Given my own religious views, or lack thereof, it may surprise some that I have watched a number of “Christian” movies. A very large percentage of modern Christian flicks are, in a word, UNFRIGGENWATCHABLE, and thus when I say “I watched that movie,” what I actually mean is “I watched ten minutes of the movie then hit fast forward a whole lot.” Holy Crap are they bad. The video below, made by a Christian feller who wants *good* Christian movies, explains what the problem is: these movies are not made by movie makers. Companies like “Pure Flix,”who have inflicted such execrable cinematic war crimes as the “God’s Not Dead” series onto the public are, first and foremost, *preachers.* They are message first, movie making a distant second.
This is not to say that *all* religious movies are like this. Back in the day, Hollywood used to crank ’em out on a regular basis… the Fifties was loaded with Swords and Sandals epics like Ben Hur and The Ten Commandments that, regardless of what you thought of the supernatural elements on display, you can’t argue that they were anything but top-notch quality film making. More recently there was Mel Gibsons “Passion of the Christ,” a really rather remarkable achievement. And then… there are the “Left Behind” movies. There’s anything with Kirk Cameron.
Most of these religious flicks are by Hollywood standards “low budget.” But we’ve seen amazing stuff on YouTube shot on a shoestring. A low budget movie – and here the budget is still likely measured at a million dollars or more – need not *look* low budget, yet somehow these Christian propaganda flicks manage to pull it off.
Additionally, from an outsiders perspective these movies look even worse than they do on the pure artistic level. These movies generally have non-believing characters, or characters of non-Christian faiths, and they are generally shown to be mustache-twirling one-dimensional villains. They are the sort of people that actual non-Christians look at and recognize to be an insult directed squarely at them. What, then, is the purpose of the movie? It sure as Hell isn’t going to do much to win converts if it insults those who are to be converted, while at the same time making the Proper Believer look like a bunch of smug jackasses. Plus, a *lot* of these movies feature interminable scenes of actual preaching. Yeesh, if you want to drive away a potential convert, bore him to death with a church scene. And then there are the “arguments,” where the Believer puts forward something patently ridiculous and easily refuted by a real-world skeptic, but the movie Nonbeliever is of course utterly flummoxed by in a way that real-world nonbelievers find laughable. Some of these religious flicks are so bad at the task of conversion that one might be tempted to wonder if they are, in fact, skillful efforts to *prevent* conversion.
See? There ya go, Christian movie makers. I’ve just given you your next religious blockbuster: an honest, earnest religious person stumbles across the greatest conspiracy of our time…most of the bad religious movie makers and televangelists are in fact secret Satan worshippers using their awful and ridiculous religiosity as a way to tarnish and destroy the faith from within.