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Hollywood's Absent, Impotent, and Avenging God in the Classroom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Michael E. O'Keeffe  and
Kathleen Waller
Michael E. O'Keeffe
Affiliation:
Saint Xavier University
Kathleen Waller
Affiliation:
Saint Xavier University
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Abstract

The focus of this article is twofold. First, recognizing the influence of the mass media on the religious views of many undergraduate students, it examines the negative depiction of God in several popular American films and concludes that the image of God as absent, impotent and demonic ought to be addressed in the classroom. The second issue concerns the use of film in the classroom—both to encourage students to sharpen their understanding of contemporary theology, and to then use this theology as a basis for understanding and evaluating the religious messages carried by contemporary films. The films explored are What Dreams May Come, Dogma, The End of the Affair, The Rapture, and Stigmata.

Type
Creative Teaching
Information
Horizons , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , Spring 2003 , pp. 92 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 2003

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References

1 Mazur, Eric Michael and McCarthy, Kate, God in the Details. American Religion in Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001), 3–12.Google Scholar See also the introduction to Davis, Walter T. Jr., Watching What We Watch: Prime-Time Television through the Lens of Faith (Louisville, KY: Geneva Press, 2001)Google Scholar, where Davis writes that television has become the “dominant storyteller” in popular American culture and, as such, operates as the “functional equivalent” to organized religion.

2 See Wolfe, Alan, One Nation, After All (New York: Penguin, 1998), 302Google Scholar; Tanner, Kathryn, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 70.Google Scholar

3 See Wolfe, Alan, Moral Freedom. The Impossible Idea that Defines the Way We Live Now (New York: Norton, 2001).Google Scholar Wolfe states: “The idea of people having the freedom to choose their own way of believing—a little more this week than last, a little bit of Protestantism this month and Catholicism the next—assumes that the individual is in charge of his [or her] own destiny” (203). See also God in the Details, 177–80, which identifies this eclecticism with the “personal spirituality” that has supplanted organized religion as the primary postmodern mode of affirming belief in the transcendent, and Flory, Richard W., “Conclusion: Toward a Theory of Generation X Religion,” in Generation X Religion, ed. Flory, Richard W. and Miller, Donald E. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 232–34, 242–44.Google Scholar

4 Smith, Robert Lawrence, A Quaker Book of Wisdom. Life Lessons in Simplicity, Service and Common Sense (New York: William Morrow, 1998), 140.Google Scholar

5 See, e.g., the discussion in Romanowki, William D., Pop Culture Wars: Religion and the Role of Entertainment in American Life (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1996), 141–67 and 312–22Google Scholar, and the analysis of Ostwalt, Conrad E. Jr., “Conclusion: Religion, Film, and Cultural Analysis,” in Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth and Ideology in Popular American Film, ed. Martin, Joel W. and Ostwalt, Conrad E. Jr. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995), 152–59.Google Scholar

6 As Conrad Ostwalt writes in the “Conclusion” cited above, “Many of the self-authenticating experiences secular institutions encourage are rooted in a society's popular culture. Why do people go to movies? … They participate in such activities because these and other forms of popular culture function in the same way traditional religion has always functioned: to provide ways for one to make sense of one's world and life. … In other words, popular religion and cultural events allow individuals to participate in their own reality construction” (158).

7 The influence of the mass media on American religious sensibilities grew in the 1920s with the production of films such as The Ten Commandments (1923) and The King of Kings (1927). At this early stage, Hollywood was generally supportive of traditional religious beliefs and practices, and many ecclesial leaders welcomed their work. Much of this support began to disappear in the 1960s when Hollywood began to depict religious leaders in a more critical light (recall, e.g., Elmer Gantry), and depict religious traditions with more scrutiny. See Moore, R. Laurence, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar and Williams, Peter W., Popular Religion in America: Symbolic Change and the Modernization Process in Historical Perspective (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980), esp. 203–04.Google Scholar According to Fore, William J., Television and Religion: The Shaping of Faith, Values, and Culture (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1987)Google Scholar, the battle for our very souls has been won by television, since “it is now the primary shaper of our values, our view of the sacred, and our culture, and it is the central worldview that we increasingly have adopted as the only way to live” (12).

