On Religion: Why Media Maven Bob Briner Remains Relevant
(ANALYSIS) Decades later, it's hard to remember how much “Chariots of Fire” shocked the Hollywood establishment, with soaring box office totals and four wins at the 1982 Oscars — including a Best Picture win for producer David Puttnam.
The film’s focus on two legendary runners — one Christian and the other Jewish — also pleased believers who rarely applaud how faith is handled on screen.
The movie's success sent Bob Briner to London, seeking Puttnam's private office. Briner was an Emmy winner and global sports media trailblazer who worked with tennis legend Arthur Ashe, MLB pitcher Dave Dravecky, Michael Jordan and many others.
“Naive soul that I am, I believed that the success of ‘Chariots’ would trigger a spate of similar films,” Briner wrote in “Roaring Lambs,” a 1993 book that was popular with college students and among media professionals. “It seemed to me that the movie moguls would see that a great, uplifting story ... backed up by stirring music and produced on a reasonable budget would be a formula for success after success.”
That didn’t happen. A melancholy Puttnam had stacks of potential scripts.
“He was looking, but not finding,” wrote Briner. During his career, Puttnam had “shown an affinity for producing quality, uplifting, affirming, even Christian-oriented movies, but no one was bringing him scripts of quality.”
Briner, who died of cancer in 1999, was an articulate evangelical and supporter of Christian education and all kinds of projects in mass media, the fine arts, business and print storytelling. I met him through his efforts to meet journalists who were active in various Christian traditions while working in mainstream news.
Now, the Briner Institute is publishing a new edition of “Roaring Lambs” while seeking discussions of the many ways the internet era has changed the media marketplace. The internet has created new ways for religious believers to reach mainstream consumers — but also tempts many to settle for niche-media Christian products.
“Our churches are growing. Our colleges are full. Subscriptions and sales are up at our magazine- and book-publishing companies. And our broadcast media continue to bring our own music and teaching into our homes," wrote Briner in 1993. "Our subculture is healthy. ... It’s the world that needs help.”
It was past time for a different approach to culture, he noted.
“Instead of ... hanging around the fringes of our culture, we need to be right smack dab in the middle of it.”
Today, many churches are declining while others are growing. Religious mass media projects have, in the internet era, faced the same challenges as their secular counterparts. Hollywood is struggling to please consumers in a marketplace bitterly divided by the same kinds of cultural and moral issues that divide voters.
In the new edition's forward, philosopher Douglas Groothuis of Cornerstone University stressed the need for believers to be candid in rapidly changing times.
“As I write in the summer of 2024, two longstanding evangelical colleges have closed in the past three months and recently several evangelical seminaries have significantly downsized, even to the point of selling physical campuses," he wrote. Meanwhile, “Pornography has exploded online,” “popular culture is increasingly vulgar in the extreme,” “occultic spirituality (even Satanism) is celebrated,” crime statistics are up, drug laws are being liberalized and gender confusion is rampant.
Briner would have acknowledged all of those realities while continuing to challenge Christian artists and entrepreneurs to do the hard, humbling work required to reach new audiences.
Consider, for example, “The Chosen,” a crowdfunded drama about Jesus and his disciples that has reached 200 million viewers — at least a third of whom are non-Christians, according to viewer surveys — through streaming services and in select releases in movie theaters.
This summer, the multi-year series hit the top of the chart on the Apple TV app store and was second on the mobile iOS app store.
“Bob would admire that ‘The Chosen’ is reaching a global audience, for sure. He would applaud the high production values and, especially, the quality of the writing. He would certainly applaud how people are responding to it," said Steve Taylor, a veteran rock singer-songwriter and filmmaker who teaches at Lipscomb University in Nashville.
Briner never “jumped ship” and opposed efforts in Christian media. Instead, he kept insisting that it wasn't enough to merely preach to the choir, said Taylor. “He always wanted to know what happens next.”
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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.