Film as Religion

Myths, Morals, and Rituals

John C. Lyden

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780814765173
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2003

Film as Religion argues that popular films perform a religious function in our culture. Like more formal religious institutions, films can provide us with ways to view the world and values to confront it. Lyden contends that approaches which interpret films only ideologically or theologically miss the mark in understanding their appeal to viewers. He develops an alternative method which shows how films can be understood as representing a “religious” worldview in their own right.

Lyden surveys the state of the study of religion and film, offering an overview of previous methods before presenting his own. Rather than seeking to uncover hidden meanings in film detectable only to scholars, Lyden emphasizes how film functions for its audiencesᾹthe beliefs and values it conveys, and its ritual power to provide emotional catharsis. He includes a number of brief cases studies in which he applies this method to the study of film genres—including westerns and action movies, children's films, and romantic comedies—and individual films from The Godfather to E.T., showing how films can function religiously.

PART I
A Method for Viewing Film as Religion

1
Existing Approaches to Religion and Film

Some years ago I taught a class on ethics and society in which we discussed the impact of media, especially violent media, on our values. I invited students to bring in a videotape of a violent film to share with the class, and to perhaps speculate on the effect such violent films exert on viewers. I had expected class members to engage in ideological critiques of such films by looking at the ways they celebrate violence, in contrast to what most of us regard as an “ethical” framework. I was surprised, then, when a young woman—who had all semester clearly stated her morals were based on her Christian values—volunteered to show us part of The Silence of the Lambs (1991), which she told us was her favorite film. At the time, I had not yet seen the movie, and I knew little about it except that it featured Anthony Hopkins as a cannibalistic serial killer in an Academy Award–winning role. My student proceeded to show to the class the scene in which Hopkins’s character, Hannibal Lecter, escapes from the authorities through a combination of intelligence and brutal violence. I found it so graphic and horrifying that I had to urge her to turn it off. When I asked her why she liked this film, she seemed unable to offer an explanation; she also couldn’t say how her enjoyment of such films could harmonize with her professed Christian values.

Faced with this puzzle, I might have concluded that the film was an unholy glorification of violence and that she had failed to see this because she believed it was “only a movie” and as such not a challenge to her values. This is often how students respond to such questions, by suggesting that movies are “not real” and so have nothing to do with the rest of life other than providing a meaningless escape from it. I might have agreed with her, or I might have insisted that the film was having a deleterious effect on her values whether she knew it or not. But I chose to see the film, to see what the professed attraction to such films might be. By so doing, I came to believe not that the movie had no effect on viewers other than entertainment, nor that its effect was wholly negative. Instead, I speculated that the film was functioning as a way for her to deal with her fears and in some ways master them, as the heroine of the film does. I even came to appreciate the film as one that deals exceptionally well with the depiction of evil and its relationship to all of us. (My own analysis of the film is found later in this book.)

This experience and others like it have convinced me that, in order to understand how films function for audiences, I must be willing to broaden the ways in which I look at them as a religion scholar.

In order to attempt to give popular films this fair hearing, I have developed a method that views them as phenomena analogous to religions. This approach is certainly not the only way in which one might seek to get at the distinctive qualities of popular film or its functions in culture, but it has certain advantages in its ability to call attention to aspects of film that might otherwise be missed. Some religion scholars have already noted this approach, as when Darrol Bryant suggested that “as a popular form of the religious life, movies do what we have always asked of popular religion, namely, that they provide us with archetypal forms of humanity—heroic figures—and instruct us in the basic values and myths of our society.”¹ But he also seems suspicious of this popular religion, associating it with a “secular” culture that can be distinguished from traditional religion. “The difference between a ‘religious’ and a ‘secular’ culture is that a religious culture seeks to mediate a transcendent order, whereas a secular culture has no referent beyond itself and consequently worships itself.”² This definition seems an unsupported generalization, based in certain theological assumptions that may prejudice the study of film as religion before it ever begins. Conrad Ostwalt, on the other hand, avoids such pejorative conclusions when he suggests that “the movie theater has acted like some secular religion, complete with its sacred space and rituals that mediate an experience of otherness.”³ Rather than asserting that popular culture’s influence suggests a victory of secularization over religion, Ostwalt argues that religion is not fading away but “being popularized, scattered, and secularized through extra-ecclesiastical institutions.”⁴ He seems more open to a positive assessment of this “secular religion,” though he has not developed the ramifications of this assessment in any great detail.

