“Give me any two pages of the Bible and I'll give you a picture,” Cecil B. de Mille famously boasted at the height of his directorial career.Footnote ¹ The undisputed king of overblown biblical drama, de Mille was rendered a “prophet in celluloid” by famed evangelist Billy Graham and boasted of “getting more people to read the Bible than anyone else ever has.”Footnote ² Yet, despite the dramatic financial success of his films, much of de Mille's religious output has usually been dismissed or ignored by critics and film scholars committed to the idea that films of a religious nature are, as Melanie Wright observes, “superficial and banal.”Footnote ³ Until the 1990s, Melani McAlister notes, “scholarship on biblical epics has been remarkably sparse,” while “[t]hose film scholars and historians who have attended to the genre have often seen the religious content as entirely superficial.”Footnote ⁴ Subtitling their introduction “Problems of the Discourse: Beyond the Valley of the Wisecrack,” Bruce Babington and Peter Evans noted the caustic wit most film scholars reserved for religious filmmaking in their 1993 volume Biblical Epics: Sacred Narrative in the Hollywood Cinema.Footnote ⁵

The first book-length study of biblical cinema, Biblical Epics signaled the beginning of a reevaluation of the genre and indeed of de Mille himself. Observing the “unvarying monotony” of the scholarly dismissal of biblical narratives, Babington and Evans noted that the films were only ever celebrated in “lavish books replete with text-dwarfing stills” amounting to little more than “proofs of the films’ impressiveness.”Footnote ⁶ However, as scholars began to look back on de Mille's films, especially his 1956 remake of The Ten Commandments, they began to conclude that audience figures for biblical epics reflected not only the spiritual revival of the 1950s, but also the ideological campaign crucial to America's efforts in the Cold War. Babington and Evans noted in 1993 that while critical writing has only “(fragmentarily) addressed the Biblical Epic … it has concentrated on the films’ sub-texts rather than their overt subject-matter, largely steering clear of their surface religious content.”Footnote ⁷

This essay will explore how scholarly determination to instill older biblical films with retrospective historical or political value reflects the discomfort that has continued to impair academic assessments of religious filmmaking and the presentation of evangelical Christianity on the big screen. Religion “was not an insignificant determinant” in the Cold War according to historian Tony Shaw; rather many Americans “were tempted to see the battle between communism and capitalism as a latter-day morality play.”Footnote ⁸ Though it is not the purpose of this essay to dismiss such scholarship, Shaw's attempt to instill international political meaning in cinema reflects a wider, post-Cold War academic approach to the biblical epic that ignores its surface religious value in order to augment historical rather than cinematic analysis.Footnote ⁹ Yet this cultural meaning was not necessarily apparent or even intentional at the time of production. As McAlister notes, some readings of The Ten Commandments, including Alan Nadel's, depend “on a fairly literal-minded allegorical interpretation [that] suggests a kind of conscious, careful ideological intent that few films actually exhibit.”Footnote ¹⁰ Other scholarly accounts of the revival of the biblical epic following World War II include cinema's increasing need to compete with television and contemporary parallels with the development of modern Israel.Footnote ¹¹

Cinematic biblical narratives continue to open amidst controversy and ridicule, evidenced by critical coverage of 2014 as “the year of the Bible movie.” Awaiting the release of blockbusters Noah (Darren Aronofsky) and Exodus: Gods and Kings (Ridley Scott), secular critics on both sides of the Atlantic gave brief histories of the Bible onscreen and Hollywood's consistently turbulent relationship with religious groups, from the censoring of the Hays Code of 1930 to the controversy that surrounded Martin Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ in 1988. Though interactions between Protestants, Catholics, and industry censors have recently been subject to complex scholarly reconsideration, thanks to insightful work by William D. Romanowski, it remains the dominant narrative that religion and film operate in separate realms of American existence.Footnote ¹²

“Hollywood and holiness are unlikely bedfellows,” Tom Shone wrote in The Guardian in 2014, but the “[b]ig news from the box office [is that] some people released some Christian-themed movies that weren't completely terrible.”Footnote ¹³ Critics traditionally reserve “their most damning barbs” for religious films, Shone admitted – including the contemporaneous Left Behind (Vic Armstrong, 2014) – but the dramatic success of Noah and other recent films reflected an unprecedented investment in the twenty-first-century religious blockbuster.Footnote ¹⁴ Church-based grassroots marketing campaigns for faith-based movies had gained the ear of Hollywood studios, Shone reported, but they continued to “induce a spooky sensation in the secular viewer.”Footnote ¹⁵

