The Chosen: Christian entertainment sans cheese/plus a Jesus with a sense of humour

Bad scripts and worse acting are frequently heard criticisms when it comes to the Christian entertainment genre. The “big knock” against the Christian movie, television and streaming genre for more secular audiences – aside from the fact the films are Christian – has long been heavy-handed theological scripts, clunky acting and cheesy sets, with mainly bad plots, which, to be charitable, do little more than preach to the choir. There hasn’t been, aside from the occasional blockbuster, much for broader audiences to judge such films or television on if they were done, well, well. You know, decent scripts, good actors, high production values, that sort of thing. Hollywood, which is usually a synonym for Sodom or Gomorrah in the vocabulary of many Christians, is seldom on the side of the angels, unless commercial potential can stand in for faith in salvation if need be.

The Chosen TV series debuted on Dec. 24, 2017. Two seasons have aired. Season 3 is expected to air later this year. Seven seasons are planned.

Angel Studios, the streaming platform behind the Christian series The Chosen, announced in early January that it had raised $47 million in funding from venture capitalists. The financing was led by VC firm Gigafund and Bain-backed Uncorrelated Venture. Original seed investors Alta Ventures and Kickstart Fund also participated.

In addition to VC money, $5 million was crowdsourced directly from fans, and The Chosen is the most crowdfunded media project in history.  It has received 9.6 out of 10 on IMDb. John Jurgensen, a reporter who covers music, television and digital entertainment for The Wall Street Journal, wrote last November: “The success of the series is a powerful reminder to Hollywood that faith-focused projects can sometimes become breakthrough hits.” Chris DeVille, a journalist based in Ohio, writing for The Atlantic magazine last June, observed: “Take it from a critic and a Christian with an aversion to Christian entertainment: The show is good.”

I concur. It is the first Biblical series I’ve seen that consistently portrays Jesus as both “fully human” and “fully God.” Usually, I find the former left out. But Dallas Jenkins’ Jesus (Jonathan Roumie) has a very keen sense of humour when the occasion calls for it. Who would have imagined? Jesus with a sense of humour. Indeed, these Apostles (my favourite, I think, is young Matthew [Paras Patel], the tax collector, who has Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of Autism Spectrum Disorder), Pharisees (shout out to Erick Avari as Nicodemus, a Pharisee and a member of the Sanhedrin), Sadducees, and assorted residents of the Red Quarter of Jerusalem, located near the Gate of the Moors and Coponius Gate, in the southwestern part of the Western Wall, all appear as flesh-and-blood real people might well have in the 1st century Anno Domini (AD).

For background expertise and script consulting, the creators of the show have been conferring with Father David Guffee, a priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross, based at St. Monica Catholic Church in Santa Monica, California, and national director at Family Theater Productions; Rabbi Jason Sobel of Fusion Ministries in Hollywood, and Professor Doug Huffman, associate dean and professor of New Testament, overseeing the undergraduate division of Talbot School of Theology at Biola University in La Mirada, California. Last weekend, Jeanette and I watched Dallas Jenkins, creator, director and co-writer of The Chosen, do a “deep dive” into the first season’s eight episode on the show’s free mobile app with the three Biblical consultants, Father Guffee, Rabbi Sobel, and Professor, and Jenkins kicking off the 40-minute or so deep dive roundtable discussion with the timeless, “A Catholic priest, a Jewish rabbi, and an evangelical scholar walk into ….” This sounds like the beginning of a joke with reference to a drinking establishment, but 1st century Jerusalem Anno Domini (AD) and theology is what’s on tap here.

I first got to know the work of Dallas Jenkins back in 2011 with Jeanette at the Winnipeg Real to Reel Film Festival, as he had just directed What If … the previous year.

What If, a film about a businessman who is shown by an angel what his life could have become if he had followed God’s calling for his life, starred Kevin Sorbo, Kristy Swanson, Debby Ryan, and John Ratzenberger, who portrayed mail carrier Cliff Clavin on the comedy series Cheers, for which he earned two Primetime Emmy nominations. As “Mike the Angel,” Ratzenberger throws what I consider to be the best guardian angel punch in cinematic history to date at Ben Walker (Kevin Sorbo).

