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Here's one that sticks out in memory from my Serious Christian Days. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeghFM0SL6Y Finger Of God is about the charismatic/pentecostal movement in the United States, made for and by said groups. It's hard to quantify how bad it is, I'm not sure the trailer really captures the spirit of the film, which if memory serves is basically how the Holy Spirit will make it rain if you believe hard enough. It mentions faith healings and stuff, but it goes heavy on the gold dust, jewels, and other horse-poo poo in the actual documentary. It basically felt like the subtext of the thing was "come to our church and tithe and gold literally falls out of the sky". I also visited a pentecostal "school" in north carolina and they screened a tell-all expose about the dangers of Buddhism. I will share that one as soon as I can find it. It features Richard Gere quotes heavily taken out of context to make the entire faith seem like a hollywood cult or something. It's really incredibly offensive, and was taught like the gospel truth. 
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Jan 3, 2014 17:20
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K. Waste posted:If we're talking strictly cultural products like films or television or music the contradictions are obvious even in places where spiritual fundamentals are advertised as being held in high regard... Everything you brought up about mainstream culture is right, and even the things who pay lip service to Christianity aren't really quite what the devout care to consume, and is flagrantly opposed to even some of the more basic tenets laid out in the New Testament. With that said, mainstream music, moves, etc. that pander to Christians are pandering to a very specific kind of Christian, and I hate to use this word but it's basically for apostate Christians who use Christianity as a group identity without really giving a drat about the spiritual or lifestyle elements. To them it's okay to sing about whiskey in bars eyein' up the gal in the daisy dukes. That stuff is for a southern crowd who basically can't have very many friends without paying some lip service to it all. It's not for more serious believers to consume as Good Wholesome Christian Content, and if Nashville and Hollywood think they're actually doing that, they're fools. The truth is, for the most part truly religious media is almost an invisible market to anyone who isn't interested in it. The stuff hardcore "keep the culture pure" Christains are listening to doesn't get much radio play, the movies they watch rarely ever get wide releases, which is why when they do, it's an insane bank-breaking affair. Evangelical media usually isn't good enough to pass the wide release bar. edit: The reason for this is almost all of the music is light instrumentation; chorus, verse, chorus, verse music with three chords, lasts 8 minutes, and is for worship. The lyrics can be summed up as "God is awesome" and there is very little variation amongst all the music. Some Christian artists are genuinely talented but are very much held back by the producers and labels who publish to them and find their audience. It's almost all very cookie cutter in a way the United States hasn't seen since The Beatles made music interesting. Riot Bimbo fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Aug 3, 2014 |
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Aug 3, 2014 18:34
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LloydDobler posted:What I always found really interesting when I was a consumer of Christian music, was that when the media was good enough, it was the Christian fanbase itself that actively attacked it for any reason it could think of. "Sounds too secular" "Not joyful enough" "Dwells on the sinful nature" or whatever reason you have. It's like Stryper - They got crapped on by secular media for being too cheesy and Jesus-y and they got crapped on by Christians for trying too hard to fit in with the secular world. I've read enough blogs and interviews by the guys in the band to know that they were really, really sincere and just wanted to reach as many people as they could with a positive Christian message. Also coming to mind is King's X, a band of Christians rather than a Christian band, where the lead singer admitted that he was struggling with homosexuality but he was doing right by god by remaining celibate, and trying to set an example for others like him. Didn't matter, tons of their Christian fans immediately ex-communicated them while their secular fans laughed at them for participating in religious nonsense. I've been wondering to myself how to bridge that gap for ages. I want it. I visited North Carolina to visit some friends going to a ministry school there back in 2010. Plastic Beach by Gorillaz had just come out and IIRC it was at the top of the charts at the time, and I was overheard listening it. A discussion arose, mostly about why I wasn't listening to more Godly music. Ultimately I asked them, what if Christians could produce their own Plastic Beach? What is the fundamental problem with producing music that non-believers could stand to hear? Millions of people live for and consume music, why can't we reach out with you know, quality music? Yes, we can make praise and worship music, but why can't we also make songs about the finer points of faith? The struggle? The doubts? This stuff isn't sinful, and it might allow us as a whole to connect to a great many people? Anyway they were flustered for an answer. The truth is, evangelicals have a bad habit of running off talented artists for one reason or another. Whether that's cinematography, music, or fine art, it's hard to keep them around much less convince them their talents could be used to make something as good as a chart topping album or a high-grossing movie.
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Aug 6, 2014 23:25
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K. Waste posted:Wait, did they not even challenge your basic insinuation that "quality music" goes beyond complete submission and indulgence of God? Like, did it not even occur to them to rebut with something like, "Well, our belief is that the highest calling is to do honor unto God, so Earthly standards don't really apply. We already aim for the highest form of what we do." It's so eerie to me that I as a non-theist can probably think of better Evangelical arguments than actual Evangelists. I suppose the perfection of God somehow doesn't correlate to "more Godly music" necessarily being 'more perfect.' I'm sure they did, and back then I was much more on my "A Game" when it came to dogmatic arguments and my response to that would simply be, "If I must plant my feet and hands in earthly things to bring more people to God, I will." To me there is no transgression against God to stop making mindless praise music in the interest of portraying Christianity as something approachable and Christians as thoughtful, expressive people.
