In Defence of… Christian Movies

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When I feel low, I often cheer myself up by watching US-made Christian movies. I’m not proud of this. Very few are well made or intellectually complex. I’m drawn to them for other, perhaps less respectable reasons, some of which I will share here today.

First, you should understand that the Christian movie industry is a very much booming trade. After the injection of pace with Mel Gibson’s (slightly dodgy) ‘Passion of the Christ’, even the most atheistic Hollywood producer has come to recognise the massive profit-potential in religious film-making. Most ordinary Americans are devoutly attached to their faith, and of these a great number feel alienated by the over-worldly content churned out by conventional L.A productions. It seems only logical then that faith-based productions enter the void left over.

And they have done. They really have. Christian films now reliably bring in millions of dollars, usually despite a paltry budget and so creating a gaping profit margin for the makers.

What are they like? As I perceive the matter, Christian films are usually small variations on the following plot structure: Good Christian girl/boy living a wholesome American life – falls into temptation (drugs, fame, sex, wealth etc…) – gets burnt by the sin they fall into – are saved by their old friends or family from their former wholesome life.

Sounds stupid? I suppose it is. But then there is something weirdly magnetic and comforting in the uncomplicated innocence these films advertise. If the idea of the movies is to tempt you into a different, more wholesome way of life, they are successful to the extent that they make that way of life seem joyful and safe. You come away from one of these films with a desire to avoid falling into life-traps, perhaps even to get out of life-traps you are already in. The feeling doesn’t last long enough for you to do anything about it, of course, but it certainly stays in your mind longer than the messages of Taken 3 or the latest sci-fi abomination.

Christian movies are also appealing to me because of their all-American feel. The characters at the beginning of each film (before the temptations and fall from grace) are living the American dream; a suburban house, a nice car, and a tight family with one beautiful cheer-leading daughter and one athletic and good-mannered son. I’ve always been drawn to idyllic caricatures like that. It matters nothing that this isn’t the reality for 90% of real American families. As shtick goes, it works for me – like a social watercolour painting.

A list of Christian cinema’s flaws would be as long as the list of its virtues. Christian movies are often anti-Semitic (the temptation villain trope character in a film usually looks Jewish). They are homophobic as a matter of course. And though the lead character in each production is usually female, she is also passive, secondary and naïve. These films are anything but politically correct, and this explains sufficiently why they will never break through into the mainstream.

By any religion’s standards I’m a sinner. I like anything that brings me pleasure and have indulged more than I should in uncountable vices. Perhaps it is for that reason that the morals of Christian cinema strike me as exotic and fascinating. They are foreign, but in a way I can’t easily belittle or reject.

D, LDN

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Between Paradise and Hell: The Precarious Happiness of the Christian Lebanese.

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This past week, various friends of mine have sent me the link to a viral video from MEMRI TV. It features a sultry Lebanese TV anchor cutting the microphone of a London-based ‘Imam’ after he arrogantly seeks to insert his sexual-religious authority into the conversation.

I’m not as impressed by this as others seem to be. That is because I have never truly considered Lebanon a part of the barbaric construct we call the ‘Islamic World’. Indeed, after the State of Israel, Lebanon seems to me the most civilised and modern country in the greater Middle East.

While it’s true that Muslims now make up a slight majority in the country, the civilising effects of Lebanon’s Christian elite extend deeply into its social and educational fabric. As a consequence, Lebanese Muslims tend to be more ‘secular’ than Syrians or Jordanians, and arguably for reasons directly attributable to Lebanon’s cultural diversity (one of the very time that phrase can be used positively).

If you look through an album of photographs taken in modern Beirut, you might find it difficult to distinguish the streets and piazzas from parts of Portugal, Spain or southern Italy. Despite the ancient mosques and grungy madrassas, one will also notice billboard advertisements for premium wines and Heineken Lager, bare-armed women in tight jeans and sunglasses, as well as gaudy bars and upmarket pubs catering to American and English tourists respectively.

The Lebanese Christians are proudly aware of this geo-cultural strangeness and view any comparison with other Arab states like Saudi Arabia or Jordan as wholly derogatory. Biology plays a role in this. Though all Arabs are a mixture of ancient ancestries, the Lebanese are known to be especially diverse. Genetic investigation of the Christian community has revealed a mixture of Greek, Arab and Western European genetic markers, the last being a hangover from the time when Lebanon functioned as a base for the Crusaders, some of whom remained, intermarried and got lost in the biological stew.

Though we in the West might look down on sectarian attitudes, it is surely easier to sympathise in this case. Imagine for a moment that we in England belonged to a modern, affluent and liberal(ish) country neighboured to the North and East by lands of hellish confusion. We would all eventually come to rely on sheer hostility to prevent the damaging integration of outside elements, especially if defensive alliances seem unavailable.

Only a few miles from the wine bars of Lebanon, the sub-humans of ISIS cut the heads off people accused of summoning demons or practicing witchcraft. Just a short drive from a Beirut Miss Universe pageant is a tent-city where women cannot even leave their homes.

It is hard to think of a more terrifying fragility or a more perfect misery than that of the Christian Lebanese.

D, LDN.

Pakistan’s Everyday Madness.

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When Taliban gunmen abbreviated the lives of 132 children in a Pakistani school last month, it became customary on social media to report a feeling of ‘shock’. Via facebook and twitter, Westerners lined up to report their disbelief and surprise at an event that seemed to defy understanding.

This wasn’t a bandwagon I could leap onto myself, I’m afraid. To do so would have been dishonest and almost pretentious. Knowing what I know about Islam, about Pakistan and about the abusive relationship between the two, I couldn’t be less surprised by a massacre of this kind. To be sure, I couldn’t really be shocked by any act of bestial violence occurring in that horrible, irredeemable country. If tomorrow, 300 new born babies were slaughtered in a Pakistani maternity ward, my heart would ache, but my mind would be unchanged.

Islam, you see, can only ever end in violence. Those Muslims who do not commit violence really are (as the extremists say) disobeying the spirit of the religion. That those children massacred in Peshawar were themselves Muslim means little. If Islam cannot fight those outside of its tent, it will turn on its own. Like the proverbial shark that must constantly move to survive, the pace of Islamic evil must be ceaselessly maintained. Noise must made (and what better noise than screaming) so that thought and conscience can be muffled and ignored. If the Muslims of the world could stand still and reflect without the presence of an (external or internal) enemy, even for a year, the culture would begin to crumble. Islam is total and permanent mobilisation of the lower instincts; a military-delusional complex.

Unlike Iran, Tunisia and other moderately infected nations, it is increasingly clear that Pakistan cannot be rescued. There is no cultural haloperidol we can airdrop to change the hearts and minds of that delusion-ravaged land. And when things like Peshawar occur, we should have the honesty not to feign surprise.

D, LDN.