A Secular Stage: Jerusalem Through the Lens of Hollywood (and Vice Versa)

Films and series with spiritual themes—faith, transcendence, human meaning, the sacred, the holy—seem to have fallen on hard times. Blockbusters like Bing Crosby’s Bells of St. Mary’s or grand biblical epics in bold technicolor have been replaced by nunsploitation horror flicks like the 2024 Immaculate with Sydney Sweeney, anti-traditionalist conspiracy thrillers like the 2024 Conclave with Ralph Fiennes, and secular films that evince little interest in spiritual transcendence. Even films that should have given religion a more central place in their narratives, such as the 2023 Napoleon and Oppenheimer, failed to do so.

It is indeed a problem, but the thorny relationship between Jerusalem and Hollywood (that is, between biblical faith and the motion picture industry) runs deeper than a contemporary anti-Christian bias in Hollywood or a current shortage of Christian screenwriters, as real as these problems are; the problem is as old as cinema itself.

To understand this problem better, we first draw from Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age in order to identify certain features of secularism that put it at odds with Christian belief. Second, we provide a brief and selective overview of religious subjects in American film, including three complicating factors that have arisen since the late 1960s. Third, we conclude with speculating on ways that Christian authors and screenwriters can work constructively in this given milieu. For if Christians today live in a secular age, they live on a secular stage wherein they must learn to play a part without compromising their principles. And the Christian artist has the added challenge of crafting art for a secular stage.

The Secular Terrain

Secularism has at least two qualities that are relevant to contemporary filmmaking. The first is that it has become synonymous with what Charles Taylor calls “exclusive humanism,” an anthropocentric ideology that is entirely immanent, concerned with the here-and-now and closed to transcendence, that is, contact with the divine or the hereafter. It is, Taylor writes, a “purely self-sufficient humanism . . . accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing”[1] Like Christianity, it is concerned with human flourishing, but unlike Christianity, “what makes modern humanism unprecedented . . . is the idea that this flourishing involves no relation to anything higher.”[2]

Living within this “immanent frame” has a significant impact on one’s imagination, which in turn affects one’s ability either to understand and appreciate a story or compose one. Examples include:

· Where a mind exclusively focused on the immanent sees coincidence, a mind open to the transcendent sees providence.
· Where an “immanent mind” sees nature as a disenchanted commodity, the “transcendent mind” sees nature as a created sacramentum, a divine sign that points to God.
· Where an “immanent mind” sees misfortune, the “transcendent mind” sees divine chastisement or some other hidden blessing.
· Where an “immanent mind” looks down and equates his own mind with his brain, the “transcendent mind” looks up and sees his own mind as an image of God.
· And where the “immanent mind” sees death as the end or the ultimate evil, the “transcendent mind” sees it as a new beginning.

Taylor’s distinction between immanence and transcendence has been called into question,[3] for there is a way in which modern man and modern film still seek some kind of transcendence. But if Taylor’s critics are correct, the problem becomes even more complicated, for secularism then becomes a competing search for transcendence, a rival to the Jerusalem-brand of transcendence.

The hypothesis that secularism is in competition with Judeo-Christian transcendence brings us to the second characteristic of secularism: that it is not, as is commonly imagined, a neutral space but a veritable religion unto itself, something that makes a demand on our ultimate allegiance. In his 2011 Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church, William Cavanaugh argues that modernity did not so much weaken religious fervor as transfer it from the church to the nation-state, boxing in the former and making the latter the object of one’s hope, comfort, and meaning. Taken to an extreme, the state then becomes a new and idolatrous religion complete with its own liturgy and call for ultimate sacrifice in the form of fighting in its wars.[4]

Even more interesting is Lesslie Newbigin’s 1988 Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture. Newbigin left his native England in 1936 to become a Presbyterian missionary to India, and when he returned home in 1974, he was in for a surprise, for the England to which he had returned was not the England he had left—he had missed everything from the Blitz to the Beatles. This Rip Van Winkle experience led Newbigin to reflect more deeply on the nature of modern Western culture.

The sociologist Peter Berger had argued that because religion has a “plausibility structure” and secular modernity has none, Christians have difficulty taking root in modernity. Newbigin meets Berger halfway: Christians do indeed have a plausibility structure, but so too does modernity, and there is a conflict between the two precisely because these two structures are not the same. The modern distinction between facts and private beliefs and the privileging of individual autonomy and choice, for example, are at odds with a Christian worldview. Newbigin concludes:

The result is not, as we once imagined, a secular society. It is a pagan society, and its paganism, having been born out of the rejection of Christianity, is far more resistant to the gospel than the pre-Christian paganism with which cross-cultural missions have been familiar. Here, surely, is the most challenging missionary frontier of our time.[5]

American Secularism and Film

Regarding the American experience in particular, the Founding Fathers came up with a unique solution to the problems they faced: a secular government presiding over a Christian society. On one hand, the federal government remains neutral on which religion is the best and cannot establish an official religion on the national level (although, interestingly, the Constitution does allow states to establish an official religion). On the other hand, the consensus of the Founding Fathers is that Christianity is essential to a healthy democracy, for it produces morally responsible citizens capable of self-governance. As President John Adams puts it: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”[6] This belief was a cornerstone of American legal and cultural self-understanding well into the twentieth century. One striking example of this commonplace is from the 1950 Supreme Court decision Zorach vs. Clauson:

We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being. . . . When the state encourages religious instruction or cooperates with religious authorities by adjusting the schedule of public events to sectarian needs, it follows the best of our traditions. For it then respects the religious nature of our people and accommodates the public service to their spiritual needs. To hold that it may not would be to find in the Constitution a requirement that the government show a callous indifference to religious groups. That would be preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe (!)[7]

But despite this robust endorsement of religious belief, there have been two strings attached to the American experiment. The first, as mentioned above, is the privatization of religion, the reduction of religion to one private opinion among many other private opinions. “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god,” Thomas Jefferson declares. “It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”[8] And second, there is a longstanding anti-Catholic vein. The same John Adams who praised a religious citizenry as essential to constitutionalism wrote to Jefferson: “Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion?”[9] Adam’s opinion was far from novel. Locke’s foundational 1689 Letter Concerning Toleration explains Adams’ rationale: the two groups that cannot be part of a modern liberal democracy are atheists because, not believing in God, they will commit perjury with impunity and thus wreak havoc on the judicial system, and those who bow to a foreign potentate, i.e., Papists.[10] The slanderous Immaculate, mentioned earlier, is in fact part of a long tradition. Americans have been liking the nunsploitation genre since at least 1836, when a mentally ill woman (who was ruthlessly cheated by her publishers and died in a poor house) wrote the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed, which gave in lurid detail alleged trysts between priests and nuns in a Montreal convent. And what Philip Jenkins says of American society in general is especially true of Hollywood in particular: it is a place where anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable prejudice.[11]

From its inception, American film has been affected by its secular milieu. Even during the Golden Age of Hollywood, religious films that do justice to the theme of spiritual transcendence without being saccharine or simplistic are relatively rare.[12] Movies such as Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), Boys’ Town (1938), or Going My Way (1944) portray the Catholic Church and its priests favorably and are well-told stories, and they served the admirable purpose of reducing anti-Catholic prejudice; nevertheless, a PR victory for Irish-American Catholics is not coterminous with a mature exploration of the divine mysteries or the scandal of the Cross.

And while there are some respectable biblical epics like The Robe (1953), the genre as a whole was prone to cheap tactics like gratuitous titillating romances and an odd abundance of male nipples. Cecil B. Demille’s 1956 remake of the Ten Commandments was a critical and commercial success, but it strains the great story of the Hebrew exodus out of Egypt through the colander of Lockian liberalism and American history, making it in some sense more about the patriotic defiance of tyranny and the assertion of individual rights than God’s deliverance of the Chosen People so that they could worship him.

And if things were not golden during the Golden Age, they have become more complicated because of three developments since the 1960s. First, recent decades have witnessed a sharp decline in religious identity and the rise of the “Nones” in American society. Fewer people today identify as Christian, and still fewer practice their faith through activities like going to church every Sunday. The most recent statistics suggest that the rise of the Nones has come to an end, but even so, this shift hardly heralds the return of Christendom.[13]

