be great movies for Christians to watch and enjoy, I just don’t think those fit into the marketing category of “Christian movie.”  Even so, I am still looking and even hoping.  I watched Blue Like Jazz just recently.  It was not what I was hoping for given the pedigree of excellent book and excellent filmmaker (Steve Taylor of Second Chance).  I’m still waiting, still watching, and I am sure that it is only a matter of time before someone at a Bible study recommends another Christian movie.  We live in hope and faith, and I can hope that there will be a truly great Christian movie in my lifetime.  We’ll see.

Jonathan Strawn is a father, husband, national guard officer and filmmaking enthusiast. He studied Media Arts and Art History at the University of New Mexico, produced  and served in Iraq. He likes to think of himself as a funny person on Twitter.