The Gospel According To Spider-Man

By RICHARD CORLISS

The Congregation for today's service of the journey, "a casual, contemporary, Christian church," fills the Promenade, a theater on upper Broadway in New York City. The Sunday-morning faithful--a few hundred strong--have come to hear the Journey's laid-back pastor, Nelson Searcy, give them the word. The word made film. Searcy, 32, who in jeans and a goatee looks like a way less Mephistophelian Charlie Sheen, is about to deliver the last of the church's eight-part God on Film series. The topic? "Catwoman: Discovering My True Identity."

Searcy points to a large screen at his right that shows other comic-book heroes with multiple identities. In his sermon, he alludes only vaguely to the Catwoman myth and gives the impression that he (like most other Americans) hasn't seen the Halle Berry version. But Searcy knows that a person tormented by questions of image and identity can find encouragement in the message of Genesis 1: 27: "So God created people in his own image." That biblical quotation is projected on the screen, which also features an icon of a smiling cartoon Catwoman sporting purple tights, a feather boa and a whip.

For decades, America has embraced a baffling contradiction. The majority of its people are churchgoing Christians, many of them evangelical. Yet its mainstream pop culture, especially film, is secular at best, often raw and irreligious. In many movies, piety is for wimps, and the clergy are depicted as oafs and predators. It's hard to see those two vibrant strains of society ever coexisting, learning from each other.

Yet the two are not only meeting; they're also sitting down and breaking bread together. The unearthly success of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ helped movie execs recognize that fervent Christians, who spend hundreds of millions of dollars on religious books and music, are worth courting. Publicists hired by studios feed sermon ideas based on new movies to ministers. Meanwhile, Christians are increasingly borrowing from movies to drive home theological lessons. Clergy of all denominations have commandeered pulpits, publishing houses and especially websites to spread the gospel of cinevangelism.

What's the biblical import of, say, Spider-Man? "Peter Parker gives us all a chance to be heroic," says Erwin McManus, pastor of Mosaic, a Baptist-affiliated church in Los Angeles. "The problem is, we keep looking for radioactive spiders, but really it's God who changes us." What's the big idea behind The Village, according to the website movieministry.com "Perfect love drives out fear." Behind The Notebook? "God can step in where science cannot." And, gulp, Anchorman? "What is love?" If your minister floated those notions recently, it may be because movieministry.com provides homilies for Sunday sermons. The website is a kind of Holy Ghostwriter.

By spicing Matthew and Mark with Ebert and Roeper, ministers can open a window to biblical teachings and a door to the very demographic that Hollywood studios know how to reach: young people.

"Film, especially for those under 35, is the medium through which we get our primary stories, our myths, our read on reality," says Robert K. Johnston, professor of theology and culture at the Fuller Theological Seminary and the author of the newly published Finding God in the Movies: 33 Films of Reel Faith. It was members of that generation, says Johnston, who "even if they loved God, were simply not going to church. Clergy are realizing that unless we reorient how we talk about our faith, we will lose the next generation." He sees movies as modern parables that connect to an audience that seeks not reason but emotional relevance. "As the culture has moved from a modern to a postmodern era, we have moved from wanting to understand truth rationally to understanding truth as it's embedded in story," he says.

The cinevangelists would say that the churches' appropriation of pop culture is nothing new. "Jesus also used stories," Johnston says. "In his day, parables were the equivalent of movies." Marc Newman, who runs movieministry.com traces pop proselytizing back to the Apostle Paul. "In Acts there's a Scripture describing how he came to the Areopagus, the marketplace in Athens where people exchanged ideas. Paul speaks to the men of Athens and refers to their poets and their prophets. He used the things they knew as a way to reach out with the Gospel."

If Paul could cite Greek poets to the Greeks, then today's proselytizers will bring the church to moviegoers and, they hope, vice versa."Today, with DVDs and the VCR, all of us can engage a movie text," Johnston says. "When a person in a worship congregation refers to The Shawshank Redemption, either people have seen it or they can rent it." In addition, 3,000-screen bookings and saturation marketing guarantee that a film that opens Friday will have been seen or at least talked about by Sunday morning.

Some conservative clergy prefer using the Bible, not Bruce Almighty, as the text for a sermon. "It's not my cup of tea," says Jerry Falwell of movie-inspired sermons. But progressive Christians love plumbing the subtexts of comedies, satires and action movies. Now, says Ted Baehr of movieguide.org "a church group can highlight biblical teachings by using anything from Dodgeball to Saved! to Kill Bill."

