In the second season of NBC's Community, the Christian character, Shirley, searches for YouTube videos about “God” and finds that the most popular one is an ignoble production entitled “God of Farts.” There were nine people at the last church service she attended, but seventeen million people have viewed “God of Farts”? Something is clearly amiss. Shirley sets out to make a cool, viral rap video about Jesus, while her Muslim friend Abed undertakes a postmodern navel-gazer entitled “Jesus Filming Jesus Filming Jesus.” Abed's film is rubbish, and he knows it; he prays to God to help him out, and Shirley obliges by smashing his camera to bits with a baseball bat. Abed then secretly completes Shirley's preachy, low-budget, and decidedly uncool rap video. They are now better friends. The overt message is to value humility. The less overt message—that Christian films are utterly laughable—brings us to Terry Lindvall and Andrew Quicke's Celluloid Sermons.

Of course, Lindvall and Quicke do not think that Christian films are laughable. But they do know that this is their general reputation. The authors aim to rectify the situation, not only redeeming Christian films by pointing to their spiritual worth but also providing the first comprehensive history of Christian filmmaking, beginning in 1930—where Lindvall's Sanctuary Cinema left off—and ending in the 1980s, when the rise of VHS brought a swift death to 16 mm Christian filmmaking.

The authors open with three mavericks of the 1940s: James Friedrich, Carlos Baptista, and Irwin Moon. The challenge for these men was to create Christian films for a non-existent market. There were plenty of churches in America, but virtually none of them were in possession of 16 mm sound projectors or knew how to use them, and, equally pressing, there was no system in place to distribute Christian films. Making Christian films was like opening a car wash in a town full of horse-and-buggies. By 1946, though, “five thousand churches of all denominations were equipped for 16 mm screenings, with another seventy-five thousand having 16 mm projectors on order” (83).

When Celluloid Sermons centers on these three figures, it reads a bit like an adventure story, but as the authors move on to survey a range of denominational and ecumenical films, the book turns “listy.” Indeed, if this carefully researched and impressively detailed book has a recurrent flaw, it is that at times one feels like one is reading an encyclopedia. Striving for full coverage, the authors do not always provide a strong argumentative thread to pull readers along.

The book's narrative drive returns when Lindvall and Quicke turn to the “studio era” (Ken Anderson Films, Gospel Films) and master filmmakers (Billy Graham's World Wide Pictures, Ken Curtis's Gateway Films). World Wide is particularly notable for its forays into theatrical distribution, made possible through “four-walling,” a system whereby filmmakers rent out theaters for their own use, thus skipping over middleman distributors completely. Media historians typically associate this technique with “independent film,” a category which, in their minds, has rarely encompassed religious films.

One of the most interesting issues to emerge in the studio-era chapter is the so-called “Dobson Effect.” In 1979, James Dobson began releasing his Focus on the Family films, a popular seventeen-part lecture series offering childrearing and marital advice. In Dobson's wake, the religious market shifted toward talking head films, which were relatively low-cost, turned tremendous profits, and would later thrive in the home video market as the rest of the Christian film business floundered.

That Dobson founded the Focus on the Family organization—to promote both his own audiovisual productions and conservative social policies—is not something that readers would glean from Celluloid Sermons, though this may well already be common knowledge. This absence is symptomatic the book's bigger apolitical picture: while it is ignorant to assume that all Christian films have a secret right-wing agenda, one might well get the impression from this book that Christian filmmaking has functioned in a political vacuum. For example, Lindvall and Quicke aptly convey the tremendous popularity of apocalyptic films, particularly Donald W. Thompson's Thief in the Night (1972), which was produced for under $70,000 and took in over one million dollars in rental fees. Apocalyptic films generally concentrate on individual salvation and biblical exegesis rather than overt politicking, but premillenialism has also underpinned opposition to the United Nations, support for Israel, and other distinctly political causes. This is not an untold story, and it would probably have been ill-advised for the authors to have rehashed it here in its entirety, but it would have been helpful to have referenced the political baggage that is implicitly connected to apocalyptic films, just as, elsewhere, it would have been useful to have referenced scholarship on the politics of missionary work. Lindvall and Quicke are inclined to accentuate the positive, noting when a missionary film is particularly culturally sensitive but not discussing the racial and ethnic prejudices of less sensitive productions.

Ultimately, this is an extremely useful, groundbreaking book, even as it brings along its fair share of frustrations. Some non-evangelical readers may be put off by the authors' emphasis on how the films they discuss have moved viewers to conversion. But, of course, that is the whole point of most of these films. They are designed to do something, and to ignore the fact that they have apparently succeeded would be myopic.

Film and media studies scholars will also perhaps be frustrated by the authors' recurrent evaluation of production values. Lindvall and Quicke are hardly blind to the deficiencies of many Christian films (“Baptists were producing films that congregations found dull and unwatchable” [110]), but, as if to compensate, films sometimes seem to be praised simply on the grounds that they are technically competent. For media scholars, this will seem methodologically unsophisticated. Yet, in many ways the book's methods are admirable: the authors draw on a deep range of archival materials (in particular articles from the Christian Herald and documents held at the Regent University Religious Film Archives), discuss numerous rare films in detail, and make use of their own interviews with filmmakers.

Sadly, media historians are largely uninterested in religious media, but for the past fifteen years significant interest has developed in cult, low-budget, and other kinds of “orphan films” that had long fallen beneath the radar. From this perspective, Celluloid Sermons, with its tales of Christian exploitation films (The Monster and the Stripper!), alternative distribution networks, and technological innovation is invaluable. The book, in sum, should be of great interest to scholars of both media and religion.