Yet, despite mainstream hostility to the supposed intersections of entertainment and theology, there is a wealth of scholarship attesting to what Anton Karl Kozlovic refers to as Hollywood's recurrently “sacred subtexts.”Footnote ¹⁶ Exploring films such as Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967), One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman, 1975), and Sling Blade (Billy Bob Thornton, 1996), film scholars have regularly discussed Hollywood's “Christ-figures.” Kozlovic has published extensively on the concept, arguing that there are “twenty-five structural characteristics of the cinematic Christ-figure,” although, as Christopher Deacy has argued, Kozlovic himself “is unable to identify any films that fulfill even half of the structural characteristics that he so painstakingly delineates.”Footnote ¹⁷

Contemporary film studies often pushes against its previous reliance on auteur theory, contradicting Kozlovic's emphasis on directorial intent and the conscious adoption of biblical narrative. “[F]oregrounding the collaborative, industrial nature of film-making,” twenty-first-century film studies is, as Melanie Wright contends, “challenging the notion that any film has a single, intrinsic meaning.”Footnote ¹⁸ When one considers the complexity of debates around authorship in cinema studies alongside ever-evolving trends in theological studies, it is hardly surprising, as Deacy recognizes, “that conversations between theologians and scholars who work in film and cinema studies are few and far between.”Footnote ¹⁹

This limited dialogue may well explain why many scholars continue to focus on Hollywood's reliance on biblical allegory, without properly exploring the manner in which openly religious characters are portrayed. Works in film and cultural studies still have major blind spots when it comes to the presentation of religious people in contemporary popular culture, though most scholars would probably agree that the dominant images are often far from flattering. In a 2008 article for the Journal of Media and Religion, Todd Rendleman explored “four types of evangelical Christian images in American movies since 1970: the hypocritical, the psychotic, the naïve, and the insensitive evangelical.”Footnote ²⁰ Rendleman argues that these typologies emerged when religious bodies relinquished their control over the American film industry in the late 1960s. Though such an argument fails to account for the equally negative portrayals of religion in earlier films, including The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955), Inherit the Wind (Stanley Kramer, 1960), and Elmer Gantry (Richard Brooks, 1960), it has been broadly accepted that these films offered exceptional challenges to an increasingly doomed culture of censorship, eventually eradicated in 1968.

Rendleman's analysis of evangelicals sits, as he acknowledges, amongst a plethora of “images analyses,” exploring the cinematic representation of numerous historically oppressed groups.Footnote ²¹ Still, enthusiastic reviews for Robert Duvall's southern religious drama The Apostle (1997) worked to further highlight the problematic presentations of evangelicals that preceded it, remarked Rendleman. Duvall's “Sonny is different from most movie preachers,” critic Roger Ebert acknowledged. “He's not a fraud, for one thing.”Footnote ²²

Duvall's persistence with The Apostle arose from personal discomfort at the manner in which Hollywood continued to portray evangelical culture. The Pentecostal worship that Duvall insisted on bringing to the screen with his own money was, he claimed, “part of Americana – [a] spiritual but also a cultural thing.”Footnote ²³ In an interview with Christianity Today, he baulked at the idea that some might consider his presentation of Sonny to be mocking or even derogatory, but agreed that Hollywood had a tendency to mock not only Christians, but “the interior of the United States of America, the heartland.”Footnote ²⁴ In raising this debate, Duvall suggested that Hollywood's discomfort with evangelicalism was perhaps rooted in more than a simple distrust of organized religion, but in a regional and intellectual divide.

Though films set in the South often contain some sort of religious iconography or rhetoric, little work has been done to explore the functions of this filmic religiosity. Though an image of Sonny's self-baptism appears on the cover of Andrew Leiter's 2011 edited volume Southerners on Film: Essays on Hollywood Portrayals since the 1970s, indicating the centrality of evangelical Christianity to Hollywood's southern landscape, the film is never discussed in the book.Footnote ²⁵ Similarly, Sight and Sound’s May 2015 “Southern Gothic” issue boasted the tagline “Love, death and religion in the films of the Deep South.” The magazine's cover featured a small country church, interposed against a backdrop of neon signs that proclaimed “Jesus Saves” and “Bless the Lord,” and an image of Brad Dourif as Flannery O'Connor's tortured anti-preacher Hazel Motes in John Huston's adaptation of Wise Blood (1979). Again, despite the visual power of these images in the presentation of the South as a conspicuously unique region within American cinema, religion forms no real part in the issue's analysis of the southern gothic.Footnote ²⁶

