This article appeared in the March 28, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Jesus Revolution (Jon Erwin and Brent McCorkle, 2023)

In the mid-aughts, enabled by my then-editor, A.A. Dowd of The A.V. Club, I proactively requested review assignments for anti-evolution tracts, the God’s Not Dead franchise, and adjacent mental garbage. I wasn’t raised evangelical, nor did I have any such friends growing up, so why did I seek out Christian propaganda? One answer might be that I was reconnecting with my childhood: my “alternative-medicine physician” father was prone to paranoid conspiracy theories, a strain of which runs heavily through evangelical politicking. See, for example, Pat Robertson’s galaxy-brained 1991 bestseller, The New World Order, which, as Frances FitzGerald summarizes in her 2017 book The Evangelicals, rails against “the usual suspects: the Council on Foreign Relations, the prestigious Trilateral Commission, the Rockefellers, the Wall Street Banks, and the Eastern Establishment as a whole.” These were all regular players in my dad’s alternate-reality monologues, the background of an upbringing that prepared me for the present moment better than I ever expected. (My dad was also an anti-vaxxer and, in his capacity as my doctor, didn’t allow me to get my MMR shots until NYU insisted that they wouldn’t let me in without them.)

During the ’90s, such conspiracy-mongering, especially when coupled with anti-abortion and other sexual-morality legislation targeted at “values voters,” was unappealing to the wider Republican voting base, frustrating the political ambitions of evangelical Christians. In 1993, the Christian Coalition’s then–executive director Ralph Reed proposed a path forward in his essay “Casting a Wider Net”: “Values are important to voters, but values alone are not enough. The successful candidate or movement must promote policies that personally benefit voters—such as tax cuts, education vouchers, higher wages, or retirement benefits.” When Republicans subsequently swept to victory in 1994’s midterm elections, Reed celebrated: “Our movement is now in many ways thoroughly integrated and enmeshed into the machinery of the Republican Party.”

The American evangelical church’s superficial transformation from fundamentalist fire-breathing to a milder realpolitik was mirrored in the subsector of Christian filmmaking. Evangelical cinema’s breakout was 1972’s A Thief in the Night, which was followed by three sequels (all directed, like the first, by Donald W. Thompson); the series’s signature scenes are of true believers breaking out large, crudely printed timelines of the Rapture, prefiguring YouTube conspiracists in their low-rentness, autodidactic certainty, and self-generated proofs. Primarily screened in church basements and other nontheatrical settings, A Thief in the Night is estimated to have been seen by as many as 300 million people.

In the following decades, the series (and its successors) moved from the first film’s Twilight Zone–lite tone, which presents the ascendance to heaven of 140,000 souls as a kind of sinister genre tale, to increasingly direct political and culture-war positions, dramatizing the grievances of the seemingly irreconcilable constituencies Reed made it his project to synthesize. In 1981’s Image of the Beast—the third entry in the series—computers are denounced as “the new Golden Calf.” This anti-tech paranoia is reworked by brothers Alex and Stephen Kendrick in 2008’s Fireproof, in which Kirk Cameron’s firefighter battles his pornography addiction and saves his marriage by destroying his PC with a baseball bat. That’s ludicrous, but still less tinfoil-hat conspiratorial than 1999’s The Omega Code, in which the Antichrist possesses a media mogul (Michael York), and tries to take over the world using a software for decoding Torah prophecies.

When I stopped reviewing Christian movies just before the pandemic, they were presenting as less aggressive in their positions, more likely to affirm the afterlife than condemn the world below—minus belligerent anomalies like 2019’s Unplanned, a ham-handed anti-abortion screed in which a fetus is seen clinging for literal life to the walls of a uterus before getting vacuumed into the void. Peddling falsehoods to demonize nonprofits, Unplanned is unabashedly Trumpian cinema, not least because it was in part financed by MyPillow founder and MAGA advocate Mike Lindell. But it was the exception rather than the meek norm embodied by glossy productions like 2014’s Heaven Is for Real, in which Greg Kinnear’s young child takes a ride to the other side and comes back to share the good news.

Higher-budget Christian films from major studios’ faith-oriented divisions tend to tone it down in a bid for wider appeal and bigger grosses. It’s a proven strategy: amassing just over $100 million theatrically, Heaven Is for Real was a Sony production; Lionsgate proffered 2017’s warm-and-fuzzy The Shack, about a grieving widower hanging out with the Holy Trinity in said cabin, which made $96.9 million worldwide. Fireproof’s Kendrick brothers took their business to Sony beginning with 2015’s War Room, which cost $3 million and made $74 million, a nearly 25-fold return on its investment. Notable as one of the first evangelical productions to feature Black protagonists, it offers an extremely specific demonstration of being a “prayer warrior,” with characters kneeling for hours and begging the Lord to answer their calls as a kind of endurance sport. The site for these struggles—the field of combat evoked by the title—is likely to be a closet; the Kendricks said God gave them the idea for the location-elevating label “war room.”

The film starred Christian media personality Priscilla Shirer as Elizabeth, a godly woman trying to get her potentially straying husband back. Smarting from a mostly unsuccessful decade at the box office, last year the Kendricks returned to play the hits with a successful quasi-sequel, The Forge, starring Shirer as Elizabeth’s previously unmentioned twin sister Cynthia, who’s struggling to motivate her 19-year-old son, Isaiah (Aspen Kennedy), to get a job and move out of the house. The enemy is no longer the PC but video games; however, that seductive console gets sold off after Isaiah finds a job with local businessman Joshua Moore (Cameron Arnett), founder and CEO of a fitness-equipment company. Joshua hires the kid after showing him the factory floor; Isaiah, observing what’s essentially a scaled-down Amazon warehouse, responds like Judy Garland first seeing Oz.

