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Christian films are quite a weird movie genre. Are they Christian because they evangelize the Gospel? Do they have to evangelize to be considered Christian or do they need to be made by a believer? Can movies with great analogies be Christian if they were not made for that purpose? Just so we are clear when I say Christian movies I mean movies that represent church culture and include God as a main topic.
With that said, Christian movies have been rising up trying to give mainstream culture an alternative to movies. They sprout up in theaters, Netflix, Hallmark, TBN, and other places where Christians have gotten their foot in the door. They come in many shapes like family-friendly, hot topic-driven, teen romance, artistic, or Kevin Sorbo-approved. We even have a special place for edgy Christian movies where you can say PG-13 words and be post modern (Blue Like Jazz and Believe Me).
But there is one movie genre that has been neglected because of how dangerous it is. It is often seen as silly, provocative, and incredibly overdone. But when it is done (and done well) it becomes a hallmark for wit and intelligence.
I am talking about the satire/parody.
Airplane, Austin Powers, The Naked Gun, Top Secret, Scary Movie, Here Come the Spartans, A Haunted House, and Vampires Suck. These movies are grungy, ridiculous, sometimes witty, mostly garbage, and very lame. But they represent one truth.
When we love something we make a parody of it to show how much we love it. All these movies represent a mock representation of pop culture and news. Parody movies are the cultural buffer that says, “Hey, life is not that serious. We can make fun of ourselves.”
- The part of me that laughed was the part of me that hates myself
But you’re thinking, “Those movies suck! Why would Christians demote themselves to such low art?”
Yes, you are right. But they suck due to the humor being aimed at 12-15 year-olds and the writer relying on the character license too much. All that can be changed and we have movies like Airplane and Monty Python to thank. Christians need a satire movie for many reasons.
1.) We need to remember that God is funny. Humor is an important part of the developing soul and we downplay it because salvation has serious consequences. It was Jesus who said such comedic lines like, “Blind leading the blind,” and “Camel fitting through the eye of a needle.” All these things were used for teaching and getting people’s attention.
2.) We need to show the world that we love God and his Kingdom more than we love our Christian culture. We don’t protect our habits, likes and dislikes, we expose them for what they really are.
3.) We also need to show the world that humor can be smart, funny, and intelligent. We won’t rely on grotesque sex and potty jokes and the world will get a taste of high art comedy.
4.) A movie about Christian culture is a great foot in the door for your un-churched friends. Comedies usually bring people together.
- This man was the master of parody
So here are my thoughts…
Movie: Oh No! A Christian Movie!
Story: Our movie starts in the sleepy American town of Thumperville, Pennsylvania. It is a cozy, traditional town with plenty of farms and churches. The female protagonist, Anna, desires to take her faith out of the sleepy town and do something excellent. Her single father worries because Anna’s mom died in a car accident and he needs to raise her with good Christian morals.
On the other side of town we have the big city of Neo Matrix York. The male protagonist, Claude, is looking for the truth as he graduates from high school. His life is full of partying and not taking things too seriously. Meanwhile, his local governor, Devlin Natas, is running for President of the World in the next election with the sneaky underhanded plan to create a one world government that requires all colleges to teach Atheism.
Claude has a a firefighter dad who struggles with internet Mahjong. Claude also has a token black friend, James, who loves the party life and constantly does nothing to grow up. Meanwhile, Claude attends Gomorrah High School, which has a principal addicted to lighting Bibles on fire due to an incident he had with Christian police.
Anna starts to attend Gomorrah and notices the depravity of the school. Her only Christian friend is a kind janitor named Kirk who has sage wisdom for all her problems. He was a former pilot, but during one of his flights all the visitors disappeared, which drove him to think the world was ending (truthfully the plane was filled with a professional league of Hide-and-Seekers). There’s also a very mysterious student named Joshua Chris. He is a living allegory and can be seen walking across the pool, feeding students, and talking highly about his dad.
Anna meets Claude and is stricken with interest for his bad boy side. After many ice cream dates Anna shares her faith and reveals her heart’s true love. On the third date Anna makes an analogy how she is a “deer stuck inside a flaming Ferris wheel, but Jesus was the handsome lumberjack who saved her” and Claude finally gets it.
They both fall in love and show it by side hugging, but Anna reveals that she only side hugs with her left arm, because she believes only her husband deserves a right arm side hug. Claude makes his life right. He witnesses to his dad and his best friend. Then he decides he wants to start a ministry where he creates a college football team called The Little Davids.
He would have to be in it.