The majority of religion scholars writing about film, however, have not viewed film as analogous to an independent religious tradition so much as they have viewed it as part of the nonreligious culture with which religion engages. They have taken two main approaches, the theological and the ideological, and each of these deserves brief consideration.

Approaches to Theology and Culture: Niebuhr and Tillich

Many of the attempts to relate religion and film have essentially sought to relate Christianity, and more specifically Christian theology, to popular film. Their approaches have been governed by theological attempts to define the relationship between Christianity and “culture,” where the latter term indicates the popular milieu in which religions find themselves in any particular place and time. Two theologians of the twentieth century stand out as perhaps the most influential among those who have sought to define the relationship between Christianity and culture, and their work on this point has also been most influential in religion and film studies: H. Richard Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. As both of these men were (broadly considered) among the “neo-orthodox” theologians who sought to get beyond classic liberal and conservative positions of Protestant theology, they were seeking a new way to relate Christian concerns to those of the wider society. Each set forth a typology of ways in which theology can relate to culture.

In his book Christ and Culture (1951), H. Richard Niebuhr set forth a fivefold typology of ways in which Christians can choose to engage the larger culture. The five types are Christ rejecting Culture, the Christ of Culture, Christ above Culture, Christ and Culture in Paradox, and Christ Transforming Culture. The first describes those who have chosen to reject the wider culture in the name of their faith, essentially setting up a separate culture that largely ignores and does not interact with the larger society.⁵ This approach is often associated with members of the Anabaptist tradition, such as the Amish who do not even utilize much of modern technology. It could also apply to conservative Christians who believe one should not participate in popular culture, rejecting its media altogether. Most people, however, do not find this approach viable as it requires almost complete isolation from the larger society and disallows any possibility of finding value in films or any other aspect of popular culture.

The “Christ of Culture” approach goes to the opposite extreme, essentially appropriating the norms of the society and defining them as Christian. There is no problem relating one’s faith to the society in this view, as the larger society is allowed to define how Christianity is to be understood. Niebuhr believed that late nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism fell into this category, and that this approach sacrifices what is distinctive to Christianity in its effort to accommodate itself to the larger culture. It is worth noting that Protestant liberals certainly did not see themselves as making such a sacrifice, and those who have been associated with this type would almost certainly see themselves in one of the other three categories.⁶

Niebuhr’s last three approaches all seek a middle path between the two extremes of completely rejecting the wider culture or capitulating to it entirely, and, as such, they comprise for him the main alternatives for those who are seeking a way to relate their religious faith to the culture. The synthetic approach, also known as “Christ above Culture,” Niebuhr associates with high medieval Roman Catholic thought such as that of Thomas Aquinas. This approach views culture as good and valuable, but incomplete. Christianity completes the fulfillment of culture through adding revelation to reason, grace to nature, church to secular society. There is a harmony between the two, such as was sought by medieval Christendom and the Roman Catholic Church at the height of its power.⁷ (It might be fair to say that most of those whom Niebuhr categorizes under the “Christ of Culture” position probably viewed themselves as holding this view of synthesis, as they would not have believed themselves to be capitulating to culture so much as seeking harmony with it.)

