Something I wondered yesterday is: why is The Exorcist, a film about heroic Catholic priests fighting a demon, based on a book by a devout Catholic inspired by historic Catholic exorcisms, and with multiple Catholic priests advising on the film, not considered "Christian media"?
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.
Tagging @wariteres (Catholic who grew up Evangelical) for her opinion.
I mean The Exorcist is certainly Christian media, but like does media being religious make it less serious or artistic than secular media? I was reading Undine a couple months ago which is considered the first fantasy novella and it’s interested in a Christian moral teaching but it was still both interesting to read and fun. You could potentially even argue that all epics from around the world are religious media. Certainly some Ancient Greeks considered the Iliad a work of moral teaching and most Greek plays were preformed at religious festivals so it wouldn’t surprise if The Orestes cycle counts as a religious story.
It’s an interesting rabbit hole.
I mean The Exorcist is certainly Christian media, but like does media being religious make it less serious or artistic than secular media?
Of course it doesn't inherently do so. The problem is that the contemporary Evangelical media industry makes art for the sole purpose of pandering to people's religious beliefs, and so unsurprisingly it ends up bad. Using the comparison to exploitation films again, there are plenty of films I like that include explicit sex and graphic violence (I'm a horror movie fan), but films that were made for the purpose of including explicit sex and graphic violence are (mostly) trashy nonsense only appealing to a niche market.
I sit at a weird intersection here, so my two cents might be worth putting in.
The Churches of Christ are sort-of evangelical but not really, so we don't fully share in the whole separatist culture thing. I was raised to be comfortable with the idea that using your talents glorified God even if you were making something that wasn't explicitly religious. There isn't anything necessarily wrong with a VeggieTales or two, but neither is it a necessity.
But there is a demand for modernized religious music, and the CoC has hung on, at least in part, to its interpretation that worship music is meant to be a capella, which does not comport with any variety of "Christian pop". So around the time I was in college there was a whole abortive push to create popular a capella Christian music that somehow sounded like pop without actually incorporating any instruments. On the strict level of individual singing, it wasn't completely bad (if you have the slightest amount of talent, singing in church your entire life helps develop it), and in my opinion at the time there were a few bangers. But the vast majority of it was to "Christian media" as "Christian media" is to popular media in general.
For my part, I prefer the example of Weird Al. (Who was, until recently, in the Churches of Christ, though I think he left a few years back. Has no particular reason to talk about it, so he doesn't.)
Found on X:
