Religious movies have a long and rich tradition in the span of film history, with brilliantly made films like The Ten Commandments (1956), Lilies of the Field (1963), A Man for All Seasons (1966), and many more (see the list of The 20 Best Films About Faith here). These films, in telling compelling and artistically elevated stories, reflected the beauty and drama of faith in ways that invited audiences to see religion as something worthwhile and meaningful. But in recent decades, the perception of faith-based art has unfortunately become synonymous with low-quality, low-budget, ham-fisted, and hackneyed. This has resulted in culture at large associating faith not with its rich history and depth, but rather using one of the only pictures they see of it — shallow, preachy, and missable.
Being both a person of faith who desires to share the marvelousness of my faith and a lover of great art who longs to encounter beauty and depth, this reality upsets me, as I long to see the faith I hold dearly depicted in beautiful and compelling ways and not reduced to preachy sermon lessons void of any artistry or skill. So, in desiring to be a part of the solution and not just the critical couch sitter, I have gathered together a few ways that filmmakers of faith can return to telling beautiful and compelling stories through religiously themed films.
Become Skillful At Your Craft
One of the main ways that led to Christian films garnering the reputation for being poor quality was through bad theology. Countless times I’ve heard both Christian audiences and filmmakers say something to the effect of “As long as God’s message is there, the quality doesn’t matter.” But what this fails to take into account is the quality is part of the message. If we try to reflect a skillful, high quality, and beautiful God with inexperienced, low quality, and aesthetically unappealing work, we work against our mission to reach the world and offer only a self contradictory message about who God is.
It’s an act of worship to develop our skills and invest time into the craft that so many claim they feel “called” by God to pursue. This means it’s a spiritual act of obedience to God when we study, take classes, and educate ourselves on story structure, lighting, acting, and cinema. We are honoring God by taking the time to best learn how to tell the stories that reflect God’s truth and goodness.
Don’t Preach A Sermon, Tell a Story
Another negative stereotype that has become synonymous with faith-based films is their insistence on preaching a sermon instead of telling a compelling story. This turns their characters into uninteresting, one-dimensional devices that only exist to hammer home the message, and their narratives to predictable, dull, and uninteresting plots that bore and turn off the audience they’re trying to reach. This isn’t just a sin of faith-based films, as a multitude of preachy message-based films have released in the last decade, but it is one that seems to plague a larger amount of religious films.
The inclination is understandable. We each are passionate about our beliefs and naturally want to share them through our art, and we often worry that unless we’re explicit, people just won’t get it. The problem is, if we’re not careful, valuing the message over the story can end up destroying both. Jesus knew the power of a well-told story, often opting out of preaching sermons in favor of telling intricate and engrossing parables with complex characters to connect his ideas to his audience. What’s more, he seemed entirely unconcerned in making his message crystal clear, saying to those who didn’t understand, “for those who have ears to hear.”
Learning to tell a compelling story is hard, but it’s also the most potent device God created for humans to connect to and learn from. Learning to tell compelling narratives and write complex characters instead of relying on just hammering across a message will be the change that takes faith-based films from offputting to engrossing.
Be More Honest
Honesty is literally a biblical commandment and a universally agreed upon good within church doctrine, which makes it an interesting and confusing reality that faith-based films famously struggle so much to tell honest and truthful stories. So often, Christian movies fall into the trap of dishonest storytelling in favor of airbrushed characters, unrealistic plot devices, and unbelievable happy endings. This happens for a couple of understandable reasons.
The first being that, in a world that’s often critical of faith, there’s a desire in faith-based audiences and filmmakers to display their faith in the best possible light, to sell and even stretch the truth about the benefits, while ignoring or brushing over the difficulties.
The second is, out of a desire to keep with the more moralistic and fundamentalist influences within the walls of church culture, Christian movie makers avoid altogether any kind of content that might be deemed inappropriate or immoral. This means filmmakers of faith either have to gloss over or not address the real and difficult issues of the world in their stories, or try to tackle R-rated themes in G-rated ways (read Why Christians Should Watch And Make More R-Rated Movies here) which ultimately will feel insincere or dishonest to viewers.
If filmmakers of faith want their stories to actually make a difference and connect with the hearts and minds of their viewers, there has to be honesty in our stories, even if it’s harder and more difficult to navigate. Telling authentically and even brutally honest stories is the only way to reach a world with a desperate desire for something real.
In Summary
I love my faith and long to see it reflected on screen in artistically high, compelling, and honest ways. Faith is inherently dramatic and has the power, as we’ve seen throughout history, to inspire great and beautiful stories that could touch the hearts of billions. But for this to become a reality again, us faith-based filmmakers have to put in the time, dedication, and bravery to our craft.
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