Dallas Jenkins dad, Jerry B. Jenkins, did most of the actual writing of the Left Behind novels, while Tim LaHaye was primarily the idea man. Left Behind started out as a series of 16 best-selling novels, published between 1995 and 2007, dealing with the Protestant evangelical Christian predispensationalist “End Times” view of the Rapture and the Tribulation that follows. The drama comes from the struggle of the rag-tag Tribulation Force against the Global Community and its leader Nicolae Carpathia – the Antichrist.

I’ve read the 16 novels – from Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days, published in 1995, and then Tribulation Force: The Continuing Drama of Those Left Behind; Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist; Soul Harvest: The World Takes Sides; Apollyon: The Destroyer Is Unleashed; Assassins: Assignment: Jerusalem, Target: Antichrist; The Indwelling: The Beast Takes Possession; The Mark: The Beast Rules the World; Desecration: Antichrist Takes the Throne; The Remnant: On the Brink of Armageddon; Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle of the Ages; Glorious Appearing: The End of Days; The Rising: Antichrist is Born: Before They Were Left Behind; The Regime: Evil Advances: Before They Were Left Behind; The Rapture: In the Twinkling of an Eye: Countdown to Earth’s Last Days, right through to Kingdom Come: The Final Victory in 2007.

Left Behind isn’t great literature,” wrote Alissa Wilkinson, critic-at-large at Christianity Today in the Washington Post in 2016, “but it’s highly engaging reading for a mass market, fast-moving fiction with elements drawn from sci-fi, romance, disaster porn, and political and spy novels. Left Behind has the code-cracking conspiracy feel of a Dan Brown novel, but also the appeal of a familiar story – one that inscribes the reader’s own world, with its televisions and airplanes and phones and computers, into biblical events.

“This is the genius of the Left Behind books: They work on two levels.”

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Holy Christmas, Batman … they’re thinking, talking and writing about Christianity

Several times a year (today being one of those times) I’ll see a post on my Facebook timeline from some old friend or colleague, who I haven’t seen for years, saying something to the effect, “Heard you(‘re) pretty religious.” Actually, that’s a verbatim quote from today on Facebook. But similar sentiments crop up several times a year, sometimes seemingly out of the blue, sometimes in relation to something I’ve recently written and posted on Facebook, or perhaps just re-posted from somewhere else. Usually it is framed more as a statement with a dangling question mark rather than a direct question.

The questioner in this case was a former roommate, who last I checked in with him on the matter about 30 years ago, was himself a committed atheist. And also a good guy, as we might say, principled and ethical. A good friend. A third member of our university roommate trio, who visited me after more than 20 years last summer, had also heard I was “pretty religious,” he told me. His wife, who I haven’t met yet, had suggested that before he visited, after reading some of my Facebook posts. My friend isn’t actually on Facebook himself but trolls his wife’s account from time to time, as do most Facebook objectors I know. A non-committal agonistic, he told me his response was sort of to shrug and say not to worry, “John’s always been a Catholic.”

When I hear or read this kind of thing, several things occur to me. One is the sobering fact that people I consider friends or former colleagues, who I worked with years ago, apparently in many cases find any connection between religion and me surprising and noteworthy enough to comment on. What, I wonder, does this say about how I lived my life in the years that I worked with or lived near them? As I said, sobering. And a bit rhetorical, as I’m not sure that I’d want them all to answer that, at least not on my timeline on Facebook.

As for their question, which might be paraphrased as, “When did you get religion?” how exactly does one answer that? I suppose Protestant evangelicals might point to their “born again” experience as that moment. Catholics …. well, infant baptism.

I can almost picture Pope Francis reminding me about the Sadducees, Pharisees and clericalism, should I start boasting about how religious I am. Pope Francis really is not a fan of legalism or legalists. He sees the Church as a big field hospital for sinners, of which he includes himself.

