In the past five years, 21 Christian films have opened in wide release, meaning in more than 600 cinemas in the United States. All 21 are rated as “rotten” on Rotten Tomatoes; 16 fail to crest the 30% ratio of positive to negative reviews. And yet, Sony, Fox and other studios have established divisions for the express purpose of faith-based cinema. Why? Because these movies are produced with a different mindset than your standard narrative fare – and each of the 21 films made substantial profits.

These Christploitation pictures – exploitation movies for the youth group crowd – replace the sex and violence of the grindhouse with milquetoast platitudes, weepy-eyed togetherness and lens flare so bright you’d think Jesus was manning a lighthouse. However, the subgenres of exploitation (like blaxploitation or sexploitation, Christploitation films can be war movies, sports flicks or any other genre) share more common ground than you may initially think. Like other exploitation fare, Christploitation films are built to serve their niche (in this case, with evangelical homilies) for maximum financial turnaround.

Widely regarded as the first blaxploitation film, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song cost $150,000 ($50,000 borrowed from Bill Cosby) and made $4m at the box office. These bumper profits inspired studios to make more militant, empowered, even angry films with black casts aimed at African American audiences. Sexploitation cult favourite Beyond the Valley of the Dolls succeeded in even more spectacular style: it ultimately pulled in more than $40m with a budget smaller than Donald Trump’s childhood allowance (namely, $900,000).

Compare the economics of the religious flicks with more mainstream fare. So far Bridge of Spies, the Spielberg-directed, Tom Hanks-starring cold war tale, has made almost enough to recoup its production budget of $40m. That’s with a major movie star and director, a script by the Coen brothers, and overwhelmingly positive critical backing. It’s sitting about third in relation to the other movies in theaters right now, only behind Goosebumps and The Martian, and has yet to break even.

Set this against Heaven Is For Real’s $100m gross last year against a budget of $12m or God’s Not Dead’s $64m against a $2m budget, and you’ll understand why even The Asylum, the company that brought you Sharknado and its inescapably silly sequels, opened Faith Films to release religious flicks in between cranking out mockbusters.

The landscape has changed. Social media campaigns target middle-aged, middle-class Christians through data analysis of Twitter, Facebook – even Spotify and Pandora. If you follow a Christian celebrity (think Duck Dynasty) or listen to Christian bands, you’ll be shown ads for these movies. Pure Flix Entertainment, the company behind God’s Not Dead (God’s Not Dead 2 is coming next year, sadly not titled God’s Still Not Dead), has led the way in this grassroots marketing sphere. It has struck gold again with Woodlawn, about a high school football team’s spiritual awakening. The film has already exceeded 1m likes on Facebook, about 700,000 more than The Martian.

The exploitation game is the same – target a niche and make as sloppy a product as you need to make a quick buck – but the audience has shifted. Today, if you’re not making blockbuster spectacles, you’re typically not making theatrical profits – unless you let Jesus take the wheel. Woodlawn, which has taken some $10m over three weekends after its first weekend, seems on pace to become another success story.

Woodlawn is not a good movie. The faith-and-football film’s high Rotten Tomatoes score (90% and climbing) seems mainly thanks to the low expectations of its reviewers. “Sure, it’s an evangelical Remember the Titans, but at least [directors] the Erwin brothers have made an effort,” says the LA Times. “Better than most ‘Christian’ films,” raves Christianity Today.

In Woodlawn, scenes exist to set up speeches and most speeches are sermons. Locker room go-get-em’s, porch proselytizing and gymnasium prayer meetings begin abruptly with as few lines of dialogue as possible until they get to the juicy soliloquies that take up 90% of the film’s two hours. Like any exploitation film, the framework is just for show – most of the story beats come lifted straight out of the aforementioned Remember the Titans playbook. Bricks through windows, the coach’s cherub-cheeked child, even the initial racial tension on the practice field lean dangerously close to plagiaristic. It doesn’t help that Nic Bishop seems to be cast as the coach based solely on his passing resemblance to Friday Night Lights’s Kyle Chandler.

But Woodlawn doesn’t care about story, plot or character. Otherwise, subplots wouldn’t suddenly appear and drop off, our main character (star running back Tony, played by the admirably capable first-timer Caleb Castille) would make decisions, and the film would retain some sort of dramatic interest past the opening 10 minutes. Instead, Christploitation recognizes that its audience is here for the feel-good “yes lords” and “amens”, not for traditional storytelling or even cinematic entertainment. That means the rival teams and tense races come together easily as soon as they give themselves to Jesus. Which is good for Christ, but bad for stories, which usually benefit from conflict or drama. Humor too – the tongue-in-cheek laughs commonly found in B-horror movies are absent. Christian films, Woodlawn included, remain painfully serious.

Woodlawn’s Huckabeean racial politics and often incompetent film-making limit its audience to people from enjoying the film purely from faith. You’ve got to be pretty fervent to ignore the terrible editing, the non-sermon scenes that would seem satirical if we hadn’t been spoiled by the technical and artistic proficiency of Key and Peele, laughable dialogue, and one of the most bathetic conclusions in film history.

Then there’s the deep-fried accents, the rival coach with the Joker’s crazy-giggles who shouts “Compassion makes you weak!”, and the cartoonish “sports chaplain” (Sean Astin) who literally takes a stone out of his pocket to hammer in a David v Goliath analogy. Meanwhile, Black Panthers are out-of-nowhere characterized as gang members and thieves, and the audience is patronised by the supposition that football and Bible study can fix racial inequality in a tense, angry America.

The shifting tides of culture, its revolutions and conservative pushbacks, flip the face of transgression every cycle. The cinematic face of exploitation is no longer the nudity, violence, monsters, slashers or wide-open highways of the grindhouse, but comforting faith movies. And with the success of films like Woodlawn, there’ll be a lot more to come.