8 Mercadante, Linda A., “The God Behind the Screen: Pleasantville and the Truman Show,” Journal of Religion and Film 5/2 (October 2001): paragraph 9.Google Scholar

9 Tillich, Paul, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951–1963).Google Scholar For an insightful interpretation of Tillich's thought see Gilkey, Langdon, Gilkey on Tillich (New York: Crossroad, 1990), esp. 56–78.Google Scholar

10 Tanner, Kathryn, “Theology and Popular Culture,” in Changing Conversations: Religious Reflections and Cultural Analysis, ed. Hopkins, Dwight N. and Devaney, Sheila Greeve, (New York: Routlege, 1996), 113.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., 111: “[F]rom the very beginnings of Christianity, the theologies of classically trained clergy were directed at a very wide audience; they were meant to be popular in the statistical sense of the word, consumed by many and not simply by members of elite cultural or religious classes…. By way of sermons and the writings of apocryphal acts and lives of the saints, Christian theologians used their classical training to propagate [sic] the Christian faith across the stratifications of Greco-Roman society.”

12 Ibid., 112.

13 Miles, Margaret R., in her Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies (Boston: Beacon, 1996)Google Scholar, writes: “Popular film both reflects a popular consensus that traditional religion is deeply untrustworthy and reinforces our public rejection of religion” (ix).

14 Martin and Ostwalt, Screening the Sacred; Bergesen, Albert J. and Greeley, Andrew M., God in the Movies (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2000).Google Scholar

15 Bergesen and Greeley, 176.

16 See the discussion of American spirituality and culture in Wuthnow, Robert, After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 We understand “non-religious” in a way similar to Bergesen and Greeley, who explore movies that are not “formally about religion” but “ordinary mass release Hollywood type movies” where “God makes an appearance on screen.” See Bergesen, and Greeley, , God in the Movies, 15.Google Scholar

18 See Miles, , Seeing and Believing, 5–25Google Scholar, for a discussion of the interest and attention to values shared by religion and film.

19 Borg, Marcus J., Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith (New York: Harper, SanFrancisco, 1994), 14.Google Scholar

20 See the discussion of the “cultural synthesis of American individualism and Christianity” in Romanowski's, William D.Eyes Wide Open: Looking for God in Popular Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2001), chap. 8Google Scholar, “Hollywood's Cultural Landscape,” 108–120.

21 Bloom, Harold writes, “We are a religiously mad culture, furiously searching for the spirit, but each of us is subject and object of the one quest, which must be for the original self, a spark or breath in us that we are convinced goes back to before the Creation” in his The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster Touchstone, 1992), 22.Google Scholar The understanding of God as “self-generated” is particularly evident in the film Superstar.

22 Haight, Roger, Jesus Symbol of God (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), 192–94.Google Scholar

23 Rolheiser, Ronald, The Holy Longing (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1999), 79, 95.Google Scholar

24 Contrast this view of scripture and church with that of Hauerwas, Stanley in Unleashing the Scripture: Freeing the Bible from Captivity to America (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1993)Google Scholar, where he writes on p. 36: “The Church returns time and time again to Scripture not because it is trying to find the Scripture's true meaning, but because Christians believe that God has promised to speak through Scripture so that the Church will remain capable of living faithfully and remembering well.”

25 A different interpretation of the film is offered by Miles, , Seeing and Believing, 103–07Google Scholar, who focuses on meaninglessness.

26 The American fascination with biblical prophecy and apocalyptic imagery is examined in Boyer, Paul, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).Google Scholar Although Boyer does not deal explicitly with film, he presents a compelling portrait of the preoccupation with eschatology throughout American history.

27 In addition to its depiction of God, The Rapture is also important for challenging the role of God in eternal life, which weaves together views of God as impotent and demonic. Whereas in traditional Christian thought God is given the power to decide our fate, in The Rapture Sharon chooses whether to enter heaven or not. Echoing such a view, Conrad E. Ostwalt, Jr. claims “the modern apocalypse has replaced a sovereign God with a sovereign humanity.” See “Hollywood and Armageddon: Apocalyptic Themes in Recent Cinematic Presentation,” in Screening the Sacred, 62.

28 The disclaimer that opens the film.

29 Bergesen and Greeley, 175.

30 Greeley, Andrew, “Images of God in the Movies,” Journal of Religion and Film 1/1 (April 1997): paragraph 24–25.Google Scholar

31 Ibid., 26.

32 Gabler, Neal, Life: the Movie. How Entertainment Conquered Reality (New York: Vintage, 1998), 8Google Scholar: “While an entertainment-driven, celebrity oriented society is not necessarily one that destroys all moral value, as some would have it, it is one in which the standard of value is whether or not something can grab and then hold the public's attention.”

33 Mercandante, , “The God Behind the Screen,” paragraph 9.Google Scholar

34 Flory, , “Conclusion,” 234.Google Scholar

35 Ostwalt, Conrad, “Religion and Popular Movies,” Journal of Religion and Film 2/3 (December 1998): paragraphs 3–5.Google Scholar

36 Ibid., paragraph 7.

37 Nolan, Albert, Jesus Before Christianity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1992), 166–67.Google Scholar