Oh dear. File this under “Watch out what you pray for.” There’s an article in this month’s Atlantic Monthly called “Can Jesus Save Hollywood? From The Passion of the Christ to The Chronicles of Narnia, the Christian audience is making spirits rise.” It claims that after the success of “Passion” and the presumed success of “Narnia,” the movers and shakers in the movie industry are looking to get some of that sweet church-going market share.

“The reasons are partly spiritual, partly economic. The movie industry remains affected by post-9/11 national anxiety, and now studio heads want to make movies that “mean something.” At the same time, it’s well aware of what’s known around town as ‘Passion dollars’ — the previously untapped religious audience that made Mel Gibson’s independently distributed movie The Passion of Christ last year’s biggest surprise.”

Well, this’ll teach me to complain about Hollywood’s treatment of Christians. Now they’re going to notice me, they’re going to speak to me, they’re going to pay attention to my “special” needs. Consider the onerous sound of this observation from a former nun who’s now a screenwriter:

“‘When I first came [to Hollywood], I never thought I’d be on Inside Edition,’ she confessed to the host before the show.
“Didn’t you know?” he replied, “‘Christian‘ is the new ‘gay.‘”

I think I liked it better when they ignored us.

Well, not to panic. For one thing, newspapers and magazines love to proclaim every slight change in societal fads to be a trend in the making. You’ve got to sell copies, and headlines that say, “There’s some evidence to suggest that some behavior might possibly change,” just don’t do the trick.

For another thing, though the article references Christian incursions into the film industry as if it were talking about the attempts of an odd bunch of third-worlders try to negotiate a moving walkway, their own analysis seems to suggest that the Christians that get very far in The Industry are almost unrecognizeable from the non-Christians. After seeing a practice “pitch session” at Act One, a LA-based program for aspiring Christian screenwriters, the article’s author happily talks with the director of the program:

“Afterward I mentioned … that the pitch session sounded like those at any other film school: people liked the “edgy,” “original” ideas and rejected the “tired” ones. [quotation marks mine] If I hadn’t known this was a Christian screenwriting program, I told him, I never would have guessed. I meant it as a compliment, but he didn’t entirely take it as one. ‘That’s something we really think about here,’ he said.”

Not that that’s a good thing, but the last thing that the one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church needs is to do bad imitations of TV and movie offerings with the name of some Person of the Trinity inserted from time to time.

I have complained about the stereotyping of Christians. I have hated being ignored, villified or patronized by people that seem to think everyone who owns a Bible must either be Ned Flanders or the warden from “Shawshank Redemption.” But I wasn’t shaping my criticism carefully enough. What I want from Hollywood is not recompense or political correctness. I don’t want them to turn their Sauron’s eye to this “minority” that escaped their notice before. What I want sounds more vague, but it’s actually more honest, more human and even easier than getting air-time and lip-service — I want them to let Christianity in. Not a token screenwriter or a Maranatha group, but the idea, the reality that God was made man and came to save the world.

I won’t get that of course. I’m not crazy enough to think that the entire fast-flowing current of the world’s culture will begin to run backwards — it always takes humanity away from the truth of the Gospel, in a way that I’d think discerning non-Christians would start to notice as being by design.

I don’t think that some Christian writers, actors and directors will transform Hollywood. I think they probably will be subsumed by it.

In the end, I suppose I believe the advice I heard on a John Mark Reynolds lecture CD: stop being consumers of the culture and start being producers of it, but do it one house, one group, one town at a time.