Let's talk about feelings

Allison Reed/Saulius Ambrulevičius (LTU)

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

The European Union already forced Apple to abandon its proprietary charging port and adopt USB-C across its entire iPhone lineup. It just did something bigger. A new EU mandate requires every smartphone sold in Europe including Apple devices to feature a battery that can be replaced by the user without specialist tools, without voiding a warranty, and without sending the device to a manufacturer approved service center. Batteries must maintain a minimum capacity threshold after a set number of charge cycles and replacement parts must remain available for up to ten years after a model goes on sale.

The consumer electronics industry built its current business model around batteries that degrade, cannot be replaced at home, and create a natural upgrade cycle every two to three years. The EU just legislated that model out of existence in the world's largest regulatory market.

Apple, Samsung, and every other manufacturer now faces a choice between redesigning their devices for the European market or accepting that their current hardware architecture is no longer legally sellable there.

I think the reason is that the Christian media landscape of today - CCM, Pure Flix, Angel Studios, Christian romance novels, The Shack, Veggietales, etc. - is the product of American Evangelicalism developing into a subculture in the 1980s, and that subculture's (A) willingness to spend money on things promoting their views and (B) increasing dissonance between their values and mainstream American culture. Consequently, an industry sprang up to ensure that they wouldn't have to interact with secular media.

That historical development has led to two things:

People have a very specific image of "Christian media", rooted in Evangelical theology and culture, particularly its emphasis on positive feelings as a gauge of spirituality and (to quote "Screwtape Proposes a Toast") "petty traditional abstinences from wine or cards or the theatre". Which a dark, violent, sexually explicit and extremely Catholic horror film does not match.

Because of that history, "Christian media" is a similar category to "exploitation film"; most of it is low-quality and makes money by pandering to a specific audience, and hence any example of it that achieves critical respect and mass appeal is assumed to have transcended the genre.

Interestingly, the conception of Christian media being cheap or glurgy or generally Bad or focused on messaging over quality has basically been there right from the beginning. This led to the rise of young artists who understood the desire for evangelicals to have their own media but who also wanted to prove that it could be just as good or well done as secular stuff. VeggieTales was actually conceived as a kind of critical response to an earlier straight to video series called McGee and Me, because Phil Vischer was a young Christian creative who hated McGee and Me (and so do I, Phil) and thought that he could do better. The early VT episodes are filled with absurdism and pop culture parody (the French Peas are a Monty Python homage) and were designed to be fun for kids and also at least bearable for their parents, who’d have to watch this stuff endlessly. The strategy paid off, particularly because the series launched at the start of the Christian book store boom (these were/are Evangelical-only stores that sold Christian books, movies, music, homeschool materials, and toys, for the purposes of supplying people who wanted to stay in the Evangelical media bubble) and the employees of those stores would put VeggieTales tapes on in their children’s sections (because they always had a TV always playing, to showcase their VHS collection) since the humor was designed to be actually funny and good for all ages. Adventures in Odyssey was initially a similar project, conceived with the explicit goal of being Christian edutainment that was just as high-quality and imaginative and well-acted and well-written as anything secular (it’s gone downhill since about 2005, but for about 20 years it was reliably pretty good if occasionally unhingedly Evangelical). There was a genuine effort to make authentically Evangelical art that was also of a comparable standard to secularly accepted Good Art - Phil Vischer’s creative inspiration was Walt Disney, and the creators of AiO were insprired by Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater on the Air. The success of AiO led to things like the more adult Focus on the Family Radio Theatre, which did things like original mysteries featuring an ex-cop Anglican Priest named Father Gilbert, adaptations of classic literature like Ben-Hur and The Secret Garden, and a complete adaptation of all seven Chronicles of Narnia featuring David Suchet as Aslan and given the official stamp of approval from Lewis’s stepson Douglas Gresham.

What changed, I think, was the brief crossover boom in the mid-2000s brought about by a number of factors like the decline of pop-punk and rock on the radio leading to the success of originally-Christian acts like Evanescence and Three Days Grace and Breaking Benjamin and the Internet popularity of explicitly Christian bands like Skillet, and the publication of books like The Shack, and The Passion of the Christ and the backlash against The Da Vinci Code, and especially the massive success of Disney’s adaptation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. That film in particular was the tipping point - it featured an entire soundtrack album of music by Christian artists like TobyMac, Reliant K, and Rebecca St. James, and it was also made with Gresham’s approval. While many families (like my own) considered it to be secularized compared to the book, it was still acceptably accurate, and churches and Christian schools would buy out whole theater showings and host viewings. Suddenly, actual popularity and relevance seemed on the table in ways that hadn’t been possible before, and a number of people jumped ship to get Real Hollywood Jobs. Immediately after that, Obama was elected, causing a firestorm of reactionary panic about godless liberals ruining the country, and simultaneously the culture shifted away from the interest in Christian media that it had shown; without a lot of the original creatives and with the growing conviction that it had lost the culture war (as opposed to the 90s, where the general consensus was that We Won against AIDS and the gays and all that other stuff) Evangelical artistic energy became more reactionary and more didactic. On top of that, VeggieTales’s Big Idea Studios had to declare bankruptcy and were bought out by Viacom after the financial losses suffered from the disappointing box office performance of their Jonah movie. Enter Facing the Giants, etc.

