I Don't Even Know

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.

I was raised catholic, born in Poland, so the majority of people born here are raised catholic.

I have noticed a shift in religious media and religious approach to media happening in the last years.

When my parents were young being catholic was a kind of rebellion against the goverment, because the soviet regime didn't like the church. So even the rebellious teenagers declared themselves as catholic, more culturally than anything, they weren't very strict about their religious practice. However, after Poland got its independence the church started playing a big role in politics. Some of that was a sort of "f you" to the regime, and some of that was the church claiming they helped overthrow the soviets, a lot of credit was given to John Paul II (and there is definetly some truth in that, don't get me wrong). Over the years the church tied itself very closely to the right wing parties (especially PIS, law and order party). And along with that, the approach to media started looking a bit more "protestant". I have a very religious family and I have noticed that those who are religious and support PIS are definetly more strict with the art they like, to the point were media has to affirm their beliefs or it's bad. The politicians also started to talk about art a lot these last few years, there are a lot of discussions about what books kids should read at school, even propositions of throwing some absolute classics out of the curriculum because they're not religious or patriotic enough. Last year they suddenly got interested in painting and bashed the winner of one of the biggest painting competitions basically for being trans and making art they consider "degenerate" (and yeah, I am aware how ironic it is to say stuff like that in POLAND of all places, knowing history does not make my life easier these days)

This is the quiz and I did not come up with it, credit goes to @iswearbyalltheflowers on this post.

Well. They did, at the time. 

We have records from centuries -- even millennia back -- of scholars at the time complaining that these new-fangled "books" were turning their students lazy; why, they can barely recite any poems in their entirety any more! And there are people still alive today who remember life before widely available calculators, and some of them complained -- then and now -- that bringing them into schools dealt a ruinous blow to math education, and now these young people don't even know how to use a slide-rule.

And the thing is:

They weren't wrong.

The human brain can, when called on, perform incredible feats of memorization. Bards and skalds of old could memorize and recite poems and epics that were thousands of lines long. This is a skill that is largely lost to most of the population. It's not needed any more, and so it is not practiced.

There is a definite generational gap, between the people who were trained on slide-rules and reckoning and the generation that was taught on calculators. There came a year, when that first generation grew up and entered the workforce, when you suddenly started encountering grown adults who could not do math -- not even the very basic arithmetic needed to count down from one hundred. I would go into a shop, buy an item for sixteen dollars, give the cashier a twenty and a one because I want a fiver back, and have them stare at the money in incomprehension -- what do? They don't know how to subtract sixteen from twenty-one. They don't know how to calculate a fifteen-percent tip. They did not exercise the parts of their brain that handle this, because they always had a calculator to do it for them.

Nowadays, newer point-of-sale machines compensate for this; they will automatically calculate and dispense the change, no subtraction necessary on the part of the operator. Nowadays everyone carries a phone, and every phone carries a calculator, so if you need to do these calculations, the tool is right there. As more and more transactions go electronic and card, and cash fades further and further out of daily life, these situations happen less and less; it's not a problem that most people can't do math (until it is.)

The people who complained that these tools-that-replace-thinking would reduce the ability of the broad population to exercise these cognitive skills weren't wrong. It's simply that, as the pace of life changed, the environment changed so that in day-to-day life these skills were largely unnecessary.

So.

Isn't this, ChatGPT and Generative AI, just the latest in a long series of tool-replaces-thought that has, broadly, worked out well for us? What's different about this?

Well, two things are different.

1) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the cognitive skill that it replaced was a discrete and, on a day-to-day basis, unnecessary outlay of energy. Most people don't need to memorize thousands of lines of poetry, or anything else for that matter. Most people don't need to do more than cursory levels of math on a day to day basis. 

This, however, is different. The cognitive skill that is being obsoleted here is more than "how to write essay" or "identify what is the capital of Rhode Island." It encompasses the entire field of being able to generate new thoughts; of being able to consider and analyze new information; of being able to follow logical trains to their conclusions; of being able to order your thoughts to construct rational arguments; or indeed of being able to express yourself in any structured way. These cognitive tools are not occasional use; they are every day, all the time. 

2) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the tool was good at what it did.

Calculators may have replaced reckoning, but calculators are also pretty good at what they do. The calculator will, as long as you give the right input, give the right answer. ChatGPT cannot be relied on to do this. ChatGPT will tell you, confidently and unhesitantly and dangerously, that 2+2=5, and it will not care that it is wrong.

Books may have replaced memorization, and books certainly could be wrong; but a fact, once in a book, is pretty stable and steady. There is not a risk that the Guy Who Owns All The Encylopedias might wake up one day and decide -- to pick a purely hypothetical example -- that the Gulf of Mexico is called something else, and suddenly all the encyclopedias say that.

Generative AI fails on both these counts. It fails on every count. It's inaccurate, it's unethical, it's unreliable, it's wrong.

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I remember some time ago seeing someone say (it was a video about medieval footwear, actually) that "humans have a great energy-saving system: if we can be lazy about something, we are."

This is not a ethical judgment about humans; this is how life works. Animals -- including humans -- will not do something the hard way if they can do it the easy way; this basic principle of conservation of resources is universal and morally neutral. Cognition is biologically expensive, and though our environment is not what it once was, every person still goes through every day choosing what is valuable enough to expend resources on and what is not.

Because of this, I don't know if there is any solution, here. I think pushing back against the downhill flush of the-easy-way-out is a battle both uphill and against the tide.

So I'll just close with this warning, instead: