How Faith-Based Films Became Mainstream
It’s hard to argue that faith-based films are a niche thing anymore. The theatrically released season five premiere of The Chosen debuted at #3 at the US box office, behind A Working Man at #1 and Snow White at #2. Last week, The Chosen: The Last Supper Part Two was #3 and Part One was #7. This weekend, the Angel Studios-backed animated film The King of Kings was #2 , and The Chosen‘s Part Three finished at #6 and Part Two at #10. Prime Video’s House of David—a show by the creators of faith-based hits I Can Only Imagine and Jesus Revolution—began at #3 and rose to #1 on the streaming charts. Filmmakers and stars like Dallas Jenkins, Jon Erwin, and Jonathan Roumie are being interviewed everywhere from The Jordan Peterson Podcast toThe Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon to The Wall Street Journal. Being interviewed by Jimmy Fallon is pretty much the definition of mainstream.
How did the faith-based film industry, which was once mocked for its poor quality and small audience, break through to compete and win in the Hollywood film marketplace?
Faith always had a place in Hollywood movies. While the industry tried to cater to people of all faiths (as discussed in Barry Langford’s book Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond), it understood that most of the country was Christian. Hence, many biblical narratives were made into films (like Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments, and The Robe). Christian organizations like The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association produced explicitly Christian movies for a much smaller audience, such as The Hiding Place and The Cross and the Switchblade.
But as Tyler Smith notes in Reel Redemption, that relationship changed in the 70s when Hollywood and Evangelical Christians were divided amid the culture wars. Films like The Last Temptation of Christ, which addressed religious topics in a way most Christians found offensive, outraged conservative Christian groups and set the tone for a conservative Christian subculture that was deeply suspicious of Hollywood and a Hollywood that didn’t see the value in pursuing a Christian market.
That all changed in 2004 with The Passion of the Christ. Mel Gibson’s film chronicling Jesus’ crucifixion was an enormous hit with Christian audiences. Once The Passion of the Christ showed there was a market for faith-based films, Hollywood wanted to capitalize on it. The problem was that they were too far removed from their target audience to understand it. They made blockbusters like Exodus: Gods and Kings and Noah, which portrayed the faithful servants of God as crazy and skeptics as reasonable. They made dramas like Silence and First Reformed, which treated faithful Christians as though they needed to repent and embrace secular culture’s values. Unsurprisingly, none of these films were successes with Christian audiences, and some were absolute box-office bombs.
Meanwhile, Christian filmmakers understood the audience, but not film. They made movies on topics faith-based audiences cared about, like marriage (Fireproof), parenthood (Courageous), and institutional bias against Christians (God’s Not Dead). Unfortunately, they weren’t great at making movies. Christian films gained a reputation–among Christians and non-Christians alike–for being preachy and poorly made. Christians were interested in making movies, but they didn’t have the requisite experience. As Andy Erwin told me in an interview, “We didn’t know what we didn’t know.”
For about two decades, there was a perfect storm. Everyone wanted the Christian audience, but nobody could capture it. Hollywood understood film, but not faith. Christians understood faith, but not film. An oversimplification? Yes, but an accurate one.
That slowly changed. The Erwin Brothers’ I Can Only Imagine became the highest-grossing independent film of 2018, leading that film’s distributor, Lionsgate, to sign a first-look deal to distribute the team’s future projects. Many of those projects—from American Underdog to Ordinary Angels—earned decent Rotten Tomato scores. Meanwhile, Angel Studios launched The Chosen in 2019, which blew up in 2020 when the full season was released online during the pandemic. Initially, Christians were the show’s primary audience. But eventually it drew broader attention, even earning praise from secular viewers–such as from Taxi Driver and Raging Bull-writer Paul Schraeder.
The film industry itself changed too. With the rise of streaming, “mainstream” has become something of a misnomer. Fewer people consume the same content. As New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson wrote for Vox, “As pop culture continues to splinter into niches and micro audiences (thanks in part to technological advances), it frequently caters to our individual and identity-group preferences, siloing art rather than creating art that might be watched by a range of audience members.”
Today, movies that capture large chunks of a smaller audience on a lower budget win. Faith-based films, which have leaned on low budgets for the past 20 years, have an advantage. (Hence why last year’s The Best Christmas Pageant Ever was more profitable in theaters than Amazon’s Red One.) While faith-based audiences may not be a “majority” audience, they are one of the biggest and most faithful minority audiences, which in itself makes it mainstream.
Faith has always been mainstream in American life. Even as Christianity’s influence dwindles, religious people—Christians in particular—remain a majority, and will for the foreseeable future. The surprise isn’t that faith-based content has become mainstream but that it took so long to get here.
