A Nation Divided: Digging Deeper, and Fighting the Good Fight as a Conservative Christian, Right-Winger; It's Not Easy!

God’s Not Dead!

Unfortunately, you wouldn’t be able to tell that listening to or reading all the movie critics these days.  There is a disconnect between Hollywood and the rest of us, it seems, that is actually bigger and broader once we look closer.  Look no further than the critical vs. audience ratings for some recent Christian movies on the Internet Movie Database and Rotten Tomatoes.  Here’s just a little chart to give us a better view of this disconnect, featuring Combined Critical vs. Combined Audience ratings on the Rotten Tomatoes Website for 4 recent biblically themed films:

Christian Based Movie	RT Critic Rating	RT Audience Rating
God’s Not Dead	13%	85%
Son of God	22%	76 %
Noah	77%	46%
Heaven is for Real	49%	76%

And here’s a visual representation of these ratings figures:

I find it interesting that the Christian movie that audiences liked the most is the one critics hated, while the one critics loved the most was the least favorite among general audiences.  Guess which one challenges atheism the most?  Now guess which one was made by an atheist and is the least biblically accurate, but has the biggest budget and stars?  If you guessed God’s Not Dead for the first question and Noah for the second one, then you know your modern pop culture landscape and how Christians fit in (or don’t fit in, as the case may be).  You can clearly see from this little experiment the animosity the entertainment elite has for followers of Jesus. 

And this is only one small blip in a vast sea of animosity.  I need to pay more attention to what’s going on in the world, and I need to do a better job of fighting the good fight.  Those that preach tolerance only seem to preach tolerance for everything and everyone except God, the concept of God, and those who believe in God (that is, outside of a general and flat spiritualism that doesn’t upset the apple cart).  And I’m getting tired of it.

My bother Scott told me he feels like he should just “give up on the whole entertainment industry."  He's getting tired of the way they support only the far-left liberal views and demonize those on the right.  It's there if you choose to look.  So why support the media and the entertainment industry if they don’t support us and our views?  In a recent interview with that paragon of virtue, Playboy Magazine, actor Ben Affleck admitted, “When I watch a guy I know is a big Republican, part of me thinks, I probably wouldn’t like this person if I met him, or we would have different opinions.  That !@#$ fogs the mind when you should be paying attention and be swept into the illusion.”  Oh what a horrible thing, to have a differing opinion and to be taken out of the moment by a conservative actor!  “It’s hard,” he continues whining, “to get people to suspend disbelief.”  With Hollywood actors being overwhelmingly liberal democrats, just think of how the rest of us feel!

Then I have another friend who is a Christian, but only seems to see things in black and white.  She doesn’t see the spiritual war taking place right before our eyes.  To her, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was just a fantasy story, and when I explained the deeper Christian meaning - how it was written by CS Lewis as Christian allegory, and how the lion Aslan is a Christ figure - it’s lost on her.  It’s just a fantasy movie, and all that other stuff is just a bunch of malarkey, she says.  Jesus spoke in stories and parables with deeper meanings, and that she understands.  But apparently, in her view, the rest of us can only work upon the surface of things, and our stories don't really have deeper meanings.  It's just blunt reality for some people, I guess, and I'm left wondering why she’s not an atheistic scientist with that unyieldingly cold view of the world. 

But let me tell you, there is more going on here.  Nothing is ever just on the surface.  There are shades of grey and color everywhere!  Life, and the stories of life, and the stories we make up about life, are not just surface water.  There is always something there beneath the surface, and like Michelle Pfeiffer in the thriller What Lies Beneath, it is our job to dive deeper and find out what's really down there!  Why, even the latest movie we just watched, the romantic comedy Baggage Claim, had a lot of stuff going on under the surface, even for such a trite and forgettable slice of romantic life, and the characters who are portrayed as the likable, positive heroes are gay or sleeping around, and the villains are conservative republicans.  Before the end of the film, the main character rebukes the advances of a conservative control freak climbing his way up the political ladder, and tells a room full of people that she doesn't trust black republicans.  Tell me again how there's nothing going on underneath the surface! 

I know it's a constant, ongoing battle, and I make wrong choices, but that doesn't mean that we just settle for whatever.  It’s time to be choosy.  It’s time to pay more attention.  It’s time to be more discerning - not less - and to fight the good fight.  As a Christian, I see things I never saw there before, and make choices I wouldn't have made before, and have thoughts I otherwise wouldn't have had.

Like all other nations, this too is a nation of sinners - Jesus even said several times in the bible that Satan is the Prince of this world - and if we're not paying attention, Christians will lose this battle.  Not the war - God will win the war - but Christians at least need to know what's going on, and to try to make the right choices - in everything.

I’m speaking here about a lot more than just about those two Christian brothers, the Benhams, who happen to hold traditional Christian views about the sanctity of life and marriage, and the sinfulness of the homosexual lifestyle, and for this, they were banned from HGTV.  It had nothing to do with their proposed house fixing show “Flip It Forward” before it even got off the ground, and everything to do with their Christian beliefs.  I say it’s time to peddle your show over at UpTV or Hallmark Channel, guys!  I don't even know the Benham brothers, but I can already say I like them, and admire them.

