Forgive me, but religious art isn’t what it used to be. There have been periods of history in which the Christian faith produced the most inspiring and sublime art of the day. Today, however, is not that day.

I will hasten to admit that the fledgling “freethought movement” has yet to produce a great deal of art of any kind, much less art of an inspiring quality. But it’s still in its infancy. In time I expect that to change. Certainly it must, if it is ever going to move beyond talking heads and pithy memes. Art appeals to people at a deeper level than argumentation, which is part of why I love movies so much. They can be a powerful tool for communicating ideas and evoking emotions. I look forward to the day when the larger secularist movement wakes up to the need for good music, movies, poetry and other forms of art to communicate the ideas of humanism even to point of influencing my cultural setting, the Bible Belt.

Christian filmmakers have been working on this feverishly since Mel Gibson’s The Passion raked in $600 million at the box office. Every month it seems a new religiously targeted film comes out in theaters as even Hollywood takes notice of how little money it takes to make a movie that Christians will flock to see in massive numbers. Struggling churches desperate for cultural validation will purchase tickets to the same awful film four weekends in a row in order to feel like they’re still relevant to the rest of the world.

But what these movie makers are producing is mostly crap, honestly. I mean it’s really terrible. The writing is hollow, the directing is lame, the acting is wooden, and even the music is cheesy and predictable. For most of these flicks it feels like they haven’t moved far beyond the hour-long melodramas of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, which were always just thinly veiled vehicles for reciting the plan of salvation yet again, in almost the exact same words. I’ve already written a blistering review of the cinematic train wreck that is God’s Not Dead, and I’ve also written my thoughts about learning they’ve gone and made a movie that champions monogamy that’s loosely based on the story of King Solomon, who the Bible tells us faithfully loved around a thousand women over the course of his lifetime. SMH. That movie releases in select theaters today, as a matter of fact.

A Better Movie

But in a limited number of theaters today another movie is being released entitled Believe Me. Unlike some of the other screenings I came upon, this film caught my attention because the guys who made it have already gone beyond what other Christian filmmakers have done in their previous projects, and frankly they’re just a lot cooler. I had a hunch they would make something far more fun to watch than anything else put out by religious filmmakers up until this point. Take a look at the trailer and I think you’ll see what I mean.

I previewed the movie this week and you know what? This movie did not suck. And that in itself is an accomplishment. The music was cool, the plot is amusing, and even the characters were believable with the forgivable exception of only a couple of overactors (hey, for a Christian flick, that’s fantastic). And despite what the promoters of the film insist, this is indeed a Christian film, despite the infiltration of three different curse words (gasp) and a montage of college kids partying it up at a kegger. The climactic epiphany in the movie’s turning point is all about the Jesus. The love interest (Callie) who arguably represents the most consistently devout evangelical Christian, tells our opportunistic protagonist:

If your hope’s not in Jesus, maybe you are hopeless.

Of course, I know this mentality well. It says the world is messed up beyond repair unless something miraculous happens. It asserts that the Christian religion is the only solution for what ails the world, and by implication all other ways of looking at the world are wrong. There isn’t any non-condescending way to put that, although these guys did a bang-up job of surrounding it with an entertaining story that poked more fun at Christianity itself than it did at anything else. That fact alone makes me a fan of this movie. Like these guys, I spent more of my time during my Christian days running with people who displayed enough self-awareness to know when their own culture was being stupid. The ability to poke fun at your own tribe is a sign of intellectual health, and I’d like to celebrate it wherever I find it.