Ummmm….. I agree about the satire thing, but the plot you gave was pathetic. It just seems so stereotypically Christian TM. I am planning on writing a satirical story of the Reformation in the style of Warhammer Fantasy (basically both the protestants and the catholics turn out to be just as bad if not worse than the heathens due to how bloodthirsty and dogmatic both sides have become.) One genre I would include along with Satire (less so with Parody since the latter is more light-hearted in comparison) is black comedy (cue uptight conservatives screaming and fainting off cliffs due to the scandallousness of it all), even Paul and Jesus aimed below the belt at times, with Paul recommending the Judiazers to cut their own balls off (Ouch!), and Jesus calling the Pharisees “Sons of Satan” (Just replace the second S of SoS with a B and you can get where I am coming from).
Black comedy has a purpose to it, taking the grim and laughing at it because we acknowledge how horrible the reality of it was (Jokes about the Holocaust are still a No Go though). Heck, I wouldn’t mind a Christian parody that jabs at the Evangelicals by having them calling out the Hot Topic leader of the day as the Anti-Christ and ending up following an actual Anti-Christ! They were so busy calling out the specks in their brother’s eyes that they ignored the Big, Giant, Obvious Log in their own eye, you can even ham up this Anti-Christ by making him so blatantly evil that everyone BUT the Evangelicals can see it. It can also be a warning about being proud and boastful of your own doctrines and ways and not following John’s advice of questioning everything. But the Conservatives would accuse you of TDS (I personally am a Trump supporter and am planning on voting for him this election year) and plug their ears to anything that would expose their own hypocrisy. You could even go further and call them out for having the EXACT SAME PLAN as the liberals but through different means (Have Jesus kill billions of people and not get our hands dirty as we watch and revel and the torment of the “wicked”). Heck, have Jesus himself appear as a character calling out the Church for proclaiming itself holy enough to be raptured when he said literally nothing about a rapture and even asked his own Father NOT to take his followers out of the earth (how does a dispensationalist explain that little verse in John). Why would Jesus exterminate billions of people HE DIED FOR!!! We are not in the days of the Old Covenant when extermination was BARELY justified (God even thought that what the Babylonians did to the Jews was too extreme and had them judged for that!).
Sorry that this comment I made to give advice about parody and satire turned into a long rant about the errors of a 19th century doctrine (try looking up the origins of rapture theology from a non dispensationalist source). I could even turn this into an essay of its own if I had a blog to put this stuff on. But when I went though years and years of doomsday preaching from the likes of John Hagee, David Jeremiah, Jonathan Kahn (that man’s last name must be memed), Jan Markell, JD Farag, Steve Ciocliannti, Scott Clarke, John MacAurthur, and many others (I even stayed up till midnight for one of Hagee’s blood moons, and it was a frickin’ speck, what idiot would call that a “sign” but my family seems to fall easily for photo shopped pictures and conspiracy theories) I felt that there was something very wrong going on, so I went out prayerfully (though I will admit prayer is usually the last thing I do) and looked up other opinions about dispensationalism, at first I dismissed them as being liberal propaganda, then after trying and failing (thankfully) so many times to have the Holy Spirit enter in me so I could be filled with the “Shekinah Glory” I started searching some more and discovered Conservatives who questioned dispensationalism as well. Ironically one thing that helped to push me this way was when we were watching a sermon series by a dispensationalist of all people named Billy Crone, he was calling out the Charismatic Church and called it cultic, which made me realize I was raised a Charismatic, (We even went to Lakeland Florida that one time, which even my Pagan older brother called messed up, and probably one of the things that turned him TO Paganism) and then I began to question just how much I was lied to (my mom takes personal offense to this, thinking that I believe she would intentionally lie to me when I don’t even blame her for raising us in falsehoods, but her tearing me down when I question her (even going so far as to say “You have no right to question me!”) and calling me “arrogant” and ungrateful and rebellious, which just makes out relationship even worse, which is not her intent, but she sees me as an enemy.) so I digged even deeper and found folks like Gary Demar and Americanvision, who were preterist Conservatives (A.K.A. the guys accused of “Replacement Theology” when Dispensationalists have even worse plans for the Jews) that believed that God’s word was infallible and that Jesus will return one day… but not in the way that Tim La Hay and others like him describe (the fact that Tim thinks crappy Left Behind movies were more faithful to his book should open up our eyes to how off his rocker he really was.) and that we should be stewards of the earth and that we should do God’s will on earth as it is in Heaven. I also as someone of Jewish heritage, while still keeping my love for the Jews, have let go of some of the awe and wonder and adoration I had for them, (Been to a Messianic Jewish service, was exactly like a Catholic service, which I have also been to) and just acknowledged them as fellow humans in need of Christ.