What Makes a ‘Christian Movie’ Christian?

When I say “Christian movie,” what comes to your mind?

The Passion of the Christ certainly pops into mine. Perhaps it’s followed by The Prince of Egypt or The Case for Christ. Recent moviegoers may think of Jesus Revolution and Southern Gospel.

But what about Hacksaw Ridge, the story of the soldier who, because of his Seventh-Day Adventist faith, refused to compromise on his beliefs even when his enemies shot at him?

Let’s stray a little further: How about The Lord of the Rings, which Tolkien himself called a “fundamentally religious and Catholic work”? And what about movies that have figures who certainly display elements of the Christian story, like Superman or The Matrix?

The question I’m getting at, of course, is obvious: What constitutes a Christian movie? Does it need a gospel presentation or follow a Bible story? Can it simply teach a Christian moral? Or should we also include any film that simply has any sort of reference to the Christian religion? You’ll get a different answer depending on who you ask, leaving us with a wide scope of “Christian” films to think through—and because of that, not all “Christian” movies are created equal.

And that leaves prospective moviegoers gambling: When a film advertises itself as Christian, will that entail a sermon’s worth of biblical exegesis fleshed out onto a screen? Or will it simply tell a tale of how a football coach prayed once during the big game? (Final score results may vary.)

That reality may speak to the reason for the comments of David Helling, director of His Only Son. When the Christian director spoke with Fox News about the film, he said something that resonated with me deeply.

“We need to be more discerning,” Helling told Fox News. “Just because it’s got the name of Christ on it, or it’s got the name of the Bible on it, or it talks about God, it doesn’t mean that it’s true.”

Discernment is a virtue that every Christian should strive for—the seasoned and mature Christian discerns between proper and false doctrine, for instance (Hebrews 5:14). Every movie—secular and Christian—wants to tell you something. Every writer and director behind the camera wants to deliver a message of some sort (and often, more than one). It can be simple or complex, deeply affirming or incredibly shallow, but every movie has a point that it wants to make. If you’re on our website, you probably understand that such messages can have an impact, especially on impressionable viewers. And while it may be easy for us to dismiss a secular message, it’ll be much more difficult to tear out the messages from films that call themselves Christian. In fact, it’s those films that, if we fail to discern improper teaching, may have a much graver impact on our lives.

And that “improper teaching” doesn’t always have to mean bad theology. Sometimes, it may just mean discerning “Christian” movies that, well, don’t really have a distinctly Christian message at all.

I talked about this briefly during during Plugged In’s latest movie awards. My point was not that Christian movies are bad—but some can be misleading. To be more blunt: I believe that there’s a sizable difference between a Christian movie and a movie that simply contains a Christian. I’m not of the opinion that the latter necessitates calling it the former (even if the latter can still be a good, quality movie in its own right). And a protagonist who prays once does not a Christian movie make.

It’s a strange situation within filmmaking, one that seems almost unique to the Christian genre. If you apply the rules we often apply to “Christian” movies to any other genre, we can see the disconnect.

Take a comedy, for instance. Say you sit down in the theater for a new film that advertises itself as a comedy. But by the end of the movie, you find that the only attempt at a joke within the entirety of its runtime was when the protagonist made a passing knock-knock joke. You’d be outraged at the director! “That’s not a comedy,” you’d say. “It’s just a movie that happened to have a joke in it!” And you’d say that, because when a movie labels itself with a genre, you expect a certain standard to be met. If it’s a drama, you expect some dramatic moments. If it’s a comedy, you expect jokes—regardless of whether they land. And when it’s a Christian movie, we should expect Christianity—not just a passing reference to it.

When Helling approached making a Christian film, he tells Fox that he did it with a purpose:

“My heart is to do biblical films for as long as the Lord allows me to do it in order to bring Scripture’s truth from the page to the screen, so that others can see these accounts as real people and be drawn to the Word into the Gospel for themselves.” For him, the screen was a way to help people understand the Christian faith deeper, “to give an answer to the scoffers and the skeptics, for one, and to give a defense to believers that they could then answer the skeptics in their own lives.”

As I wrote earlier, every movie has its purpose and message. Christian movies, then, should likewise have a Christian purpose and message.

And we shouldn’t settle for anything less.