Sacred cinema: exploring Christian sensibilities within popular Hollywood films

Abstract

Numerous Christian sensibilities have permeated the popular cinema, but they are frequently undetected, unappreciated or unwanted by those fearful of the cinema’s potentially corrupting effect. Yet, a postmodern religious education requires the embracement of this communication media, not its rejection, employing discernment not denial. A first step in this corrective process is to raise the profession’s consciousness about the possibilities of sacred cinema, which is the primary purpose of this paper. Consequently, using textually based, humanist film criticism as the analytical lens, the critical film and religion literature was reviewed, the popular Hollywood cinema scanned and the following areas explicated herein, namely: (a) holy plotlines, (b) divine symbolism, and (c) sacred subtexts—the Christ‐figure. All three categories were supplied with copious inter‐genre exemplars to demonstrate their diversity and richness. It was concluded that the sacred cinema is a legitimate pop culture phenomenon and a living genre that has immense pedagogic utility for religious education aimed squarely at the proverbial children‐of‐the‐media. As such, it should be proactively employed as a postmodern act of applied cinema that simultaneously values the audiovisual, education and enjoyment. Further research into this emerging and exciting interdisciplinary field was recommended.

Notes

1. Although there are real ontological differences between ‘film’, ‘cinema’, ‘movie’, ‘video’, ‘TV movie’, ‘CD’, ‘VCD’, ‘DVD’, ‘MPEG 4’, ‘Internet movie’, etc., they are all audiovisual media and so will be treated herein as essentially interchangeable.

2. The Authorized King James Version of the Bible (KJV aka AV) will be used throughout because most of ‘the biblical phrases that are embedded in our culture are from the King James Version’ (Taylor, 1992, p. ix) and it is ‘the most widely used English translation of the Bible’ (Taylor, 1992, p. 71).

3. The term ‘Hollywood cinema’ is used as a shorthand code for Western, primarily English‐speaking cinema that conforms to the classical Hollywood narrative tradition, whether actually made in America or not (see Bordwell & Thompson, 2001, pp. 76–78).

4. Of course, the religious cinema dealing with other faith traditions can be just as informative (Plate, 2003; Dwyer, 2006).