Fourth, the approach of “Christ and Culture in Paradox” is typified, in Niebuhr’s view, by Martin Luther. Rebelling against the Catholic synthesis, Luther believed that the attempt to marry the “two kingdoms” of Christ and the world inevitably resulted in a corruption of both. The Church would become like the kingdoms of the world, focused on power rather than the Gospel, and the secular state would seek to control religion. Although Luther’s view was not identical to that of the early American architects of the United States Constitution in arguing for a complete separation of church and state, he did believe that the state should not be in the business of religious coercion and that the freedom of the religious conscience must be respected. This “dualistic” approach, as Niebuhr calls it, puts forward two parallel moralities and systems of norms such that, for example, as a private citizen, the Christian must live a life of nonviolence, but as a public member of society he may take up arms to defend his country. These moral worlds should not interfere with each other but exist side by side as the two forms of our God-given lives.⁸

Finally, the “conversionist” view of “Christ Transforming Culture” suggests that the two realms can interact in such a way that the Christian tries to transform the larger culture to be more “Christian” in its values. This approach is more typical of the Reformed heritage of Calvin, and as such seems closest to the view of Niebuhr himself as he came out of that tradition. This approach differs from the classic “Catholic” model of synthesis in being more dynamic, not viewing the society as already in relation to Christ but as having the potential to become so. It is more suspicious of culture than the synthetic view, but it does not reject the culture or relegate it to a realm unrelated to Christian values. It seeks a dynamic interaction of the two, but one governed by the norms of Christian faith rather than the society (thus avoiding the supposed mistake of Protestant liberalism).⁹ Parallels to each of these three types can be seen in some theological approaches to popular film, as will be seen below.

The other typology regarding Christianity and culture that has been highly influential in the field of religion and film is that of Paul Tillich. In a 1919 essay entitled “On the Idea of a Theology of Culture,” Tillich set forth his classic distinction between autonomy, heteronomy, and theonomy in regards to the relation of faith to culture. Those aspects of culture (such as the arts) that do not see themselves as expressing a religious element view themselves as autonomous, responsible only to their own norms. If the Christian church accepts this view of them, it will leave them alone, and not seek to correct or guide them. (This resembles Niebuhr’s “Christ of Culture” position in that it undertakes no criticism of the culture at all, and it also resembles “Christ and Culture in Paradox” in strictly separating church and world.) On the other hand, heteronomy seeks to impose an alien law on culture, such as when the Church tries to control what art is “acceptable” via censorship. (This might be akin to Niebuhr’s “Christ Rejecting Culture,” or perhaps even “Christ Transforming Culture.”)

Tillich favors neither of these views, but rather argues for a third approach, which is a Hegelian-style synthesis of the other two: theonomy. If one focuses solely on the form of cultural functions, one will see them autonomously, but if one focuses on the content they express, one will understand them “theonomously.”¹⁰ This is to say that art may appear to have nothing to do with religion, but in fact the content of great art is the same as the content of religion, here defined as “directness towards the Unconditional.”¹¹ Tillich views the Unconditional not as a higher thing or being nor the sum of all beings, but as a “reality of meaning,” the “ultimate and deepest meaning” that “shakes the foundation of all things and builds them up anew.”¹² The Unconditional is not a thing within the world, but the depth of meaning present for all things in the world. This depth of true meaning is the religious substance expressed in cultural/artistic forms, and it is the job of the theologian of culture to interpret these forms to find this substance—without, however, falling into either heteronomous or autonomous interpretation. The challenge for a theology of culture is to avoid condemning culture as “other” than religion (as it in fact has the same substance) and also to avoid severing the connection between culture and religion so as to miss the deeper significance of culture. (This view in some ways resembles what Niebuhr calls the “synthetic” approach of “Christ above Culture.”)