Second, there has been a sharp decline in religious literacy. The two developments are related but not identical. For most of the history of the Christian West, the general populace had a basic familiarity with the symbols and stories of Christianity, even when they were not believers, and this familiarity created a shared language through which all, believer and unbeliever alike, could communicate. In the twentieth century, atheist or agnostic authors could still draw from a rich tradition of biblical literacy in order to articulate their own lack of belief or their criticisms of religious belief, e.g., James Joyce and Cormac McCarthy (although some scholars suspect that he was more religious than he said he was). “To understand something of the Bible and of its transmission in and through English literature,” writes David Lyle Jeffrey, “is to reckon sympathetically with the development of English cultural consciousness in its richest and most coherent levels of expression.”[14] And to peruse Jeffrey’s Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature is to surmise the enormous impact that the King James Bible had on civilization as we know it today. One wonders what will happen to Western culture when this shared lexicon is no longer intelligible, when people no longer know the origins of “an eye for an eye” or the meaning of a mea culpa or even a “Hail Mary” pass. And one wonders how a Christian story will be told when the “archetypal” symbols and images of Christianity, such as the waters of baptism or the Madonna and Child, are alien. A decline in religious literacy arguably reduces the number of tools in an artist’s toolbox.

Third, there has been a significant rise in what the sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning call “Victimhood Culture.”[15] The authors’ thesis is that the embrace of victimology that began in the 1960s and 1970s has given rise to a new “culture of victimhood.” Like any other moral culture, victimhood culture offers a framework for resolving conflict and awarding praise or blame. But in crucial respects, victimhood culture is unlike any other, past or present. Unlike honor cultures, which bestow awards to “winners,” victimhood culture bestows awards to victims or “losers” who have been at the short end of the stick of hegemonic societal influences.

On the surface, such an exchange of reward and blame is congenial to Christian sensibility, for it is the Christian narrative that carves a space for the victim, chiefly in the innocent Victim that is the Person Jesus Christ. But under the influence of the New Left, this concern for the victim has turned into an outcry against the religion that Jesus Christ founded, portraying it as oppressive. This, at least, is the position of René Girard in his monograph I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. As Girard puts it, the Left’s new “totalitarianism” reproaches Christianity “for not defending victims with enough ardor. In Christian history they see nothing but persecutions, acts of oppression, inquisitions.”[16] According to Girard, this new totalitarianism “presents itself as the liberator of humanity,”[17] but in fact it is trying to demonize the one religion that delivers humanity from the darkness.

Girard goes so far as to call the Left’s new victimology a kind of Antichrist, for it apes the teachings of Christ while ushering in something quite different: the Antichrist boasts of bringing to human beings the peace and tolerance that Christianity promised but has failed to deliver. In reality, “what the radicalization of contemporary victimology produces is a return to all sorts of pagan practices: abortion, euthanasia, sexual undifferentiation, Roman circus games galore but without real victims, etc.”[18] Ironically, despite its debt to Christianity, victimhood culture is therefore likely to view Christian films and filmmakers with deep suspicion.

Ways Forward

There are at least three ways in which a filmmaker who wants to depict transcendence can respond to this environment.

The first is playing outside the box, that is, circumventing the conventional ways in which a film or series is usually made in the United States. Mel Gibson’s 2004 The Passion of the Christ and the Go-Fund-Me juggernaut The Chosen are two conspicuous examples of this option.[19] The Passion is especially intriguing, for not only did Gibson break all the rules for making a Hollywood movie in terms of funding and distribution, but the movie itself ignores the usual three-act structure of a Hollywood movie, where act one introduces us to the characters of the story and includes an inciting incident that drives the plot forward, act two depicts the culmination of the crisis begun in act one, and act three brings a resolution to the crisis.[20]

Roughly speaking, act one typically takes up 65% of the movie, act two 30%, and act three 5%. In The Passion, however, act two (which takes up at least 90% of the movie) begins in the opening scene while act three, the Resurrection, lasts 1.5 minutes or 1.25% of the movie. And if there is an act one, it is only through brief flashback scenes interspersed throughout. Nonetheless, this unconventional approach became the highest-grossing independent film of all time, and the highest-grossing R-rated film in the USA until August 2024, when it was surpassed by Deadpool & Wolverine.

Second, a religious filmmaker can play inside the box directly yet artfully. Two examples that come to mind are Of Gods and Men (2010), the true story of Trappist monks in Algeria who must decide between the impoverished community they serve and death by fundamentalist terrorists, and Terence Malick’s 2019 Hidden Life, another true story about Blessed Franz Jägerstätter, a conscientious objector who refused to fight in the armies of the Third Reich. Because both movies were critically acclaimed and fared well at the box office, we may consider both movies a cinematic success. And because both films portrayed the Christian faith of its protagonists honestly and convincingly, we may consider them a Christian success.