Christians Poking Fun at Themselves

One of the most entertaining elements of this film was the way they satirized the narcissistic, overly-stylized contemporary worship culture. I used to do a bit of this myself during my Christian days, and I’ve seen a few funny examples of it on the web recently as well:

I laughed out loud at the way the narcissistic worship leader in the film pared his lyrics down until they were nothing more than singing the name of Jesus 16x to acoustic accompaniment. I remember one of my religion professors at the Baptist college I attended quipping about the praise and worship movement more than 20 years ago:

There’s a simple formula that’s as easy as 1-2-3: 1 word + 2 syllables = 3 hours

It appears that not much has changed, and they’re still poking fun at the same basic tendencies after two decades, only now the styles have updated a bit and have grown more hipster. One guy laid out the updated formula like this:

While this kind of self-aware parodying of one’s own culture isn’t new to me, I still find it refreshing to encounter, particularly after having forced myself to sit through God’s Not Dead. Both movies caricature someone, but while GND caricatures people outside the Christian tribal identity, Believe Me caricatures their own culture. And that right there is what I find that’s valuable about a movie like this. It’s not just that the movie is an order of magnitude cooler than the usual religious fare; it’s more about the importance of not taking yourself so seriously that you can’t poke fun at your own weirdness. There’s something eminently healthy about being able to critically analyze your own influences. If there’s something you can’t make fun of, then it’s above questioning, and in my opinion nothing good comes of that attitude.

A Legitimate Critique Which Will Sadly Be Ignored by Many

This movie highlights a real-life problem among churches today, namely its glaring lack of accountability. That goes for administrative decisions, for ethical choices, and for financial activities as well. The main characters in this film can milk the church for hundreds of thousands of dollars because they’re just so very trusting. Religious indoctrination, particularly of the fundamentalist and charismatic types, teaches believers to follow instructions without questioning the men up on the stage. Their learned docility makes them a ripe target for charlatans of every kind. Granted, I feel like I grew up around well-educated, sophisticated people. But I have to agree that even among them there is a tendency to trust authority figures because they are supposed to somehow be speaking for God. The main characters of this film show us how easy that makes a crowd of Christians to manipulate. I think their point is valid, and I hope more Christians become self-aware about that element in their culture.

The movie also demonstrates how men who have reputations to protect will cover up even illegal dealings in order to save face for the organizations they help lead. It’s very easy to adopt the rationalizations which say that God’s reputation is at stake, and that scandals should be tucked neatly away and forgotten in the interest of preserving a legacy. That happens an awful lot, and the news of abuse among evangelicals and fundamentalists has been rolling in like the tide over the last few months. At some point people need to wise up to the tactics used by men who demonstrate a high need for control. They’ll use Bible verses as easily as anything else in order to inspire the necessary obeisance. This movie did a good job of showing what that process might look like in real life.

In the end I found this film really enjoyable. I laughed out loud at several moments in the movie, and I think Christians and non-Christians alike should be able to do the same. I’d like to hope that enough Christians will go to see movies like this instead of seeing the vapid alternatives they’ve dumped so much cash into already. But I don’t know that I can reasonably hope for that. There’s a reason movies like God’s Not Dead sell so well to the evangelical crowd: It tells them exactly what they’re expecting to hear. It challenges nothing about the way they already think about the world and about people outside their own group. Believe Me goes way beyond that and shows how easily a person can just coast through the motions of the Christian religion without ever internalizing the ethical heart of that faith (that’s an interesting discussion to have in itself, some other time perhaps).

In fact, forget all that. I know for a fact that a majority of evangelicals will not be able to watch this movie. You know why? Because it has curse words in it. End of story. A lot of families and churches will object to the (very sparse) language used in a couple of key moments in the story. The words were perfectly appropriate for the characters and for the context of the scene, but for many Christians that just won’t matter. Many religious people define a “Christian movie” in terms of its ability to not utilize any swear words at all. It’s a mechanical, reductionist way to approach art, yes; but it’s the way a lot of them do it. They make movies boring because they have to remove all the objectionable content from them until they become unrealistic and canned. I hate it, but it’s the way it is.

I’d love to see more movies like this come out of Christian film making circles. I hope people will encourage that industry in a more human direction, but I don’t know that I have any reason to expect that. People who spend large chunks of time in church come to prefer what Brian McLaren once called “the massage of familiar words.” They like to hear people take what they already think and restate it in entertaining but non-threatening ways. Movies like this come awfully close to breaking that formula. For that reason I don’t know if I should expect it to get the success it deserves. One can hope, though.