Given that I work 18 hours on Saturdays and Sundays, my parish priest might be surprised to hear how religious I am, too, given my mass attendance for the one mass I might attend weekly on Saturday nights at 6:30 p.m., after working 10 of those 18 hours, is pretty abysmal. No excuse. Sadly, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” many times and an after-work nap beckons.

But when I am awake, I do write about religion with some frequency. I also read about it, think about it and think it matters far more than most journalists understand. However, that’s not exactly a new realization that I’ve come to. Almost 18 years ago, I was among the 270 participants on both sides of that great divide, interested in the intersection of religion and politics in the public square, when I attended the first-ever Faith in the Media conference at the Carleton University School of Journalism in Ottawa for three days from June 7-9, 1998. The Peterborough Examiner, while it didn’t have a religion beat in 1998, graciously picked up the tab for their city hall reporter to go.

Toronto’s Roman Catholic archbishop at the time, Aloysius Cardinal Ambrozic, noted that the Church makes truth claims and demands, which are absolute, while the media tends to be liberal, and, as such, opposed to absolutes. “(The) media are adept at showing the ills of society, but not the remedies … Most of our media are not interested in Christ’s self-emptying death, only in sweating and weeping Madonnas. The media love religious kitsch.” But Ambrozic quickly added, “We, the religious professionals, are not very forthcoming sometimes, perhaps out of a fear of sensationalism. Nor do we always explain ourselves well. At other times we kowtow to the media when we should question its mindset.”

I had also been able to write about religion some during the early to mid-1990s at the Kingston Whig-Standard, where religious coverage was quite possible on weekends, especially if you initiated it. One of my more surreal moments of religion coverage came in June 1995, less than two months after Timothy McVeigh, radicalized after the Waco Siege and Ruby Ridge incident, killed 168 people when he bombed the Oklahoma City federal building, and I covered a conference in Kingston called “Take A Stand ’95: Defending Your Faith in the New World Order.”

Gary Kah, of Indiana, and Eric Barger, of Texas, two of the rising stars of the televised Bible prophecy circuit, told me it was tough going in the immediate wake of Oklahoma City to deliver their message. I imagined it would be.

McVeigh himself was a baptized Roman Catholic but self-professed agnostic, who would later receive the Roman Catholic Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick, formerly known as Last Rites or Extreme Unction, administered through a federal Bureau of Prisons chaplain, minutes before his execution in the federal death chamber at Terre Haute, Indiana on June 11, 2001.

While it may have been tough going at the time in 1995, Kah and Barger are still going – strong, or at least, so it seems.

And the interesting thing is that much of what they talked about that June day more than 21 years ago has come to pass.

A “cashless” society, biometrics, including palm geometry and retinal scanning;  these things are no longer the stuff exclusively of the religious right and tin foil hat meme.

Or how about Implanted  RFID (radio frequency identification) chips? … hmm … sounds kinda like something from the pages of a script for one of the late Iowa filmmaker Russ Doughten’s movies, such as his 1972 film, A Thief in the Night, followed by its three sequels – A Distant Thunder in 1978, Image of the Beast in 1980 and The Prodigal Planet in 1983. Doughten, who earned his master’s degree from Yale Drama School in 1954, died at the age of 86 in August 2013.

While one friend on Facebook today was musing, “Heard you(‘re) pretty religious” another a few hours later sent me a link to Laurie Goodstein’s keynote address at the symposium on religious literacy in journalism earlier this month at Harvard Divinity School for the Religious Literacy Project.

I had read part of her speech last week. “I’m glad that we’re all here because we now have urgent work to do,” Goodstein said in her keynote speech Dec. 8. “Religious literacy has probably never been more important, or more of a challenge. The grounds are shaking, the fissures are cracking open all around us, and the faultlines all seem to intersect. Race, class, gender and underneath it all like molten lava: religion.”

Goodstein is the national religion correspondent for The New York Times. After earning a B.A. from University of California Berkeley and an M.A. from the Columbia School of Journalism, she began her journalism career in 1989 at The Washington Post.

She started as news assistant before becoming a metro reporter and then national reporter. While at the Post in both 1995 and 1996, she won two major awards for religion newswriting, The Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year and the Supple Religion Writing Award.