According to anthropologists Gary McDonogh and Cindy Wong, “organized religion [operates through] a web of signifiers” that are essential to the “hegemonic perspective” that Hollywood provides. This outlook encourages filmmakers and viewers to present the South – “and those who practice religion” – as “fictional others.”Footnote ²⁷ During the late twentieth century, evangelical Christians on film appeared to reflect years of liberal consternation about the dominant political position conservative Christians were enjoying, having entered the public consciousness in the late 1970s. Highly visible and militant, the Religious Right was a politically active movement as well as a religious one. As historian George Marsden recognized in 2005, “the news in the decades since the 1960s is that a wide variety of evangelical traditions that earlier would have been thought of as culturally marginal … have been mobilized into [a] significant mainstream national political force” with a “conspicuously southern leadership best exemplified by Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James Robison.”Footnote ²⁸ Each of those had a significant political and television presence.

By the 1990s, Hollywood offered numerous examples of southern Christians prone to hypocrisy and violence, from the zealous Klansmen of A Time to Kill (Joel Schumacher, 1996), to Max Cady (Robert DeNiro): the tattooed Georgian Pentecostal rapist and murderer of Cape Fear (Scorsese, 1991). Screenwriter Wesley Strick admitted that he intended to render Cady “a monster of the South,” while the character's Pentecostalism made him “the most kind of primitive and to [Strick], as a New York Jew, the most terrifying.”Footnote ²⁹ To Strick, rural southern evangelicals represented a unique threat to his personal liberty; they symbolized excessive intolerance, racism and ignorance. In making such a statement, Strick ensured that there would be no ambiguity over Cady's southern Pentecostalism; in essence it is the point of the film.

However, while scholars have failed to explore the significance of Strick's overt characterization of Cady, few have challenged David Denby's assertion that The Apostle “is the best movie ever made about a man of God.”Footnote ³⁰ Denby praised Sonny as a complicated hero, committed to his faith, but dealing with his demons. Building his Louisiana congregation from the bottom up, Sonny enables Duvall to present a host of Pentecostal southerners, black and white, young and old. In its harmonious mixed-race congregation, The Apostle differs considerably from most Hollywood depictions of southern evangelicalism, which are often starkly divided by race and class.

Religious historian Judith Weisenfeld suggests that, “since the first decades of sound film,” religion has been considered “a prominent feature of black public life and culture.” Weisenfeld's 2007 book Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929–1949 captures the centrality of black religion to films that hoped to present “authentic” African American culture, including Hallelujah! (King Vidor, 1929) and The Green Pastures (Marc Connelly, 1936).Footnote ³¹ White audiences would have viewed such films as “innocuous entertainment”, Weisenfeld notes, presenting practices and preoccupations contrary yet harmless to their own white American normative identity. Through film, she continues, “black religion becomes a sign and symptom of the perpetual backwardness and outsider status of African Americans,” a practice James Snead argues has continued through films such as The Color Purple (Steven Spielberg, 1985).Footnote ³²

A fundamental indicator of Hollywood's projection of the African American experience, Christianity abides as an integral resource from which African American characters draw strength and dignity. This positive portrayal contrasts with the presentation of white evangelical practice, producing a dichotomy often at its most stark in films that depict the civil rights movement, where white evangelical culture is often conflated with white supremacy. Films such as Mississippi Burning (Alan Parker, 1988) and Ghosts of Mississippi (Rob Reiner, 1996) have helped cement popular presentations of many white southerners as pragmatic, bitter racists, who utilize religious rhetoric only to further their own advancement. This attempt to distance oneself from those who orchestrated and perpetuated racial violence and subordination is understandable, but such displacement denies the multiple and complex reactions of religious white southerners to African American demands for civil liberties. It also enables Hollywood to consistently present segregation and racism as purely a southern phenomenon, relying on the region's religiosity to further cement that characterization.

Thus it is perhaps in the construction of the religious white southerner that American cinema delineates its most alarming religious outsider, cementing ideas of the region as a sociological and pathological rather than geographical entity. Whether perceived or projected, religion has proven integral to Hollywood's presentation of the South. Yet these productions limit religious expression in America to a noticeably demarcated region. With both southerners and evangelicals defined as distinct subcultural groups, with further racial divisions at play, it is hardly surprising that Hollywood consistently portrays them both with little sensitivity or nuance. However, further scholarship is required to probe the ideological processes behind these characterizations, developing an understanding of how and why filmmakers utilize religious characters and not simply narrative allegory.