Third and finally, a religious filmmaker can play inside the box indirectly and playfully. The first four films of Whit Stillman and Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2016 Hail, Caesar! are examples of this option. All of Stillman’s films have Christian motifs that point to classical virtue and religious faith, but the motifs are hidden in layers of irony and humor. Metropolitan (1990) contains witty conversations about God, tradition, and Jane Austen; Barcelona (1994) has an amusing scene involving dancing while reading the Old Testament; Last Days of Disco (1998) includes a subplot about faith as a possible counterweight to mental illness; and in Damsels in Distress (2011), Lily, after learning that the Catholic Church launched a crusade in the Middle Ages against a group called the Cathars, crackles: “Omigod, the Catholic Church is, like, always bad.” But Lily later learns the hard way that Catholic sexual ethics would have guarded her dignity far more than those of the Cathars, as practiced by her boyfriend.

The Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar! is also layered in irony and humor. The movie follows the making of a movie about Jesus Christ during Hollywood’s Golden Age (loosely based on the plot of The Robe), and it pokes fun at the Hollywood studio system making such a film as well as the alleged silliness of religious belief. There is one scene that almost sounds like the beginning of a joke, where a Catholic priest, a Protestant minister, an Eastern Orthodox patriarch, and a Jewish rabbi walk into a boardroom and argue theology in front of the brass-tacks studio fixer Eddie Mannix. But as it turns out, theology is no more absurd than Communism which, the audience learns later, is equally difficult to explain and far more pernicious, leading as it does to joyless subversiveness, kidnapping, and treason. Better then, to cling in sincerity to the Faith, as does Eddie Mannix when he begins each day going to confession.

Hail, Caesar! also playfully addresses the difficulty of film conveying the transcendent. “Squint! Squint against the grandeur!” barks the director to Hollywood star Baird Whitlock (played by George Clooney) as the cameras roll, but the joke is that the audience only sees Baird squinting somewhat cartoonishly; the grandeur is offstage. And in the climactic scene of the movie-within-the movie, Baird almost reaches the transcendent: his delivery of his climactic lines even moves the cast and crew until he blows the last line and starts cursing. But the lines testify to transcendence: a “truth beyond the truth that we can see . . . a truth beyond this world, a truth that we could see if we had but”—and then Baird forgets, as does the modern world, the word “faith.” Finally, Hail, Caesar! ends with the disclaimer “This motion picture contains no visual depiction of the godhead,” a wink at PETA’s bill of good health regarding ethical animal treatment. After noting that Coen is Hebrew for “priest,” one critic writes:

The Coens have always been priestly filmmakers making theology-obsessed films, but hitherto, Satan has been more visible than God in their movies. Almost all their films have a devil figure who relentlessly destroys goodness—Leonard Smalls in Raising Arizona, Charlie Meadows in Barton Fink, Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men.[21]

Hail, Caesar! is a refreshing departure from this pattern in which the invisible godhead is more palpable than a visible devil.

Conclusion

No doubt there are more than three ways to engage a secular audience, but these three possibilities are enough to justify hope for religious filmmaking despite a growing bias in Hollywood and in secular society against so-called organized religion. Christians in particular are partakers of what Chesterton calls “the thrilling romance of orthodoxy.”[22] For Chesterton, orthodox Christianity accounts for the “self-renewing energies of the west” precisely because it insists on the transcendence of God. He writes:

By insisting specially on the immanence of God we get introspection, self-isolation, quietism, social indifference. . . . By insisting specially on the transcendence of God we get wonder, curiosity, moral and political adventure, righteous indignation. . . . Insisting that God is inside man, man is always inside himself. By insisting that God transcends man, man has transcended himself.[23]

Even in our secular age, there remains in every human heart a desire for genuine transcendence, and the advantage of the Christian storyteller is that he knows the secret of how to do so. The story of the Christ is the greatest story ever told, and it has generated countless other great stories as well, from the true lives of the Saints to the epic and exhilarating myths and allegories of Tolkien and Lewis, the deliciously dark parodies of Evelyn Waugh, and the punch-in-the-gut Southern Gothic tales of Flannery O’Connor. And Christianity can generate such stories again, even in an age such as ours. Hollywood may yet hear the cry of Jerusalem.

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