We shall see both Tillich’s and Niebuhr’s typologies operative in the various approaches to religion and film which have been taken—and although they will be critiqued in that context as well, a few preliminary observations can be made. Both view the relation of religion to culture in the prophetic mode in which the primary task of a theologian of culture is to critique the culture in the light of one’s own religious tradition. Religion (specifically, Christianity) is viewed as being in opposition to the culture, for even though it is part of culture it gives itself a privileged position as its critic. In Tillich’s view, the theologian can decide what is good or bad art based on how well it conveys an iconoclastic sense of “horror,” critiquing the culture that religion wishes to correct.¹³ In Niebuhr’s view, “Christ” is defined as distinct from “culture” in all five types, even though he acknowledges separately that Christianity (and indeed all religion) is part of culture. By speaking of “Christ” rather than Christianity or religion, Niebuhr gives the impression that the theologian can gain the divine position of “Christ” outside of culture, and so observe and critique it. He admits the relativism of the theologian’s position, and that we cannot know for certain where truth lies, but the structure of his typology belies this point; it appears that Christianity can distinguish itself sufficiently from its cultural matrix to make judgments on it.

I would not deny that we can and should make judgments, or that the “postmodern turn” makes it impossible to do so. But, I would argue that as we make judgments we should be more honest about their sources and admit that we are creations of multiple cultural influences beyond what we explicitly identify as our religious backgrounds. Scholars of religion or theologians cannot pretend to the sort of Promethean theological vantage point that Niebuhr and Tillich seemed still to believe was possible (even with their recognition of the nonabsolute and uncertain character of their own judgments).¹⁴ If there are judgments to be made about culture by those who study and/or profess religious viewpoints, they cannot be so monolithic as to suggest that there are entities corresponding to “religion” and to “culture” that can clearly be defined as distinct. The realms of religion and culture overlap to a much greater extent than many of the studies of religion and popular culture seem to admit, and theology cannot stand outside culture any more than any other aspect of human religion or culture can do so. It is for this reason, in part, that I would suggest the classic distinctions between “religion” and “culture” must be put aside for a more nuanced view that sees all features of culture as having religious aspects that cannot be separated from their nonreligious aspects. Although we can distinguish the religious aspects in all of culture to a certain extent, those aspects cannot be restricted to those portions that identify themselves as “religious”; they must instead be seen as echoed in most (if not all) portions of the culture. The dialogue between “religion” and “culture” is really a dialogue between various religious views expressed within culture, many of which we may share. No religion exists in a historical vacuum and each is shaped by its interaction with others.

In what follows, we will examine the ways in which various authors have conceived the relationship between religion and film. Some have intentionally made use of Tillich’s or Niebuhr’s categories regarding how religion (or Christianity, or theology) should relate to culture, and others can be defined as fitting within one or another of these categories even though they have not always identified their positions in this way. Not all the approaches fit within these categories, but most of them share with Tillich and Niebuhr the idea that culture and religion can be distinguished fairly clearly. Also, while it would certainly be possible to have a “theological” position based in almost any religious tradition, in practice most of the approaches have been explicitly Christian in basis.

Theological Approaches to Film

To consider Niebuhr’s typology first: which of his five categories are found among approaches to popular film? The two extreme positions (Christ Rejecting Culture, and the Christ of Culture) seem the least viable to most Christians today, because one disallows any contact with the culture, and the other sacrifices religion to the culture. This leaves the three intermediate positions. The conversionist approach (Christ Transforming Culture) can be seen in the creation of Christian popular media in recent years, including Christian rock, Christian movies, and Christian popular novels. Conservative evangelicals have shifted from a strategy of rejecting popular culture to remaking it in their own image; for example, rock ’n’ roll is no longer “the devil’s music” if it can be given lyrics focused on God rather than sex and drugs. This approach has been enormously successful for the subculture it addresses, and it has affected the larger culture as well. But while this approach can help in designing separate Christian popular media, it is not too often used as a method for interpreting existing popular media. This may be because it would require the interpreter to view non-Christian films as if they were Christian in content, which may w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART I A Method for Viewing Film as Religion
• PART II Genre and Film Analyses
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name and Subject Index
• Film Index
• About the Author