A requirement of Isaiah’s employment is that he show up twice a week for “mentoring sessions” with Joshua, which quickly turn explicitly evangelical. If he wanted to complain, the HR person taking his grievance would be… Joshua’s wife, a situation which is portrayed as an ideal workplace. And while Isaiah ostensibly jettisons his video-game habit so that he can devote more time to serving Jesus, the shifting motivation for destroying technology—from saving the family unit in Fireproof to becoming a better-rested employee in The Forge—is depressingly aligned with the GOP’s increasing abandonment of its “family values” pose for simple deregulation.

In that light, The Forge isn’t really innocuous compared to its red-meat predecessors. Its politics are encapsulated in the idea that small-business owners are hampered by labor regulations, with a climax that frames the gross exploitation of workers as a spiritual triumph. Joshua’s employees work 16 extra caffeine-fueled hours after an eight-hour shift to ship 3,000 units overnight, in order to retain a demanding client thinking of changing contractors—all to ensure that 10 percent of the company’s profits can continue to be allocated to solar panels in indigent third-world countries. For their backbreaking work, they’re awarded hefty bonuses (a prize they would never have had the chance to win if they’d had to check with a union shop steward first!) The film’s Charlotte, North Carolina setting is directly relevant: The Forge takes place in a right-to-work state, making the film a quiet example of lived politics.

While not explicitly Christian, relative newcomer Angel Studios’s Sound of Freedom (starring Mel Gibson’s former Jesus, Jim Caviezel) peddles child-sex-trafficking fears, putting a more sinister charge on their flagship television series, the New Testament dramatization The Chosen. The program is the brainchild of Dallas Jenkins, whose father, Jerry B. Jenkins, is the co-author of Left Behind, the best-selling rapture book series, and author of four (soon to be five) novelizations of The Chosen. Theatrical releases of select episodes of each season have repeatedly cracked the box-office top 10, while the series’s Jesus, Jonathan Roumie, has become famous enough to be welcome on secular daytime talk shows. This is a genuinely new development; Christian films have traditionally drafted right-wing, past-their-prime C-listers (à la former sitcom star Cameron), insular evangelical stars, or uncharismatic placeholders. But Roumie—a 50-year-old who looks plausibly within a decade of the age of his character—has become a name recognizable outside of his Christian context.

Roumie’s day job on TV is the unavoidable meta-text for his other recent big Christian part. 2023’s Jesus Revolution is a triple biopic, its trinity consisting of older pastor Chuck Smith (Kelsey Grammer) and his two younger protégés: hippie evangelical Lonnie Frisbee (Roumie) and the more straitlaced Greg Laurie (Joel Courtney). Co-directed by Kendrick mentee Jon Erwin and Brent McCorkle, Jesus Revolution tells a none-too-controversial story of generational rift and reconciliation: in the late ’60s, Pastor Smith presides over an aging and increasingly empty congregation, into whose drab world Frisbee’s hippie attire introduces literal color. A new Jesus for a new age! This, however, is Frisbee’s only deviation from the norm; once parishioners learn to tolerate folk guitar and bare feet, the ideological song remains the same. The story is basically an outgrowth of Reed’s foundational insight, proposing that Christians adopt the garb of their time to advance their eternal concerns (Reed had earlier advocated presenting like a businessperson for the Reagan ’80s).

Jesus Revolution is predictably expedient in what it leaves out. You won’t learn from the film that the late Smith, played as a cuddly patriarch, was the type of evangelical who blamed 9/11 on homosexuality; still with us, Laurie, now an ardent devotee of our current president, believes “God has placed Donald Trump in office.” While it’s not technically lying to omit present-day positions from a film that takes place more than half a century ago, the movie’s withholding of key facts about Frisbee’s life is breathtaking in its cynicism. His departure from Smith’s ministry is presented as more or less a clash of egos, but Frisbee was almost certainly gay, even if his own memoir—published nearly two decades after he died of AIDS at age 43—disputed the assertion: “I have never even considered myself a homosexual at all, even though I had been molested for years as a child, had sexually experimented as part of the rebellious ‘free love generation’ during my teenage years in the ’60s, and there is also my disappointing backsliding days in the mid-’80s.” That is a lot of time to be gay-but-not-gay; Frisbee characterized his illness as “paying for the consequences of my sin even right now.”

All of these Christian productions, no matter how successful, make the vast majority of their money at the U.S. box office. Though the world is currently short on neither right-wing governmental drift nor parallel evangelical movements, there is something uniquely and unexportably American about these films: they’re set in uninspiring, featureless cities where closets afford the closest access to the sublime, and they indulge in parochial persecution fantasies while relitigating very specific grievances and rewriting national histories. Jesus Revolution, for example, contends that the major social breakthrough of the American ’60s wasn’t by the free-love generation but their less-revered Christian counterrevolutionaries. The way things are going, the movie may have a point; if the rest of the world now has to deal with the consequences of America’s evangelical fringe becoming its very own Council on Foreign Relations, at least they’re spared the movement’s cinema.

Vadim Rizov is the director of editorial operations at Filmmaker Magazine.