Maybe Christian filmmaking is on the verge of a mainstream middle

This summer brought a curious announcement in the history of Christian filmmaking: 21 years after his hit biblical epic The Passion of the Christ became one of the most important touchstones in religious filmmaking history, Mel Gibson’s long-rumored sequel finally was announced.

The Resurrection of the Christ — now split into two parts — and slated for release March 26 and May 6, 2027.

So much has happened in the two decades since Gibson’s first film became the most successful R-rated film of all time (prior to the release of Deadpool and Wolverine in 2024). We’ve endured five presidential administrations, multiple wars, continued polarization and radicalization, Gibson’s career was damaged by numerous public controversies, and Christianity’s relationship with American politics has rapidly warped into our modern debates over “Christian nationalism.”

Most notably from a filmmaking perspective, The Passion of the Christ marked the beginning of a new approach to “biblical” filmmaking. While Hollywood followed its success with a few large projects like New Line Cinema’s The Nativity Story and History Channel’s The Bible, independent filmmakers saw its success as an opportunity to create a parallel economy of low-budget faith-based films.

This marked the beginning of faith-based films becoming a counter-cultural weapon.

God’s Not Dead, Fireproof, and Facing the Giants were produced by a generation of filmmakers — many of them pastors rather than professional moviemakers — competing with mainstream Hollywood with cheap, topical and occasionally controversial little films that drew in sizable audiences for huge profits. God’s Not Dead grossed $64.7 million on a $2 million budget, sparking a franchise that released its fourth sequel less than a year ago.

Critically, most of these films were reviled by mainstream film critics, who saw the films as condescending, hollow and preachy. Among evangelical Christians, though, these rejections were interpreted merely as hostility from a secular culture attacking their values, rather than objectively evaluating the art. And to a degree, they were correct. Several of the films, like Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas, were funded by right-wing groups and touched on hot-button partisan topics or culture war battles like “the War on Christmas”.

Critics often were morally reviled by these films, but the films also were flawed and unimpressive to mainstream eyes. The same could be said for Passion of the Christ, which drew heavy criticism for its questionable depiction of Jewish characters. However, Christians continued to watch these films as a silent protest against mainstream culture.

Hollywood’s Golden Era

This hasn’t always been the case. While mainstream biblical filmmaking effectively ceased to be following the culture war battles of the 1970s, Hollywood produced dozens of big-budget religious epics at the height of its Golden Age. This was partially a way to circumnavigate self-imposed censorship standards within the film industry, by being able to point to biblical accuracy as a means to depict controversial materials, but it also reflected a mainstream culture where public profession of Christianity was more common. At a time when 91% of Americans identified as Christian, Bible epics like Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments, King of Kings, The Robe, and The Greatest Story Ever Told felt at home in American society.

Even at that time, though, open evangelization in films wasn’t common. Linus’ famous sermon, drawing from the Gospel of Luke in A Charlie Brown Christmas, was considered unconventionally evangelistic when it was released in 1965.

The great American evangelist Billy Graham became a notable exception to this rule, though. Starting in 1951, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association opened a subsidiary called World Wide Pictures to produce and distribute evangelistic films. With the studio’s final release in 2003, it had produced more than 130 films in five decades. Most of these were screened in church fellowship halls, not in traditional movie theaters.

Then we were Left Behind

As mainstream biblical filmmaking became less common going into the 1980s, American evangelicals took the lead in attempting to spread the gospel through new media formats.

Among the leaders of this were the apocalyptic novelists Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. Borrowing heavily from premillennial dispensationalist theology, their popular Left Behind franchise became one of the most success franchises of all time, with 16 novels selling more than 65 million copies. The series also was adapted into five films between 2000 and 2023.

The art world of the 1990s also witnessed the rise of one of the most successful evangelical painters in modern history. The late Thomas Kinkade became one of the most popular and financially successful painters of his time, producing highly sentimental landscape paintings loved as inspirational by some and loathed as too sentimental by others.

