What makes a movie “Christian?”
Does a story with no explicit reference(s) to Christ qualify? What if it contained a redemptive and/or sacrificial message, or focused on atonement?
Perhaps the question isn’t whether a piece of art is “Christian” or even Christian-themed, but whether we can “take joy in God’s material creation, in the colors and sounds and textures and tastes of all the good things he has created,” as Brett McCracken writes in the recently published Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide (which I reviewed for the Christian Research Journal.)
God’s handiwork is part of general revelation, God revealed in nature (as opposed to special revelation, God revealed through his word and through Christ), and there’s beauty and truth in secular pursuits. Christians can and should discuss with unbelievers spiritual and transcendent messages that may be found in secular films.
While I’d like to see more Christian entertainment in Hollywood, as Christians should be salt and light in the world, even in Hollywood, the message doesn’t have to be explicit. The Chronicles of Narnia and Mere Christianity author C.S. Lewis talked about smuggling the Gospel past “watchful dragons” in his fiction. That’s what I’m attempting to do as I work on novel revisions (which is why draft #3 is essentially a rewrite). I’d intended to be explicit, but decided to be subtle, as I have embarrassingly high hopes of seeing the book published by a mainstream house and read by secular readers.
Movies like The Matrix and Atonement don’t qualify as Christian movies, but they contain a shadow of the Gospel, one might argue. In the third movie of The Matrix series, a man’s sacrifice saves a city of survivors from physical death, as opposed to the Son of God’s sacrifice saving the forgiven from spiritual death. In Atonement, an old woman tries to make amends for telling a lie that kept her sister and the man she loved apart by creating a happy ending in fictional form. For the Christian, Christ has done the substitutionary, atoning work for us, once and forever, on the cross.