Baehr, who grew up in Hollywood (his father was ranger Bob Allen in cowboy serials of the '30s), has put his Columbia University Film School education to use by giving a Christian take on current movies. "We try to teach people media wisdom. If Christians didn't believe in communications, they wouldn't believe that in the beginning was the word and the word was God and the word has a salutary effect within society."

But movies? From the beginning, they were considered, in the words of Catholic doctrine, an occasion of sin. The Catholic Legion of Decency was more notable for proscribing movies than promoting them. Some of the sterner Christian sects forbade filmgoing. And that was when Hollywood still produced religious films, from uplifting tales of jolly priests (Bing Crosby in Going My Way) and selfless sisters (Audrey Hepburn in The Nun's Story) to outright miracle plays like The Song of Bernadette, with Jennifer Jones as a French girl who had a vision at Lourdes.

By the '70s, the religious film had virtually disappeared. Today, The Passion aside, the genre exists only in niche markets: Mormon films (Ryan Little's Saints and Soldiers, Richard Dutcher's God's Army), well crafted and proudly square; and Rapture movies (The Moment After, Caught in the Rapture), which announce a personal and earthly apocalypse. Both types of film usually fly under the radar of studios, critics and audiences.

Rarely, a Christian message is implicated in a Hollywood film. Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which an ordinary guy sees the light and travels far to make contact with extraterrestrials, was conceived by its original screenwriter, Paul Schrader, as Saul's transforming journey to become the Apostle Paul. The Matrix (the first one, not the sequels) was manna to hermeneuticians. In a recent Museum of Modern Art film series called "The Hidden God: Film and Faith," Groundhog Day, the Bill Murray comedy about a man who relives the same day over and over, was cited as a profound statement of faith, either Buddhist (rebirth), Jewish (acceptance) or Christian (redemption).

In the broadest sense, movies are getting more religious. According to Baehr, only one film in 1985 (The Trip to Bountiful) had "positive Christian content," compared with 69 in 2003 (including Finding Nemo, Spy Kids 3D and Master and Commander). Of course, it all depends on what counts as Christian and who's doing the counting. What's irrefutable is the growing number of theocentric movie websites, most recently a sophisticated one launched in February by the magazine Christianity Today.

The clergy may see all this as a revival; Hollywood sees it as a customer bonanza. New Line Cinema reaches out to Christian groups with films--like Secondhand Lions, about a boy living with his two codgerly, kindly uncles--whose themes might resonate. Says Russell Schwartz, New Line's president of domestic marketing: "The thing about all special-interest groups--Christian, Jewish, whatever--is that they have to discover something relevant to their experience." Some studio bosses go further. Baehr says he talked with a mogul who told him, "We want to be seen as Christian friendly. We realize there's a big church audience out there, and we need to reach them."

"It's a vast, untapped market," says Jonathan Bock, a former sitcom writer (Hangin' with Mr. Cooper), whose Grace Hill Media helps sell Hollywood films to Christian tastemakers. He pitches media outlets like Catholic Digest and The 700 Club and has created sermons and Bible-study guides and marketed such movies as The Lord of the Rings, Signs, The Rookie and, yes, Elf. "The ground was softened before The Passion," says Bock. "There are hundreds of Christian critics and Jewish writers and ministers who are writing about films." And millions of the faithful who see them. A July 2004 study by George Barna, the Gallup of born-again religion, shows that Christian Evangelicals are among the most frequent moviegoers. "Being a Christian used to mean you didn't go to Hollywood movies," says David Bruce, who runs the website hollywoodjesus.com "Now it is seen as a missionary activity."

All this could just be the church's appropriation of Hollywood salesmanship: luring audiences with promises of a movie and some good talk, as the Journey's Searcy offered. Finding a Christian message in secular films like Catwoman and Spider-Man could be either a delusion or, as Jeffrey Overstreet, a critic for Christianity Today says, "a way of affirming that God's truth is inescapable and can be found even in the stories of people who don't believe in him."

Hollywood doesn't necessarily want to make Christian movies. It wants to make movies Christians think are Christian. Moviemakers are happy to be the money changers in the temple, even as preachers are thrilled that a discussion of--what, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle?--can guarantee a full house on Sunday. --Reported by Lina Lofaro and Clayton Neuman/New York City and Desa Philadelphia/Los Angeles

With reporting by Lina Lofaro and Clayton Neuman/New York City and Desa Philadelphia/Los Angeles