(The Left Behind books were an early sign of this tipping point, but unlike later examples I gave they were pretty controversial and not always well regarded or well liked)

The Christian Booksellers Association was founded in 1950. 219 stores. By the 1990s there were thousands.

In 2017 Family Christian Stores, the largest Christian retail chain in the country at 240 locations across 36 states, declared bankruptcy and closed everything, laid off three thousand-plus people. In 2019 LifeWay — the Southern Baptist-affiliated chain, 170 stores, in operation since 1891 — closed every brick-and-mortar location and went online-only. Cokesbury (Methodist-affiliated, 38 stores) had already gone in 2013. The whole physical retail layer is, as of right now, basically Mardel (which is owned by Hobby Lobby) and a long tail of dying independents.

This matters more than it sounds.

Because the thing wariteres is describing — the McGee and Me / VeggieTales / Adventures in Odyssey / Focus on the Family Radio Theatre / christian rock and metal moment — was not just a cultural moment. It was a distribution channel.

The Christian bookstore was the infrastructure that made the category possible. The bookstore is what defined what counted as "Christian media" in the first place: it was Christian media if it could be sold at the Christian bookstore, which meant clearing whatever de facto content standards the store buyers (mostly evangelical, mostly suburban, mostly trying to keep parents from complaining) were applying that quarter — no smoking, no drinking, no sex, no excessive violence, no demons-as-protagonists, no Catholic mysticism, nothing that would get them yelled at by the local pastor whose congregation made up half their customer base.

The Exorcist could not be sold at the Christian bookstore. The Exorcist therefore is not Christian media, in the operative sense, regardless of who wrote the source novel. The classification is not about the work. It's about the channel.

(This is exactly the same dynamic as why "exploitation film" doesn't mean what you'd think etymologically — it means a film that played the grindhouse circuit, regardless of its content, which is why you have like Bergman-tier art films that are technically exploitation because of where they distributed and Roger Corman pictures that technically aren't. The category is the venue.)

So the OP's exploitation-film comparison is even sharper than they're making it. Both categories are defined entirely by their distribution infrastructure. Both have a reputation for being mostly low-quality because the channel had specific economic logic — high volume, low budgets, audience that would buy product because they wanted the genre signal itself and not because the work was good. The rare prestige outlier is held to have transcended the genre, which is another way of saying the genre is defined by the channel and not by the content.

VeggieTales is the cleanest case. Phil Vischer was specifically trying to make something that could be sold at the Christian bookstore and be actually good, which created the famous tension that bankrupted Big Idea — the production values got high enough (they tried Jonah in 2002, it underperformed) that the unit economics of CBA-channel distribution couldn't support them anymore. Big Idea collapsed in 2003 and got bought by Classic Media for $19M, then DreamWorks Animation in 2012, then NBCUniversal/Comcast in 2016. Vischer had built the thing for the bookstore. The bookstore couldn't carry the thing he'd built.

Anyway, here's the thing. The bookstore collapse happened during the same five-year window — 2013 to 2019 — as the Christian media industry was also trying to figure out what it was supposed to be in the streaming era. So you get this very specific period of institutional thrashing where the old infrastructure dies faster than the new infrastructure can replace it.

What replaces it is interesting and not what you'd guess.

Two things, mostly. First, the major studios figure out there's enough money in the niche to keep an in-house faith-based shingle. Sony has Affirm Films, set up in 2007, which has put out Heaven Is for Real, Risen, Miracles from Heaven, War Room. Lionsgate has its partnership with Kingdom Story Company (the Erwin brothers' outfit, the I Can Only Imagine / Jesus Revolution people). These are Hollywood divisions that figured out a $5-15M faith-targeted picture with church-group buyouts and a built-in audience is one of the most reliable ROI structures in the post-streaming theatrical economy.

Second thing, and this is the one I find most interesting from the institutional angle. Angel Studios. The Chosen, Sound of Freedom, His Only Son, Cabrini.

Angel Studios is the rebranded VidAngel.

VidAngel was a Utah company (the Harmon brothers, four of them, Mormon) that started in 2013 as a content-filtering service. You bought a DVD through their system, they applied filters you selected (no profanity, no nudity), they streamed you the filtered version for a dollar. The family-friendly market wants Hollywood content but with the Hollywood parts taken out, and there's real consumer demand for this but no legal way to provide it without studio cooperation, which the studios will not give because their directors hate it. CleanFlicks tried this in the early 2000s with physically re-edited DVDs and got sued out of existence by the DGA in 2006. VidAngel was the digital descendant.

In 2016 four major studios (Disney, Warner, Fox, Lucasfilm) sued VidAngel for DMCA violation, VidAngel claimed protection under the Family Movie Act, the courts disagreed, VidAngel went into Chapter 11 in 2017, settled in 2020 for $9.9M (down from a $62M judgment), and emerged having pivoted out of filtering and into production and distribution. Angel Studios is a Christian media company because the original Christian media company they'd been trying to build — a filtering layer over secular content — got destroyed by the secular content owners.

