This Is What Christian Film Criticism Looks Like

Published on February 16, 2005

And the most damning indictment of evangelical passion for The Passion comes from…Christianity Today‘s Leadership Journal. “Maybe it’s because (I know some readers will be tempted to write me off after reading this sentence) I was so frustrated by last year’s promotional hype surrounding Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, and I was so frustrated by the movie […]

And the most damning indictment of evangelical passion for The Passion comes from…Christianity Today‘s Leadership Journal. “Maybe it’s because (I know some readers will be tempted to write me off after reading this sentence) I was so frustrated by last year’s promotional hype surrounding Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, and I was so frustrated by the movie itself,” writes Brian McLaren, pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in Spencerville, MD. “For whatever reason, when I walked out of the recent film Hotel Rwanda, the story of a hotel manager who saves more than a thousand Tutsi refugees from Hutu-led genocide, this thought wouldn’t leave me: If we really had the mind and heart of Christ, this is the movie we would be urging people in our churches to see.” And McLaren just gets tougher from there. This, in a sense, is what “Christian film criticism” could look like. “Why,” he asks his fellow evangelicals, “did so many churches urge people to see Gibson’s film, and why did so few (if any?) promote Terry George’s film? What do our answers to that question say about us?

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