Sanctuary Cinema: Origins of the Christian Film Industry

Better Films

Better Films Motion pictures which flourished by clinging to Satan have discarded him for Mother Church. Alva Johnston As nontheatrical church production waned and Hollywood’s productivity waxed, the church turned toward critiquing rather than creating film products. In response to the growing suspicion that Hollywood was the source of a creeping secularization, some church leaders joined together to resist what they saw as a deluge of modernity and immorality gushing out of the film industry. However, as a result of this conservatives were marginalized, accused of adhering to the spirit of the Iconoclasts, of being out of touch with the advanced, modern age, or of trying to keep “the life of a busy world in tune with the words of the Bible, an essentially pastoral book.”1 To a lesser degree, lacking the access and resources to produce their own sound films, mainstream churches now turned to judging Hollywood’s output. What they found was displeasing. Although in 1922 the industry had appointed a moral overseer, Will H. Hays, after the Hollywood scandals of the previous year church leaders suspected that their own religious mongoose was fraternizing with cobras. Criticism extended beyond Hays, however. Addressing another issue of film propaganda, the International Journal of Religious Education pointed to the contributions of the National Film Estimate Service that reviewed and recommended hundreds of films each year. The increasingly political, as opposed to aesthetic or religious, nature of the recommendations was exposed in certain pacifist reviews. They accused early 1930s newsreels of fostering distrust among nations and other films of being instruments of propaganda for militarism. Such criticisms of the media 4 179 spread. More than one thousand Princeton University students and faculty protested the Hearst Metro-Tone newsreels as vicious propaganda. The Garden Theatre management in Princeton actually had to discontinue the newsreels.2 Religious educators were likewise urged to obtain better, more politically and religiously correct, films. Film was being converted into a battleground of ideologies rather than an uplifting playground . The now vigilant, even vigilante, church abandoned its productions , and many of its exhibitions, in favor of debating the cultural blights of the industry. Independent Film Distribution Religious groups recognized that they needed to find reliable distribution networks for original moving picture products. For example, as a quasi-religious social organization, the Young Men’s Christian Association wanted its own dependable distribution circuit in order to exhibit films as recreation in its training camps. It subsequently established the YMCA Motion Picture Bureau as a free lending library. The YMCA issued a forty-two-page booklet devoted to its use of film, with suggestions about manufacturers and organizations useful for religious purposes .3 Key sources for religious motion pictures included the American Motion Picture Corporation, the Children’s Bureau, the Community Motion Picture Bureau of New York, the New Era Films, International Church Film Corporation, and others.4 Sacred Film Productions of the Paragon Film Bureau, which released Sacred Songs on film and suggested ways to use the song films, and Plymouth Pictures, stood out as exemplary supply centers.5 Plymouth Pictures incorporated in 1919 to promote James K. Shields’s productions and became the Pilgrim Photoplay and Book Exchange. Shields created notable work for the church with three “virile pictures, each with a heart thrilling sermon visualized.” As we have seen, The Stream of Life preached the spiritual message of strength and peace of a home that finally finds God. A Maker of Men summoned men to the high calling of God in ministry. Lest We Forget used the “poignant facts of the now outlawed beer saloon with its train of heartaches and crime and shows that out of which we have come. See Uncle Sam and righteously indignant citizens nail up the stupid old saloon, the entire congregation unites in one resolve: ‘It must not come back!’”6 180 | Better Films Plymouth Pictures’s choice feature promoting pacifism was Shields’s post–World War I Hell and the Way Out, decrying the horrific ravages of war.7 The Chicago-based Pilgrim Photoplay Exchange also distributed The Lord’s Prayer, with a suggested service of scriptures and hymns, and twenty-five other single-reel films with biblical themes like The Good Samaritan and Light of the World.8 Another Chicago company, the Film Library of Associated Churches, produced a six-reel Life of Our Savoir; a “chaste” comedy called The Butterfly Net...