Christianity is a pernicious religious philosophy that requires such mind-altering faith that it ultimately ends up twisting the minds of those who blindly embrace and profess it. And the end result is always the same, as the Christian is at some point forced to confront all of the insoluble contradictions of his belief system, which in turn triggers a descent into madness and violence.
That is the version of Christianity that is continually offered up by Hollywood and the arts community/entertainment industry at large.
It’s such an old story that the only word that can accurately be used to describe it is hackneyed, yet it is one Hollywood never grows tired of retelling.
Take the new Broadway play “Grace,” which is described as an exploration of “the stories we tell ourselves to get through life.” You know, whatever gets you through the night, and all that stuff.
“Grace” tells the story of Steve (played by Paul Rudd), who apparently views his evangelical Christian faith as little more than a merchandising opportunity. He has a get-rich-quick scheme to develop gospel-themed hotels that offer such amenities as “Promise Keepers strength training” and answer the fundamental question: “Where would Jesus stay?”
“I’m not a knower, I’m a believer,” he says, explaining that faith – like real estate – is “about the substance of things not seen.”
As one reviewer wrote concerning this line: “Cue knowing laugh from the audience, aware of Steve’s naivete and the crash we know is coming.”
How does the audience know there’s a crash coming? Well, decades of similar offerings from Hollywood and the arts, for a starter. But for those who are still a little slow on the uptake, there’s the added fact that this play starts out with Steve pulling a gun – then the remainder of the story is told in flashback sequences revealing what leads up to that point.
Throughout the course of those flashbacks, we see Steve’s obviously fragile, superficial faith worn down (and out) by two far more honest and intellectually inclined characters. One is his neighbor Sam, a NASA scientist who was the victim of a horrific car accident that killed his fiancee and left him permanently disfigured. The other is the condo exterminator Karl (played by Ed Asner), a German refugee who has seen and experienced the kind of human suffering he believes no God could ever allow.
Throw in Steve’s neglected wife, Sara, to show how believers are by and large sexually repressed, and the makers of “Grace” have managed to work in just about every one of Hollywood’s treasure trove of stereotypes about evangelical Christians.
But the two main lines of attack in the play against Christian faith, as in life, are first of all the matter of evil, suffering and death, and secondly the challenge of science.
On the question of how a loving God could allow evil, suffering and death in a world He created, the fact of the matter is that this isn’t the world God created; it’s the world man corrupted.
Atheists throw this question around gleefully as if it is the “checkmate” move of Bible criticism. To hear them tell it, you would think that the Bible doesn’t have an answer or an explanation for it anywhere in its 66 books – when, in fact, all you have to do is read the first three chapters of the Bible to find the full story.
In Genesis 1 and 2, we read that God created this world in perfection, but then in Genesis 3 man ruined it all by rebelling against God and opening the door for sin to invade this world. Consequently, since we are all Adam and Eve’s descendants, we are born with a sin nature and must therefore be redeemed from the curse in order to be saved. This is why we are told in James 1: “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am tempted by God’; for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He Himself tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, brings forth death.”
Man is a fallen creature, by his own choosing, and lives in a fallen world of his own making – or re-making, as the case may be, since (again) God created it as a perfect environment for us. Now, true believers yearn for the return of Christ and the redemption of our mortal bodies from the curse of sin (Romans 7:24, Revelation 22:20), just as the universe itself is groaning in anticipation of its eventual restoration (Romans 8:22).
As for the challenge of science, it’s really the challenge of pseudo-science that Christians face. True science contradicts Darwinian evolution across the board, whether it’s the fossil record and the absence of intermediate links; the fact that life at the most basic, cellular level is encoded with a literally mind-boggling amount of information which is expressed in language (DNA); modern discoveries like irreducible complexity (as outlined in Dr. Michael Behe’s seminal book “Darwin’s Black Box”), which shows certain life systems must be fully formed from the start to function properly – and therefore never could have evolved – and so much more.
Like Robert DeNiro speaking in tongues while trying to savagely murder a family in “Cape Fear” or Mimi Rogers shooting her young daughter in the head after becoming disillusioned while waiting for Jesus to return in “The Rapture,” and so many other similarly “Christian” characters being portrayed on-screen or on-stage, “Grace” offers little more than anti-Christian propaganda. It is designed to sway the masses not to consider the evidence, the very opposite of what it pretends to promote.
Because, truth be told, a reasonable, rational, scientific exploration of the overwhelming evidence is actually the last thing that the creators of these caricatures and complete works of fiction want. That would indeed be a checkmate move, and one in which they would be sitting on the wrong side of the board.
