Some Thoughts on Cinematic Portrayals of Christianity

Wow, that's a pompous title.

Anyway, just got back from seeing 300 (it rocks, highly recommended) and there were two references to Catholicism in the previews (300 itself predates Catholicism by a fair bit). First, there was a Catholic priest, recognizable by his collar in a trailer for The Reaping and, evidently, Eddie Brock in Spiderman 3 is a Catholic too (he was shown crossing himself with holy water as he entered a cathedral to ask God to kill Peter Parker.

I'm Catholic, too, and these two things got me thinking about how movies portray Christianity. These are just a few things that came to mind; they're not particularly well thought out.

When a character in a movie needs to be established as "religious", they are portrayed almost always as Catholic. I wondered why that was, and came up with a few ideas. First, it is usually considered to be the largest single Christian denomination, with something around 1 billion baptized members, so it's easily accessible to many people. More than that, I think, the Catholic Church has number symbols like the collar, the rosary, confession (reconciliation), and the Vatican that make it easy to characterize someone as being "Catholic." It's an economy of narration; You paint a few broad strokes and let the audience fill in the rest. Most other Christian faiths lack such readily identifiable symbols, or may lack denomination-specific symbols entirely.

The one major exception to this (in movies, mind you) is black people, who are usually portrayed as belonging to some indeterminant protestant sect, understood by the audience to be baptist. This is especially true is the character is a minister or preacher; you never see black priests in the movies.

Catholics are urban/suburban, and protestants, when portrayed, are rural or southern.

The Catholic faithful seem to come in two flavors: the fairly devout (going to Confession, receiving Communion) or just-making-the-motions type, a la Bethany in the beginning of Dogma.

Protestant faithful (bear in mind, I'm using protestant in a very broad sense; in Hollywood, protestant is essentially defined as "non-Catholic") either have a very down home, simple faith, or are seen to be crazy bible-thumpers.

When deviance is portrayed in a Catholic community in the movies, it always seems to be priestly deviance. The members of the church are fairly average people, but the priest (deacon, bishop) is a lech or actually worshiping Satan or involved in some super-secret but uber-powerful cabal within the church.

When deviance is portrayed in protestant communities, usually the whole community is in on the weirdness; everybody thinks it's perfectly normal to share your wife with your brother and sacrifice a live lamb every full moon to the evil spirits that live in the woods. This may be because there is less of a hard distinction between clergy and laity in many protestant faiths.

Just some thoughts. Maybe more later.

With Respects To Wm Wordsworth (A Work in Progress)

"The World is too much with us"
Truer now than then
we scramble for purchase, footing
like frightened ants and busy men

"The World is too much with us"
it's never left my side
a constant nuisance, ever-present
as inexorable as a tide

"The World is too much with us"
I'd like to leave awhile
to let my thoughts collect themselves
and gather life more fertile

"The World is too much with us"
Wm Wordsworth once did say
I think the man ahead of his time
his words haunt me still today.