So they had to make their own content. They fund it through equity crowdfunding — the Angel Guild, retail investors who buy in for a few hundred bucks at a time, the same Reg CF / Reg A+ structure used for startup biotechs that can't raise from VCs. The Chosen's first season was the largest crowdfunded film project in history when it raised $10M+ in 2018. Sound of Freedom's P&A budget — $5M in two weeks from seven thousand investors, paid back at 120% within three months because the picture grossed $250M worldwide.

This is structurally a different industry from the CBA-bookstore model. The bookstore was B2C retail with gatekeeping done by store buyers. The Angel model is direct-to-investor crowdfunding with gatekeeping done by Guild members voting on trailers. Same audience. Different infrastructure.

And once the channel changes, the content that fits the channel changes, because the gatekeeping function moves. The old gatekeeping was "will this offend the suburban evangelical mom shopping at Family Christian on a Saturday?" The new gatekeeping is "will the Angel Guild approve a trailer?" These are not the same filter.

Cabrini, Angel's 2024 picture about the Italian Catholic missionary saint Frances Cabrini, would not have cleared Family Christian. It's a Catholic hagiography. The Catholic stuff is on the screen. The Angel Guild approved it on the trailer because the trailer showed nuns running orphanages in tenements, and that reads as "moral content" to the new gatekeepers in a way that didn't matter to the old ones, who would have been hung up on the Catholicism. (Bonhoeffer, 2024, Lutheran. His Only Son, weirdly grim Old Testament theology that would have made evangelical bookstore buyers nervous in like 1995.) The post-bookstore Christian media industry can be substantially more ecumenical than the bookstore-era one could, because the bottleneck is in a different place.

Which loops back around to The Exorcist.

Friedkin's film could not have cleared the CBA channel in 1973 and cannot clear it in 2025 (which is mostly defunct anyway). But it could probably clear an Angel Guild vote, if it were being pitched today as a debut, because a Catholic horror film in which the priests win is exactly the kind of thing a contemporary investor base of religious retail-investors would actually want made, and they would not be screened by a midwestern bookstore buyer anxious about complaints from her pastor.

What's changing isn't the theology of the audience or its willingness to watch difficult content. The audience for The Passion of the Christ in 2004 is basically the same audience that watches Angel Studios pictures in 2024. What's changing is which institutions sit between the audience and the work, and what those institutions are trying to optimize for. The bookstore was trying not to lose customers. The studio shingle is hitting a quarterly box-office target. The crowdfunding platform is maximizing Guild member engagement and reinvestment.

These optimize for different things. They produce different content.

congrats! Now you have a motif! A recurring theme! A focus for your art! Something to haunt you!

Seventeen still lives of dandelions? Three hundred poems about grief? A sketchbook dedicated to your grandmother’s house? Two books trying to unravel the complexities of familial relationships?

An early exploration of the themes Hokusai would keep coming back to is Spring in Enoshima, done in 1793 when he was 33. The wave is small and there are no boats, but Mt Fuji is clear in the background, and Enoshima is in Kanagawa, so we are clearly beginning to work towards something here.

A second pass, eleven years later in 1803 when he was 44. The title of this one begins to get more familiar: The View of Honmoku Off Kanazawa. It has a towering wave over a smaller boat, but Mt Fuji is not present, and the boat is considerably larger and has a sail. But the feeling of danger in the wave and the smallness of the boat are here, and of course the general composition is definitely recognizable.

This is A View Of Express Delivery Boats, done in 1805, merely two years later at age 46. Here we find the wave and the boats almost exactly as we'll find them in The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, though Mt Fuji isn't present, and the location is uncertain. And it's a good picture! The wave is threatening, the boats are small -- but the feeling of "ocean" isn't really there yet, is it? It's unlikely this picture would have become a classic for the ages. But that's okay, there's still time.

And here we have it, a full 26 years later, done by Hokusai in 1831 at the age of 72. The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, one of the most recognizable pieces of art in the world. The boats are there, the mountain is there, the wave is there, and the FEELING is there. He did it! He reached the apex of his ongoing motif and theme!

Or did he? Because the whole point of a motif is not that you're striving to get to the perfect version of it, the one idealized image you carried in your head all along, and when it is done, you are also done. Hokusai is on record at the age of 73 saying he'd only just begun to feel like he was learning how to draw things properly, and that "if I keep up my efforts, I will have even a better understanding when I was 80 and by 90 will have penetrated to the heart of things. At 100, I may reach a level of divine understanding, and if I live decades beyond that, everything I paint — dot and line — will be alive." He had drawn The Great Wave, but he didn't believe he was finished -- he thought that he was still just beginning to get started.

And he wasn't finished with his ocean motif, either. Please check out his Mt Fuji At Sea, done in 1834 at the age of 75.

Nadiia Bashynska/Peter Beaumont (CAN)

ETA2: we do use inches/miles in poetic ways ("he was lost in thought/miles away" or "his lips were a bare inch away").

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YES