Sanctuary Cinema: Origins of the Christian Film Industry

Conclusion

Conclusion Film as Religion If Christ went to the “movies”—He would approve. Rev. Percy Stickney Grant1 By the late 1920s Hollywood executives were well aware of the religious milieu in which they sold their products; nevertheless they remained generally ignorant or dismissive of the theological and moral concerns of the Roman Catholic and Protestant constituency. In an apocryphal story told by biographer Bob Thomas about Columbia Studio’s legendary Cohn brothers, the two producers debated the prospect of making a religious film. Harry challenged his brother Jack, claiming that he knew nothing about religion: “What the hell do you know about the Bible, Jack? I’ll bet you fifty bucks you don’t even know the Lord’s Prayer,” said Harry. “Oh, yes I do,” boasted Jack. “Well then, let’s hear it,” prodded his brother. Jack started: “Now I lay me down to sleep . . .” “Okay, okay,” conceded Harry. “You win,” and handed over the fifty bucks.2 From the late 1920s to about 1944, when Bing Crosby merrily sang in Going My Way, major Hollywood studios avoided overtly religious themes, with the well-publicized exception of Cecil B. DeMille. During this time religion was generally not taken seriously when Hollywood did incorporate it. When critic Herbert Corey lambasted films in the mid203 twenties, he mockingly characterized the male actors as “apple dumplings,” the girls as pretty, curvy “movines,” and the average writerdirector as “a 90-year-old moron who had been missing his sleep.” The movies’ only redeeming quality, he quipped, was that “the audiences all laugh at the holiest movie moments.”3 On June 13, 1934, the Production Code Administration set regulatory guidelines governing the production of all movies and warned filmmakers not to show any disrespect to religion or ridicule the clergy. Religion was off limits. Humorist Alva Johnston derided any code that forbade satirizing clergy as “an absurd invasion of the rights of churchmen who are as much entitled as any others to the moral tonic and wholesome discipline of satire.” Johnston mocked another prescription requiring that constituted authorities and the rule of law must always triumph over law-breakers in the movies, “a rule which would require the director to throw the sympathy with the lions as against the Christians in Ben Hur.”4 Laughter at the holy moments was both symptomatic and symbolic of the church’s ultimate lack of success with movies at the end of the silent film era. As we have seen, the potential for the religious use and possibilities of the motion picture and the realization of the dream of a vibrant church market were inadequately achieved. Questions raised by the ambivalent relationship of Christianity to the icon-image and to the theater continued to frame the churches’ posture toward film. Inquiries such as “What is a graven image?” “How can an icon provide a book for the illiterate ?” or Tertullian’s “What has Jerusalem to do with Athens?” helped to shape the responses of religious artists and critics in appropriating media for social, ecclesiastical, and spiritual uses. The church had hoped that experiments with the magic lantern, lanternslides, and stereopticons would help the Lord’s servants promote the new media of the moving picture . However, the dramatic narratives of both evangelical novels and religious paintings that served as models for what a Christian film could become , led instead to an endless debate on whether this modern instrument of visual communication supported or subverted the mission of the church. The church’s ambivalent relation to the moving picture reflected the uncertain and schizophrenic connection the church had to modernity itself . With the enlightened emergence of science, technology, urbanization, and industrialization, the spirit of modernity reigned over the realms of the motion picture industry. In investigating the interactions between modernity and melodrama, film scholar Ben Singer identified modernity 204 | Conclusion as a mode of social life marked by democratic instincts, secularity, and late capitalism with a litany of socioeconomic conditions, particularly the explosion of forms of mass communication and mass entertainments such as modern cinema, characterized by its individualism and sensory stimulation .5 Other scholars have explained that modernity was best understood as “inherently cinematic” and have proposed cultural links to industry and technology beyond the traditional precursors of theater and novel.6 For religious audiences, these two classic connections helped to make sense of cinema’s acceptability and usefulness within the confines of the...