I can see it clearly.  There is a division happening in this country, and it’s a division that’s been happening for a long time.  There is more than this, of course, but for the most part, there are two extremes:  The liberal left and the conservative right.  And sooner or later, you are going to find yourself somewhere in one of these two camps.  Any other camps in this nation aren’t really big enough to make that much of a difference, at least not right now, and aside from that, most other camps fit in somewhere on one side of this fence or the other.  For instance, the libertarians, who probably like to say they straddle the fence, are actually on the right side of it, because they have more conservative views.  Tell me what you believe, and I could tell you what side of the fence you are on.  The abortion debate is a good example.  If you believe in abortion, you are on the left.  If you don’t, you are on the right.

Of course, the big picture isn’t that cut and dried.  There are tons of people out there who profess a faith in Christ – implying the conservative, biblical ideals of those on the right – who call upon that faith as the reason they support leftist liberal causes, like Carrie Underwood did with her Christian faith in support of the gay movement.  These camps of ideals are actually rather fluid things, and like anything else, there are as many exceptions to the general rules as there are people on the planet.  There are two ideologies at war with each other here, and tiny little exceptions flourish.

Traversing an ideological, political, and theological landscape like this isn’t easy, and it can get confusing if we are not rock solid in our own beliefs and ideals.  It can get confusing even if we ARE rock solid in our own beliefs and ideals (and who is really rock solid on anything when, quite frankly, facts are not enough to explain everything, and beliefs are not facts). 

And so, what I usually find myself doing, when I’m not hiding from all the political noise, is to find those nuggets of truth – and not just truth for me, but universal truths that cannot be refuted (even though they so often are).  

The writer or blogger I wish I could be like is Matt Walsh.  (See his website linked here.)  I look upon Matt as a bit of a personal hero since he sees the world the same way I do, but pays more attention to what’s going on, and writes the way I wish I could write, in content, volume, and intelligent perception.  And he doesn’t load his blog down, like I love to do, with all those obsessive movie and TV reviews from an entertainment world full of, as he calls them in his blog about the Benham brothers and HGTV (linked here), “deviants, junkies, rapists, pedophiles, adulterers, and crooks,” citing how the likes of Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Mike Tyson, and Hugo Chavez are loved and adored by the Hollywood elite, no matter what they’ve done, or might have done.  To Hollywood, it doesn’t matter.  Well, it IS a business, and they’ve got to sell their product.  For the longest time, I’ve been buying, and to just swear off it and stop buying is very difficult for a movie lover like me.  There will probably be more movie and TV reviews in this blog in the future, - including the near future - just because I love them so much.  For instance, I loved recent movies such as About Time, Enough Said, God's Not Dead, The Last Station, and Ruby Sparks, because they were so well made and inventive.  Yet it is also my duty as a Christian to be discerning, and to fight the good fight – like Matt does.  Because, like my brother Scott, I’m getting tired of the liberal attitude, and like Matt said in his blog about the Benham brothers,  there are more of us than there are of them, even though they are the Elite who run everything, and we are getting tired of being lied to by “a bunch of politically correct, bigoted, mewing, leftwing carnival barkers.”  It kind of reminds me of the way the Egyptians kept the Israelites in slavery, even though the Israelites outnumbered them.  “In a country of filth,” Matt concludes, “the only thing you can’t be is pro-life and pro-marriage.  Enough of this, already.  It’s time to stop playing nice with these people.”  Well said, Matt!  That’s the attitude we should have, and need to have, as conservative - yes, even loving - Christians!  

Jesus loved everyone, but if you spend any amount of time in the Gospels at all, you also realize He wasn't afraid to stand up to dissenting voices.  "Playing nice" doesn't mean that we should just shut up and sit down and accept everyone and every situation, and don't rock the boat.  It means you stand up for those who are being persecuted.  Why, this is the liberal's very playbook!  The reason they're liberals is to "liberate" the persecuted, apparently, but these days, this noble cause has turned into race baiting and an agenda of Political Correctness and Big Government and victimhood, and whoever cries the loudest gets the microphone, and my, those conservative Christian republicans are a bunch of backwards meanies, aren't they?  Yet when these "victims" suddenly find themselves with power, then they become the persecutors, silencing the "intolerant" Christians - like what happened to the Benham brothers.  It shows, as I said above, that as this division cuts deeper, people, individual and collective, will have to make a choice about which side they want to be on.  HGTV chose the left.  They chose to make a big stink about the Benham brothers professing their faith, as Jesus calls them to do.  

Jesus called out the sinners. He may love them and teach them and be their friend, but he also realizes they are committing sin.  They are sick, and He is their doctor, who came to heal them.  He even said as much when he stated, "Healthy people don't need a doctor - sick people do." - Matthew 9:12 NLT  

And now, as followers of Jesus, we must go and do likewise.  

And as it was for Jesus in His time, the world will hate us, because we "accuse it of doing evil." - John 7:7

In fact, if you are Christian, and you are loved and adored by this world... I don't know.  Maybe you're doing something wrong!