"Christian" movies I love

I was/am prepping a post on what I've been reading lately, but I just rewatched I Saw the TV Glow and I want to talk about a few movies I love, instead - movies that weren't made as "Christian" movies, but that have powerful Christian themes anyway.

There will be no spoilers; I want to encourage you to watch movies on this list that you haven't seen.

I Saw the TV Glow

First on the list because yeah, I just rewatched it not an hour ago. I Saw the TV Glow is difficult to describe; there's not a whole lot that I've seen than I can compare it to. The basic synopsis is it's about a kid and his friend who get a little too obsessed with a Buffy-esque 90s show, but that is so, like... it tells you nothing about what the movie is actually like.

But look, what I love about this movie is the shockingly powerful Christian allegories that run through it. I know it was not the author's intent, but like seriously, it is one of the most intensely Christian movies I've ever seen, and about a side of things that intentionally Christian movies never touch on - what faith in Jesus looks and feels like to someone on the outside, who's attached to their life. This isn't a movie about "Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden," this is a movie about "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple."

It's described as a horror, but it's not what anyone thinks of when they think of horror. It's horrifying, maybe, but there's no jump scares, no gore, nothing like that. Just horrifying ideas.

Silence

Okay, this one might be cheating a bit - Silence is definitely a Christian movie, but it is a real Hollywood movie, not a movie made by Christians for Christians, and it's not one that many Christians I've talked to have seen.

It's a hard movie to watch, I won't pretend otherwise; it's like 3 hours long and while I don't remember a lot that's particularly graphic, it is about a tortured people group - early Japanese Christians - so there's some rough scenes for sure.

But oh, the ideas that it dares to give voice to! "Christian" movies like to pay lip service to the idea that life can be hard even for Christians, but there's still this severe intellectual cowardice in most of them - this idea that there are answers to all of your questions, or that once you fully trust God then it's all easy. Silence is about looking for God in the midst of suffering - about struggling to find him when it seems like he's completely absent. It's about facing people utterly undeserving of forgiveness and wrestling with whether it's right to forgive them anyway. It's about realizing how unworthy of forgiveness we are, about being too weak to even ask God for strength, and casting yourself on his mercy anyway.

It is a hard movie to watch, and at times even a hard movie to agree with, but I think it's an important movie to consider.

Everything , Everywhere, All at Once

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is basically the book of Ecclesiastes in the form of an action-comedy. This is a harder movie to recommend to general audiences; a lot of people are going to be too turned off by watching a man fight tooth and nail to insert a buttplug into himself, or a woman beating a man to death with a pair of dildoes, to get on board with the movie's deeper themes. And that's okay! I get that. And then even if you do stick around, the theme is all about "All is vanity and striving after wind," which, while biblical, is not exactly the most popular memory verses.

But I find Ecclesiastes to be an important counterpoint to the rest of scripture, in much the same way as the book of James. James is in large part about, "Hey, if you're reading all this stuff about being saved by faith and not by works, you might get the wrong idea that works are unimportant. But bro, they're super important, because if you actually have faith then you'll be dripping with works left and right." Ecclesiastes, in turn, is about, "Hey, if you're reading all this stuff about how important you are to God, you might get the wrong idea that the things you do matter. But bro, you are literally incapable of achieving anything of any lasting value, even if you commit your entire life to it - you are what matters, not your accomplishments." (Obviously both of those are heavily simplifications, but you get the idea.)

So Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is about wrestling with the question of the vanity of life - if there's really nothing new under the sun, why are we even here?