A family of four recently started attending our church. Neither husband nor wife grew up in church and, although the wife briefly attended youth group when she was in middle school, they knew almost nothing about the Christian faith. Individually they felt a desire to learn about God and rightly relate to him, and that desire led them to our church, for which we are grateful.
This past week, I asked them what their parents and family members thought about their decision to follow Christ. They told me that family members said things like, “If it helps you…” and “Just don’t get weird.” So, I asked them what they had thought Christians were like before they started coming to church. Their answer was interesting.
The husband had not known a Christian personally, so his opinion had been formed by what he saw on TV and in the movies. What he saw there, which he assumed was an authentic representation of Christians – was nothing like what he found when he actually met some.
Thank goodness! The way TV and films represent Christians is misleading and often malicious. For example, my wife really enjoyed E.R., which ran for 15 seasons on NBC’s “Must See TV” lineup. After watching it with her for a few seasons, I stopped watching it because of its blatant bias against Christians. When a Christian character appeared on E.R., you could automatically assume that person would be a sexual predator, a greedy fraud, or an abusive bully.
Of course, E.R. first aired in 1994. Perhaps things have changed in the way television has portrayed Christians in more recent years.
They haven’t. HBO’s comedy, The Righteous Gemstones, features John Goodman as a Southern televangelist who preaches purity, modesty, and tithing, while his children lead ridiculously opulent lifestyles that are funded by gifts to the ministry. The long-running Law and Order: Special Victim’s Unit featured an episode in season 21 that portrayed the deputy chief’s close friend, the Reverend Delman Chase, as a serial sexual predator. Criminal Minds portrayed Reverend Marcus Drake, highly regarded for his loving intervention in the lives of at-risk teens, as a manipulative abuser of runaway children.
My new friend saw Christians portrayed like this and assumed that this is what they were really like. At the movies, he could have seen Robert DeNiro playing Max Cady in Cape Fear. Cady is a self-styled servant of the Lord, but in reality he is a sadistic, brutal fiend. Or he could have watched serial killer and faithful church member Carl Henderson in The Devil All the Time. Or he might have seen Steven Spielberg’s, The Fablemans, which featured an apparently earnest Christian teen who uses private prayer sessions as an excuse for sexually aggressive behavior with boys.
It is not that one cannot find examples like these in real life. There are plenty of them. But if every time a TV show writes in a Christian character, it represents them as a hypocritical, money-grubbing sexual predator, it has become the administrator of agitprop – the agitation of people with propaganda in order to condition their thinking.
If all people know of Christians is what they see on TV or in movies, their perspective will be grossly imbalanced. There are about 50 million people in the United States who are in church every Sunday. There are about half-a-million clergy. On average, these people are more generous than the average American. They are more forgiving. They care about doing what is right and good.
Evangelical Christians are more generous by far than the average American. In 2023, they gave 29% more per capita than the non-religious. Even with the decline of Evangelicals on the American scene, they still give more than any other group. I would suspect that they, along with serious Christians from every denomination, forgive more than any other group. They volunteer more often. They take the lead in worldwide humanitarian efforts.
Of course, there are notorious Christian preachers and hypocritical church members, and their representation in the media is a stinging rebuke of the church’s failure to effectively teach people to obey all that Jesus commanded (Matthew 28:19). But what we find on TV and in the movies is a prejudicial depiction that has become the instrument of anti-Christian indoctrination.
Before my new friend came to church, all he knew about Christians came from the media. (It is amazing – an act of God’s grace – that they came to church at all.) But now they are getting to know real Christians and are discovering that they are not weird (at least, not weirder than anyone else), but they are kind and giving. If all you know of Christians is what you’ve seen on TV or picked up from the media mill, it is time you met one for yourself. Go see them in their natural habitat – go to church – and find out what they are really like.
The Way Home 
Leave a comment