Reforming Hollywood: How American Protestants Fought for Freedom at the Movies

In his Reforming Hollywood: How American Protestants Fought for Freedom at the Movies, William D. Romanowski tells the fascinating and unexpected tale of American Protestants’ engagement with the movie industry over the long sweep of the twentieth century, from the very dawn of Hollywood through its golden mid-century efflorescence and up through the present day. In the popular imagination, Protestants have played the role of cultural philistines and reactionary stick-in-the-muds, invariably pushing for heavy-handed cinematic censorship until all films have been rendered into moralizing Sunday school pabulum. Like H. L. Mencken’s Puritans, it would be all too easy to suppose that twentieth-century Protestants, in their engagement with the film industry, were primarily driven by “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” As Romanowski tells it, the actual reality is far more complex than its rude popular redaction. Far from being motivated by desires for film censorship, twentieth-century Protestants were driven rather by the reverse: by and large, they preferred voluntary self-regulation on the part of filmmakers, which they viewed as consonant with broader faith that they had in individual freedom and responsibility.

Much of the first half of Romanowski’s narrative treats the interwar period, as he considers the Protestant establishment’s attempts to balance its desire for moral wholesomeness with its support for popular freedom of conscience. This tension was perhaps nowhere more evident than in Protestants’ concerns about “block booking”—Hollywood production studios’ monopolistic stranglehold on the screening of the films they produced. Under block booking, movie theatres were required to purchase showing privileges for all of the films that a given studio produced, not simply the blockbusters. Most Protestant leaders through the 1920s and 1930s remained convinced that the popularity of immoral films was simply the result of block booking, not consumer demand; in their view, film morality could thus be established by abolishing block booking and allowing theatre owners to be responsive to patrons’ tastes and mores. In other words, many American Protestant leaders believed that the invisible hand of the market would naturally delineate morality and good taste as well as economic efficiency.

Some of the most interesting sections of the book explore the divergence between Protestant and Roman Catholic methods of dealing with movie immorality. The Catholic hierarchy during this period—especially through its National Legion of Decency—had far fewer qualms than Protestants about censorship and also about restricting congregants’ freedom of conscience by morally strong-arming them into boycotting particular films. Later in the book, Romanowski explores how in the 1960s some Catholics began to shift to a more traditionally American Protestant position on films and to work with some Protestants on ecumenical moral projects. The latter half of the book is particularly interesting in its exploration of how American Protestants specifically, and American Christians more generally, attempted to grapple with their fading moral and cultural hegemony.

Reforming Hollywood should be applauded for its complex and inventive argument, which interestingly complicates our picture of twentieth-century American Protestantism. Romanowski compellingly demonstrates the divergent and evolving ways in which Protestant religious and political movers and shakers reacted as various of their key tenets collided—free speech and high aesthetics, freedom of conscience and a wholesome public morality. The book provides a useful contribution to current scholarly discussion about Protestants’ changing interpretation of Church/state separation over the past century, as well as about Protestants’ relationship with the free market, populism, and aesthetics. Romanowski should additionally be commended for the level of research that clearly went into the book’s genesis: he incorporates a wide variety of primary sources from both religious and cinematic archives, many of them new. On occasion, however, Reforming Hollywood falls victim to its own success in this regard. The level of detail at points escalates from persuasive to dizzying, and it is sometimes difficult to follow the intricate thread of the argument...