She joined The New York Times in 1997. “Her work for the Times has covered a wide range of topics and religious traditions, offering a nuanced rather than monolithic view of American Catholics, evangelicals, and Muslims, among others,” said Harvard Divinity School. “In 2004, she won the American Academy of Religion’s award for best in-depth news reporting on religion, an award she won again in 2009. In 2015, she also won the Religion Newswriters Association’s award for excellence in religion reporting. Her recent work has covered American evangelicals’ support for Donald Trump, the possibility of female deacons in the Catholic Church, and Muslim opposition to ISIS.”

I grew up Roman Catholic in an extended family of mainly Protestants (primarily United Church, but with a smattering of Anglicans) with a few Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses also added to the mix. I still have my dad’s 1927 United Church certificate for perfect Sunday school attendance. He was a member of the United Church when he married my mother in June 1942 – an era when “mixed marriages,” as they were quaintly called, were still rather uncommon and somewhat frowned upon by both Protestants and Catholics.

Eventually my dad converted to Catholicism of his own accord. But it was strongly suggested to me by my parents during my childhood that religion wasn’t a particularly suitable topic for discussion at large extended family events given the plurality of beliefs and the conviction with which they were held. I thought religion and politics were about the two most interesting topics one could talk about at the dinner table, so this imposed considerable restraint on me. Still, if my Uncle Morley and Aunt Dot weren’t bringing The Watchtower or Awake! around to the house on visits (and they weren’t), it seemed a reasonable accommodation. My dad and Uncle Morley found their common ground in a boat fishing. All in all, my parent’s live-and-let-live theology has struck me as increasingly wise as I get older.

Christmas dinner next week for many means travelling long miles only to be thrust together in close quarters with other annually seasonally-close family members and friends who hold somewhat different cultural, political, sports or even religious beliefs than you do.

In terms of the latter, this happens even among Christians, hard as that may be to believe, marking the birth of the saviour some 2,000-plus years ago in Bethlehem – or is it Nazareth? Take your pick.

The Gospels of Saint Matthew and Saint Luke opt for Bethlehem, while Saint Mark and Saint John seem to lean more toward Nazareth.

As for the year, month or day of Jesus’ birth, you can likely rule out Dec. 25 for the latter two and settle on sometime between 7BC and 4BC for the year. Pope–emeritus Benedict XVI in his book, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives wrote that Jesus was born several years earlier than commonly believed because the entire Christian calendar is based on a miscalculation by a sixth century monk known as Dionysius Exiguus, or in English, Dennis the Small.

Given these antecedents it perhaps should come as no surprise then that Roman Catholics and their Protestant brethren some five centuries almost after the Reformation still don’t see eye-to-eye on some of the theological fine points of Christianity. In fact some evangelicals are pretty sure Catholics aren’t really Christians when it come right down to it and remain “unsaved” if they’re not “born again.”

The Catholic response is often a dismissive exercise in pulling rank and saying, in essence, “we were here first” and we are therefore synonymous with being “the Church.” As in one and the same in an unbroken line from Saint Peter to Pope Francis.

How this might play out at a Catholic-Protestant Christmas dinner has been nicely illustrated by Chris Castaldo, lead pastor at New Covenant Church of Naperville in Naperville, Illinois. Castaldo, who was raised as a Catholic and who had an uncle who was a cardinal,  several years ago did a 4:38-video promo for his book, Holy Ground: Walking with Jesus as a Former Catholic, where he plays the role of the Catholic brother, “Vito” at the Christmas dinner because, he says, he was a natural as a former Catholic – and “a Long Island Guido” – to play the role.

“Pastor Dave,” Castaldo’s good friend, Lon Allison, pastor of teaching and evangelism and missions at Wheaton Bible Church in West Chicago, Illinois, plays the Protestant minister.

The video, which can be seen at http://vimeo.com/2702601, is based on a true incident that happened to Castaldo as a minister at College Church in Wheaton, but whereas the actual incident happened right in the church, the fictional video setting has been moved to the family Christmas dinner. To say more about it here would make me a spoiler.

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