Kinkade, however, developed a rancid public reputation due to his arrogance, hostility toward the art world and questionable business ethics. Despite his open evangelism and describing himself as “the painter of light,” he proudly declares himself “the most controversial artist in the world.”

However, the success of Left Behind, Passion of the Christ, God’s Not Dead and Kinkade’s works resulted in a strange effect. They created a market without a center. Christian art came to vacillate violently between the sublime and the ridiculous. It would only exist at two extremes.

On one hand, there were the great Christian artists of antiquity like Dante, Milton, Michelangelo and Salvador Dalí, crafting brilliant works of poetry and art at the height of human achievement. On the other hand, there were American evangelicals and TradCaths like Kinkade, LaHaye, Jenkins and Gibson. They were unapologetic fundamentalists and controversialists, making sentimental and borderline propagandistic kitsch for a starving audience of Christian consumers and openly condemning their haters and critics as godless or going on drunken antisemitic rants.

Between these two extremes, there was almost nothing. There was only the classical art you’d see at the Vatican Museum and the canva prints you could buy at Hobby Lobby.

Dreamworks’ The Prince of Egypt came out in 1998 and became the only mainstream faith-based filmmaking to sit comfortably and successfully in the middle market, neither being an ascendant masterpiece nor broadly despised as religious kitsch (2007’s Evan Almighty was a possible but largely forgotten exception).

What The Chosen accomplished

It is remarkable, then, to see such a middle market finally has emerged in the past decade. In the past eight years, The Chosen became the most successful work of Christian filmmaking of our time. Licensed by Amazon Prime, Netflix and The CW, this life-of-Christ series grossed $120 million in theatrical screenings, was translated into 50 languages, and currently is on pace to become the first multi-season television show to completely depict the life of Christ, Dallas Jenkin’s underdog project has grown from fan-funded to internationally renowned.

This success has even spawned imitators. Amazon Prime’s House of David, Netflix’s Testament: The Story of Moses, and Fox Nation’s Martin Scorsese Presents The Saints have tried to imitate The Chosen’s success. The Chosen already has multiple spin-off shows planned after its seventh season wraps, including multiple miniseries about the Book of Acts, Joseph and Moses. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Hollywood investors are starting to see biblical filmmaking as viable and profitable, and it continues to turn heads across the industry.

Naturally, the kitschy culture-war approach to Christian filmmaking hasn’t gone away. God’s Not Dead 5: In God We Trust was described by reviewers as “paranoid” and “alarmist”. Even the nominally sympathetic Christian website Common Sense Media dismissed it as a “naive, contradictory drama about faith in politics.” Similarly, several of Angel Studios’ recent films like The Sound of Freedom have taken flak for echoing far-right culture war talking points or pandering to partisan audiences. They also partnered with The Daily Wire for the release of 2024’s The Sound of Hope. The studio’s leaders told Newsweek in June Hollywood continues to have an “allergic reaction to faith content.”

The market for Christian art is still moving sluggishly, likely as a result of Christianity’s diminishment within American culture. While its statistical decline appears to be slowing, Christianity remains at the center of America’s ongoing culture wars, with the Trump administration publicly declaring itself on the side of conservative Christianity. Mainline Protestant churches are staring down demographic collapse, while many of America’s largest denominations and megachurch leaders are battling public ethics scandals.

The fact that The Chosen has broken out as it has, in a country where Christianity is on the decline, is remarkable, with many nonreligious people I’ve met confessing they enjoy it. Yet this month’s release of The Light of the World only grossed $3 million at the box office, reminding us not every Christian project is going to hit the target of mainstream success.

Perhaps the greatest irony is this: Dallas Jenkins, creator of The Chosen, is the son of Jerry B. Jenkins, co-creator of the Left Behind franchise. The younger Jenkins produced a show that has broken out in the mainstream in ways his father’s franchise never did.

 

Tyler Hummel is a Wisconsin-based freelance critic and journalist, a member of the Music City Film Critics Association, a regular film and literature contributor at Geeks Under Grace, and was the 2021 College Fix Fellow at Main Street Nashville.