Why Do Christian Films Act Like The World Is Getting Worse?
(ANALYSIS) With the world around us getting better, why do so many faith-based films insist the world is getting worse? And what does that say about the religious right in America?
Many of us who grew up watching Christian films know how so many of them acted like America was a dystopia, or at least five seconds away from becoming one.
For Christian dystopia films there was the “Left Behind” series starring Kirk Cameron, which was about the rapture occurring in the present day; The “God’s Not Dead” movies, which portrayed modern-day America as one where Christians were constantly at risk of being harassed by professors or legally prosecuted for their faith; “The Time Changer” which showed a man from the colonial times transported to today and being horrified by how much worse the world has gotten, as well as lesser known films like “6: The Mark Unleashed” and “Persecuted.”
This trend has not slowed down. “God’s Not Dead” has just had its fourth movie (with its fifth set to debut this year), and “Left Behind” just had its latest installment come out in theaters. Finally, the new faith-based supernatural thriller “Nefarious,” includes a conversation between a psychiatrist and a demon where the demon argues — successfully — that the demons are right now winning the battle against humanity.
The irony of this is that, according to available data, none of this is true. As I recently wrote for Relevant Magazine, the world is not getting worse — it’s getting better.
Poverty around the world is going down, racism is going down, violence is going down, sexism is going down. Literacy is going up, millennials are richer than their parents were at this time in their lives. Religious freedom arguably has more legal protections now than at any time in our history.
Our ability to protect our world from the effects of climate change is growing so fast that climate change will only slow the improvement of our lives, not make it worse.
Further, although both Hollywood and Christian films blame our fundamental Western institutions for the problems in the world, the exact opposite is actually true.
Our fundamental institutions of democracy — free market capitalism, free press, separation of church and state, religious liberty, freedom of speech and freedom to protest — far from being the source of everything bad in our world, are the main reasons that things are getting better the way they are.
That’s why both Hollywood’s insistence that in order to save our world we need to get rid of capitalism and religion and the new Christian right’s insistence that we throw out liberal democracy for Christian nationalism are both misguided.
The rise in depression and anxiety (and the corresponding suicides) are really the main consistent metrics by which society is getting worse. And that’s partly because we falsely believe the world is getting worse, a belief faith-based films are perpetuating.
Happily, I had the recent privilege of talking to the writer-director team behind both “Nefarious” and the first two “God’s Not Dead” movies for the ReligionUnplugged.com podcast and asked them about why this discrepancy between the world as it is and the world as they portray it.
Chuck Konzelman argued that deciding whether the world is getting better or worse sort of just depends on what standards you’re using:
“When you talk about the statement of infant mortality decreasing, it really depends on how you define infant mortality. I would define infant mortality to include those who are electively terminated, those who are aborted, which means that we’re at the highest infant mortality rates in all of recorded history.
“I believe the one place where you can absolutely argue that the traditional world had failings was in racism, and racism and bigotry, absolutely inexcusable in the West, the way certain classes of people were treated, owned, sold as property, and the rest of it. And overcoming that, to the greatest extent possible, is the one great advance that I see.
“I think it’s impossible to argue that life hasn’t become more comfortable. We’re about to move to Texas. Moving to Texas in an era before air conditioning to me would be unthinkable. In the long history of humanity, air conditioning is a pretty recent development. But as sort of the part of the theme of this podcast, when you’re talking about Religion Unplugged, the decline in faith and the decline in the degree or intensity with which faith is practiced, we would hold that, that is a strong negative.
“We believe that post-Christian Europe, which is truly post-Christian now, is in a worse shape than it was. The statistics as far as the mental health and sense of wellbeing, we tend to bear that up. If we’re not very careful, we’re going to follow in that as a culture. If we’re not very careful, we’re going to make the same mistake regarding self extermination that Northern and Western Europe are doing now. Eastern Europe is already lost. It is done. The demographic time bomb has actually already exploded, not because the wave of people is dying, but because they’ve aged ahead of the reproductive years. So now it’s just a question of how long it takes for the tree of fall. If there was a malicious evil looking to destroy a society, we believe that a number of these moves would be moves that malicious entity would look to undertake.”
The argument by Konzelman is actually a pretty good one. To argue that the world is getting worse, one would have to be a conservative Christian. If abortion is murder, then the murder rate hasn’t gone down in society, it’s gone up. And even though Roe is overturned, more people support abortion now than ever before. Gender identity and sexual identity ideology is confusing and mutilating a generation of children. And although there are more legal protections for religious freedom than ever before, there’s more cultural force against Christians having traditional sexual values, which means you can get fired or sued for using the wrong pronouns now when you weren’t before. People are having so few children that a population collapse could be on the horizon. And faith in God is dying out in the West in a way that it might become irreversible in a few generations.
So if you’re primarily secular or liberal, it’s perplexing that you would think the world is getting worse. But for a religious conservative? It’s a lot more understandable.
That said, even with all the things that are getting worse, that still doesn’t change the fact that a lot of things are getting better — as I pointed out at the beginning.
A truthful portrayal of the world would shows the ways that the world is getting better and worse, rather than give the impression that we are experiencing overwhelming decline or — even more absurdly — that we are living in dystopian territory.
It also begs the question, if religious conservatives do have good reason to argue things are overwhelmingly getting worse, why do they feel like they have to lie or exaggerate the problems in our world to persuade us that it is? Why do they have to lie about the level of discrimination that Christian college students face in the classroom? Why do they make movies about the government trying to ban home-schooling? Why don’t they make movies instead about transgenderism? Or about population collapse? Or about the rise in depression as we move further away from God?
Moreover, the ways that the world is getting worse, it’s more typically ways that we as individuals can do something about. We can choose to live in more tight knit communities, get married, have children, be closer to God. Yet most Christian movies focus on society getting worse in ways that involve government coercion and things that are out of our control unless we vote for the right people in office. Why?
My cynical side says many purposefully exaggerate because they know if they showed both the good and the bad of the modern world, honestly, it wouldn’t scare people enough to motivate them to vote the “right way” in the next election cycle.
Sure, things are bad in some ways, but they’re getting better in others. Similarly to how (some) climate activists exaggerate the very real dangers of climate change to create sufficient alarm and motivate political action. In both cases, if you told the truth — some things are getting worse but a lot of things are getting better, and there’s likely no doomsday scenario coming — how likely would people be to drop everything to support your cause?
My more thoughtful side believes that Christian filmmakers — like everyone else — are telling stories not about the way the world is but the way it feels. Nobody is literally banning someone from being a Christian — but it feels like they are. The cultural pressure on Christians often feels like legal pressure. The institutional pressure on conservative values often feels like pressure on Christian values. And they want to tell stories that “wake people up” to that reality that they experience.
But Christians are not called to live by what we feel, but by the truth. So Christian art should reflect the truth as well. Religious conservatives have a lot that they can critique in the culture, like “Nefarious” did expertly regarding things like abortion and euthanasia. These will be a lot more powerful and, perhaps more importantly, a lot more truthful.
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.com, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at his website josephholmesstudios.com.