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Aug 7, 2014 00:38
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Kings was so ridiculously good and it just happened to come out at that time when NBC was still cancelling shows, looking for a hit, as if there was a chance in hell they would have some kind of hit that might help them compete with CBS or something. Then they gave Community five agonizing seasons. It was really good. It works as a miniseries though, so if it's still on hulu, or wherever you can get it legally, you should watch it if you haven't seen it. One of the better biblical adaptations in recent history.
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Aug 8, 2014 00:40
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Some of them are actually afraid of history. I recall meeting a man who in one fell swoop called people who firebombed a local Planned Parenthood martyrs and heroes then went on to denounce all extra-biblical history as a grand liberal/satanic conspiracy.
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Aug 22, 2014 01:34
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yeah but when a guy is basically admitting that even the gap between the new testament and the current day is totally suspect and probably didn't even happen, what do you do with that? Can that person even be said to live on this planet?
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Aug 22, 2014 15:06
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Tyler Perry flies with evangelicals yes. Some of them. You'll always find some one or some group who is striving real hard towards that weird perversion of asceticism you see in a lot of christian groups. For everyone else, Tyler Perry has a captive audience of people who literally fear for their souls if they watch something less than wholesome.
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Apr 8, 2015 16:33
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Professor Shama Lama looks a bit like a will forte character.
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Jun 16, 2015 09:31
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Last Days In The Desert features a non-divine Jesus? That kinda sucks. Is it at least a good movie? If I have faith am I gonna feel like poo poo if I enjoy it? I consume plenty of 'sinful' media but the blatantly heretical actually does bother me. I thought the Last Temptation was a great movie though. The Passion is more upsetting and infuriating to me from the overtly sexist depiction of satan to the nazi-propaganda-esque depiction of the pharisees and actually basically everyone that was Jewish, the glorification of rome, and the most offensive thing is the apparent way the movie loving relishes in the torture of Christ. I hate to agree with South Park, but The Passion is a sickening, lovely movie and I've gotten into shouting matches about it back in my hardcore christian days. That Christians not only accept The Passion but promote it as some way to connect with the savior is.... I just want to scream at them. There's so much wrong with the movie it's an insult to faith, it's an insult to God, and God, and the spirit of God, and women, and men, and snakes, and Romans, and also gently caress Mel Gibson although I like Apocalypto, it has many of the same problems, but it doesn't offend my religious sensibilities and he did a hell of a job with the imagery and storytelling, but I don't know this for sure, but I suspect his depiction of the Mayans/Aztecs/whoever the decadent human sacrificing natives were might be problematic, but apocalypto has little to do with this thread so i'll stop now.
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Sep 8, 2016 09:59
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Christ's suffering stripped of all context is drat near meaningless, and this film does it's absolute best to give as little context as possible. It assumes you know the before and after, which might be fine if your end product doesn't end up just being torture porn of the Savior put in a vacuum. There's lots of transparent directorial shittiness, bad history, bad theology, and your Christ actor has been injured, ill, and struck by lightning, and then two others get struck. It's a shitpit of a film and I think Gibson's vision of hell might have been what he was seeing the nights he was making this movie. I don't know why i have so much venom for that film but it makes me really mad it exists and it's held up as one of the better examples of christian cinema. I guess on a technical level it is, it's just not actually Christian in its content.
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Sep 11, 2016 00:09
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Satan as depicted in the bible is that of a tempter and tester of men's souls. A few years back i specifically looked up every reference to him and its amazingly scant and what's there is hardly enough to justify the popular perception of him. Im not saying Satan's secretly a good guy just there's not any real biblical justification for what we believe, although maybe there's more apocryphal references that flesh out the origins of the rear end in a top hat devil we know. I haven't read any Jewish apocrypha but the gnostic stuff has satan as an obedient servant of the demiurge
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Dec 16, 2016 04:45
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my old church had about the same tolerance for both sex and violence, which is to say none. It was the one thing i respected about it in the end, even as i continued to jack off and watch violent action movies
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Dec 19, 2016 22:31
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DStecks posted:This isn't completely within the scope of the thread, but I just want to highlight the Trapped trilogy of Newgrounds games, which are very overtly Christian while still being relentlessly immoral. It's really not. People i knew who didn't run screaming from secular things tended to be insanely averse to violence on a fundamental level that i couldn't begin appreciate as a later in life convert. It was actually more offputting than the sex aversion when you have people wanting to walk out of a tense scene with a gun in loving north central Texas
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Feb 22, 2017 20:41
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Sorry there, samuel clemens is right in my experiences and i had a spiritual crisis that saw me stop and meet people from charity thrift shop churches in Dallas to WASP dens in west plano to weird freaky pentecostals that gave me a crisis of faith in North Carolina. Cool black Baptist churches in Texas and Mississippii. I still know lots of people and those who dont totally denounce non-Christian oriented media, are very much extremely sin averse and thats not just sexual portrayals but portrayals of acts of violence
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Feb 23, 2017 02:48
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