Hollywood’s Underground Church

Christians behind the scenes of today’s movies say God is working to redeem the film industry.
You’ve been working hard all day, and you want some light entertainment. You remember this was the hour Little House on the Prairie used to air, so you figure you’re in for something wholesome. Instead, a program about several unmarried young adults, each involved in a sexual relationship, comes on.

You take your 13-year-old daughter to see Queen Latifah’s movie Beauty Shop, thinking it can’t be too bad. Instead, you’re embarrassed by the frequent raunchy references to sex acts and body parts.

If you think entertainment wasn’t always this debased, you’re right. And if you’re wondering whether Christians can do anything about the current situation, the answer is yes.

This isn’t the first time the cultural climate has been favorable to offensive media, however. Many films made during the Roaring ’20s featured explicit sex, violence, profanity and blasphemy. Christianity and clergy were often ridiculed on the screen.

During that decade, attempts at censorship on the local and state level met with mixed success. God’s people had to rise up and act in concert to bring change.
In 1934, the Roman Catholic Church formed the Legion of Decency to help reverse the trend toward immoral films. Parishioners were urged from the pulpit to boycott movie theaters until Hollywood changed its ways.

The legion helped to enforce the Motion Picture Production Code, a set of guidelines developed in 1930 to govern the content of films. For more than 30 years, Christians of various denominations read every script from every major studio in the light of this code.

If a picture conformed to the code, it received the Code Seal. If not, many theaters would not show it. The church exercised godly stewardship over the moral
climate of the country.

Protestants worked with the Roman Catholics during the 1930s until a growing distrust of Catholics caused Protestant representation to wither. Not until 1948, with the creation of the Protestant Film Commission (PFC), was there an organized presence of Protestantism in Hollywood.

In the late 1950s, censorship efforts weakened. The Legion of Decency stopped warning people to stay away from bad movies and began only commending good movies. By 1975, the organization had virtually ceased to exist.

The PFC initially was under the umbrella of the liberal National Council of Churches. In the 1960s, the council dismantled the PFC on the grounds that mainline Protestants no longer “[are] concerned with condemning sex and violence or immorality and futility, but are interested in films which are honest in their portrayal of the human situation.”

Not long after, what we now call R-rated movies started being produced. It wasn’t that Hollywood threw out the church and its restraining force. Rather, the church abandoned its call to be salt and light. When it did, the era of Christian-led decency in Hollywood came to an end.

Cleaning Up the Big Screen

As the moral quality of movies degenerated, many individuals heard God’s call to action. Currently, several dozen Christian ministries are active in Hollywood ministering in various ways to people in the film and television industry. You might say they are Hollywood’s underground church.

Many ministry leaders, while acknowledging there’s considerable room for improvement, cite trends that give cause for rejoicing. Two men making a difference are Larry Poland, Ph.D., and Ted Baehr.

Poland, founder and CEO of Mastermedia International, builds relationships with Hollywood decision-makers, presents the gospel to them and then disciples those who come to Christ.

“God is at work in the industry,” he says. “There’s a hunger and an openness to the gospel on the part of Hollywood persons of influence. And there are growing numbers of believers in prominent places in the business.”

Poland says he once led a network vice president to Christ. Afterward, the man instinctively started red-penciling bad words out of scripts that landed on his desk.

Poland’s ministry publishes a quarterly prayer calendar naming Hollywood media personalities and decision-makers. He says that many media people-believers and nonbelievers-express appreciation for Christians’ prayers.

If Poland is an evangelist, Baehr is a researcher and lobbyist. He is founder and chairman of The Christian Film & Television Commission and publisher of Movieguide magazine.

Baehr’s research demonstrates that wholesome movies do much better at the box office, and he shares his findings with heads of studios. His research shows that although in 1985 there were only six movies aimed at families, in 2003 the number made represented more than 40 percent of the total.

“The chairman of a major studio recently told me that he attributed these shifts directly to our influence and our economic benchmarking of the entertainment industry,” he says.

Movieguide (www.movieguide.org) helps Christians make wise entertainment choices by publishing reviews of movies currently playing. In addition to putting out this publication, Baehr also hosts the increasingly popular Movieguide Annual Faith & Values Awards Gala and Report to Hollywood in Beverly Hills, California, at which awards are given for television programs and movies, and to actors based on wholesomeness of values presented.

This awards show is attracting increasing attention from Hollywood decision-makers, some of whom have come to know Jesus as Lord and Savior at the event. Even the media is taking note; the 2005 gala garnered a segment on NBC Nightly News.

In spite of the efforts that have been made to clean up the big screen, however, there is still much to be done. Christians must continue to work to reform the entertainment industry. Here’s why:

First, though we rejoice that movies and television programs with wholesome, redemptive-even specifically Christian-themes do get produced, they are not the majority of visual media made, and their effect doesn’t last long. Dave Johnson, a Christian and the creator-producer of TV series Doc and Sue Thomas: F.B. Eye, comments, “The effect of one good movie like The Passion of the Christ quickly wears off. We must keep the effort going.”

Second, media influence attitudes and behaviors. A recent article in Newsweek gives a significant example. The article states that Emory University researchers Ralph DiClemente and Gina Wingood tracked the disrespectful lyrics of rap songs and found a greater incidence of lowered self-esteem and associated risky behaviors in girls who frequently viewed rap videos.

Third, our national security is at risk. Though we do not condone the actions of terrorists, we can understand why many in the Muslim world view America as a moral cesspool, out to corrupt the nation’s children.

Christian businessman David McQuade says, “Perception is reality a half a world away, and with each morally irresponsible motion picture or television show we export, we add to an already deadly cocktail of misperception-it has literally become a matter of national security.”

What Can We Do?

Many conservative Christians are no longer willing to live self-protectively, letting the world become an ever-worsening cesspool. They now acknowledge Christians have a divine custodial mandate to change society. However, not all responses are wise or helpful; in fact, some are actually counterproductive. For example: