Religon Compass 3/5 (2009): 909919, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2009.00177.

Using Film in Theology and Religious Studies

Christopher Deacy*
University of Kent

Abstract

The aim of this article is to provide an overview of work that has been carried out by scholars working in religion theology and lm over recent years. For a eld that has only come to prominence in the last two decades, I outline a number of perspectives on the ways in which religion theology and lm may be seen to interact, including a discussion of some of the criticisms that have emerged both from within existing religious studies and theology scholarship and from lm studies. The discussion focuses on whether or not research and teaching in this area is more than a fad and whether it offers creative new possibilities for interdisciplinary study.

Using Film in Theology and Religious Studies Although, as Robert Johnston has recently pointed out, the academic eld of theology and lm is still in its infancy, less than three decades old (Johnston 2007a, p. 15), the last 10 years in particular has witnessed a sea-change within theology, religious studies and biblical studies as lm has increasingly been embraced by scholars as having the potential to comprise a serious dialogue-partner with religion. Whether by established scholars, such as Robert Jewett and Larry Kreitzer who had already made their mark in biblical studies before nding a new channel for their research by investigating how, in Kreitzers words, the Bible and cinema have overlapping territory and that this territory is ripe for fresh exploration and mapping (Kreitzer 2002, p. 15) or by an increasingly large number of academics who have carved out a niche by specically focusing on the theology religion-lm interface (among them Clive Marsh, Robert Johnston, Gaye Ortiz and John Lyden), Robert Pope is correct in his attestation that the theological analysis and interpretation of lm has become one of the more intriguing, and accessible, debates on the contemporary theological scene (Pope 2007, p. viii). Indeed, whereas just 15 years ago it was rare for a university department of theology or religious studies to run modules in this area, there has more recently been an increasing awareness of the value even the necessity of investigating the multifaceted relationships between religion and popular culture, including the use of new media and communication technologies by religious groups, the representation and exploration of religion and spirituality in the media, the religious signicance and content of media texts and rituals, and the popular consumption of religious and spiritual media (see Deacy 2009, p. 1). Outside of the academy, however, there is no shortage of testimony relating to the way in which, from its very inception, the medium of lm has attracted considerable interest from religious practitioners and church groups. For some, indeed, lm could function as an important missiological and proselytising tool, presenting familiar stories and narratives in a new visual form. This is evinced by the American Episcopalian minister, Percy Stickney Grant, who wrote in 1920, in an article entitled If Christ went to the movies, that, in combining amusement, entertainment and education, motion
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pictures put us in contact with new scenes, give us new ideas, make us better acquainted with new personalities and belong in Gods church as well as the theatre (cited in Mitchell & Plate 2007, p. 27). Accordingly, for Grant,
If Christ went to the movies would he not say, Let my people enjoy this thing. Let my Church employ it. Blessed be that which uplifts, restores, and refreshes the weary souls of men (cited in ibid., p. 30)

In a similar manner, the Congregationalist minister Reverend Herbert Jump wrote in 1910 that
one may venture the statement that the modern motion picture offers the most colossal opportunity for making a fresh moral and religious appeal to the non-churched portions of the community that has risen in the history of recent Christianity. (cited in ibid., p. 17)

Jump even went so far as to attest that

Because the motion picture will tell to the eye moral truths with vigor of illustration and an eloquence of impression which the most enthusiastic orator cannot command, it has a proper place in the equipment of any church which is trying to reach the masses. (cited in ibid., p. 18)

That lm has the capacity to play a moralistic role is also highlighted in a papal encyclical from 1936 by Pius XI, which asked Bishops to entreat those in the motion picture industry to understand how the force of such a power of universality as the cinema can be directed with great utility to the highest ends of individual and social improvement, on the grounds that With its magnicent power, [cinema] can and must be a light and a positive guide to what is good (cited in ibid., p. 42). Optimistic though such perspectives are, however, they are far from representative of the many attempts by the Church to control indeed, censure the lm industry in the rst half of the 20th century. In 1929, the Catholic Movie Code campaigned for the positive reinforcement of religious and family values over against what it perceived as the depravity of the motion picture industry, and the Catholic Legion of Decency asked its members to remain away from all motion pictures except those which do not offend decency and Catholic morality (cited in Johnston 2000, p. 36 and Deacy & Ortiz 2008, p. 18). Indeed, in 1934 Cardinal Dougherty of Philadelphia pronounced this edict which was dutifully observed by up to nine million Catholics in America (cited in Johnston 2000, p. 36) to be binding all in conscience under pain of sin (ibid.). Other ecclesiastical gures went even further and denounced the practice of cinema-going without qualication. For example, in 1923 the evangelist Jack Linn condemned movies as the devils incubator which are not conducive to morality or spirituality, to the extent that a Christian cannot even darken a movie theatre, and at the same time [undertake] fellowship with Christ (cited in Mitchell 2005, p. 740). A British publication, The Devils Camera, written by R. G. Burnett and E. D. Martell in 1932, understood those who go to the cinema to be steeped in the articial sentimentality of the modern screen, familiar with the whole sordid concoction of adultery, deception and murder (cited in Mitchell & Plate 2007, p. 32), and it endorsed the claim that cinema where the devil is in full, spiritual control (cited in Mitchell 2005, p. 740) is nothing short of the greatest crime-producing agency of this generation (cited in Mitchell & Plate 2007, p. 33). Even with respect to movies which explicitly portrayed the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, in the genres of Jesus lms and biblical epics, where one might expect an exception to be made (after all, Cecil B. De Mille attested that probably more people have been told
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the story of Jesus of Nazareth through The King of Kings than through any other single work, except the Bible itself; cited in Telford 1997, p. 122), in the United Kingdom the British Board of Film Classication censors, founded in 1912, banned the visual depiction of Jesus until after the Second World War, and even De Milles The King of Kings (1927) could only be screened in London after a special licence was granted (cited in Reinhartz 2007, p. 15). Even today, Reverend Stuart Bell, vicar of St Michaels Church, Aberystwyth, was recently quoted on the BBC News website as resisting any attempts to overturn the ban that was enforced in the town in 1979 on the satirical Monty Pythons The Life of Brian (Terry Jones, 1979), on the grounds that
The lm at its root is poking fun at Christ and we dont want that to happen. I dont think that the lm should be shown. Why should the ban be removed? (BBC News 2008a http:// news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/mid/7530542.stm)

What is more, according to Bell, Theres been no change in attitude or response to the lm [in the last thirty years] amongst the Christians who have spoken to me in Aberystwyth (ibid.).1 Such reservations aside, in the UK alone statistics reveal that 78% of the population goes to the cinema at least once a year, and 25% goes once a month (cited in Christianson et al. 2005, pp. xi-xii), while in 2007 alone cinema admissions in the UK reached 162 million (up 4% on the previous year), with box ofce receipts rising 8% on 2006 to a total of 821 million (UK Film Council 2008, Statistical Yearbook 2008 http://www.uklmcouncil.org.uk/rsu). As the UK Film Council (2008) Statistical Yearbook for 2008 reports, however, while most media attention is paid to the theatrical release of movies, it is via television that most people watch lms, and that in Britain in 2007 the total audience for lm on television was 3.1 billion, a gure that is almost 20 times higher than the cinema audience and three times greater than the estimated audience for DVD and video (ibid.). In 2005 in America alone, $45.7 billion was spent on lms (cited in Johnston 2007a, p. 16). With such gures in mind, it is difcult not to concur with Johnstons assertion that Film has become our Western cultures major storytelling and myth-producing medium and which has, as a corollary, begun to invite the best (and worst!) of our theological reection (ibid.). Even if it is a rare lmmaker who has either studied religion or theology in depth or who consciously endeavours to articulate religious and theological themes through their work (Mitchell & Plate 2007, p. 70), Mitchell and Plate are correct in their observation that A large number of directors tend to express sacred, religious or theological themes without formally naming them as such (ibid.). This is not really surprising. Some scholars have argued that the secular medium of lm may be seen to be performing a religious function in contemporary western culture by addressing and confronting fundamental issues and themes which are distinctively and quintessentially religious in form (see e.g. Deacy 2001, p. 20). Even if, as Conrad Ostwalt sees it, the subject matter of religion is often taken to be that of transcendence or another world, religious adherents have always sought to show that religion is nothing short of relevant in this world thus, by denition, religion is a part of the secular world just as religious institutions are by nature secular institutions insofar as they reside in and operate in this world, not in a transcendent one (Ostwalt 2003, p. 4). If the line of demarcation between religion and culture is thus a diffuse one, John Lyden is correct when he afrms that there is no way to completely separate religion from culture and that, conversely,
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if those aspects of culture that are usually viewed as nonreligious or opposed to religion meet many of the same functions of what we call religions, then we also cannot really separate culture from religion. (Lyden 2007, p. 205)

A strongly theological underpinning to such a position is presented by the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer from the 1930s and 1940s, according to which any attempt to draw a distinction between the sacred and the secular realms is actually theologically problematic insofar as, in Christian terms, through the Incarnation God came to earth in human form and effectively unied Godself and the (secular) world. There is, accordingly, no line of demarcation between the physical and the metaphysical or between the sacred and the profane (for more on this see Deacy 2007, p. 245), a position taken even further in the 1960s by one of Bonhoeffers greatest advocates, Harvey Cox, who wrote in The Secular City:
If we are to have any transcendence today, even Christian, it must be in and through the secular If we are to nd Grace it is to be found in the world and not overhead. (cited in ibid., p. 247)

That the line of demarcation between the sacred and the secular can be seen as permeable and uid is borne out to an extent by the thinking of the late Polish lmmaker Krzysztof lowski whose TV series Dekalog (1989), which consisted of ten episodes, each based Kies on one of the Ten Commandments, led him to ask the following question: Did we have the right to deal with a subject of such universal signicance, a subject which even for many of those who break the Commandments is something deeply sacred? (cited in Mitchell & Plate 2007, p. 223). Acknowledging that such fears are easy to comprehend in a Catholic country like Poland, where the Church is a powerful force in shaping publowski continued that these lic opinion, Kies
fears subsided when we suddenly realized that all writers, painters, playwriters and lm-makers indirectly deal with themes which are central to the Commandments they had done so in the past and would no doubt continue to do so in the future. (cited in ibid., p. 224)

Indeed, whether we are talking about Shakespeare, Dostoevsky or Woody Allen, themes of murder, adultery, bearing false witness and the coveting of that which does not rightfully belong to oneself can be found in abundance Allens London-set tragi-drama Match Point (2005), like his earlier Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), successfully integrates all four. With this in mind, it is not too great a stretch to see how for many theologians and religious studies specialists today, lm and other agencies of popular culture often comprise a portal through which religious questions are increasingly being initiated. Marsh puts it as follows:
In contemporary Western culturetheological interests and questions are always in part shaped by popular culture. There is no escaping this and it is not a situation to be regretted. It is simply the way things are. (Marsh 2007, p. 2)

Many students, for example, often tend to see a lm they particularly like, or have recently seen, as a more accessible entry-point to embarking on theological questions than more traditional theological journals and books are able to achieve. Aside from the common quest by many of my students to look for narrative or thematic convergences between lms such as One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest (Milos Forman, 1975) or The Green Mile (Frank Darabont, 1999) and the gure of Jesus of Nazareth and there is a plethora of literature in the area of Christ-gure motifs (see Deacy 2006 http:// www.usask.ca/relst/jrpc/art13-reectcinematichrist.html, and Deacy 2008, pp. 12940) there are increasing attempts within the eld to understand lms as appropriate, and
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equal, dialogue-partners with theology religion, which can in turn engender fertile religious questions. One could look, for example, at how The Green Mile explores such themes of racial hatred, persecution, the sanctity of human life, justice and the efcacy of the death penalty, while One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest might be seen to address issues relating to freedom, the dangers of institutionalisation (something the Christian Church has wrestled with from Montanism2 in the second century to Bonhoeffer in the 1930s), captivity, betrayal, solidarity and human dignity all topics about which theologians have much to say. One of my own students, for example, wrote a very instructive assignment a couple of years ago about how the X-Men franchise could be read as a theologically rich study of prejudice and social ostracism (as well as about liberators and redeemers), while the Batman lms intelligently dissect issues relating to fear and the need to stand up for ones beliefs. I suspect that in the future a comedy such as Ghost Town (David Koepp, 2008), which stars Ricky Gervais as a misanthropic and spiritually barren individual in the Ebenezer Scrooge mould whose life is transformed when his world is suddenly invaded by dead people in search of redemption for the loved ones they have left behind on earth, will also become a possible entry-point to the complex theological terrain of eschatology, death and immortality, much as Ghost (Jerry Zucker, 1990) and The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999) have been employed in the recent past. Kreitzer similarly makes the point in his 1999 publication Pauline Images in Fiction and Film that he is
more excited than I have ever been before about the relevance of the New Testament for the contemporary reader, and nd again and again in teaching situations that biblical stories suddenly spring to life for students when they are approached through more familiar subjects. (Kreitzer 1999, p. 30)

Moreover, as Clive Marsh puts it, even those students who profess no religious afliation are always interacting with religious practices and theological impulses which are implicit and explicit in cultural life (Marsh 2007, p. 2), even to the point that many of the students of theology in universities today are those whose contact with religion takes less and less the form of a religious upbringing or specic Christian commitment (Marsh 2007, p. 14). Rather, such students today may be dened as
those who sit in lecture- and seminar-rooms across the world and may not have begun to examine the differences between salvation, liberation and atonement, but are interested in tackling them and have seen The Shawshank Redemption. (ibid., p. 4)

Ostwalt makes much the same claim when he wrote in a recent chapter that when he was teaching a class on the New Testament nearly 20 years ago it soon became apparent that more students had seen the lm The Seventh Sign (Carl Schultz, 1988) an apocalyptic thriller starring Demi Moore that draws on the New Testament book of Revelation and ancient Jewish mythology than had read the book of Revelation itself, and that much of what the students knew about the Christian Apocalypse had been informed more by The Seventh Sign than their reading of the Bible (Ostwalt 2008, p. 35). Consequently, Ostwalt explains,
We had to do some serious unpacking before we could discuss the book in class, but I believe in some ways the students continued to see the apocalyptic text in terms of the movie. (ibid.)

It is not surprising, when such considerations are borne in mind, that university courses in the area of religion theology and lm are increasingly popular though, as Melanie
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Wright shrewdly counsels, we should not overlook the extent to which pragmatic motivations are often afoot when university departments lay on such modules. In her words, Academic practitioners of religious studies and theology are conscious of the fact that they nd themselves in a marketplace and that many teach in institutions hit by funding cuts and have to compete for promotion or sabbatical leave with colleagues in other, larger (more nancially successful) subjects (Wright 2007, p. 13). Within such a climate of insecurity and competition, in which there is a concomitant proviso that courses need to be attractive and intelligible to students with increasingly diverse educational and cultural backgrounds, it is not surprising if modules in religion and lm are introduced in the attempt to appear legitimate in the eyes of university administrators and external agencies (ibid.) as the study of lm is perceived to be both popular and relevant, as well as more marketable than a module on, say, Sanskrit. It can also, says Wright, provide a route into the study of religion for students who cannot be assumed to be religiously literate, or to share a common cultural background (ibid.). True though this may be, however, it nevertheless remains the case that a certain scepticism continues to prevail in some corners of academia about the provenance of the work undertaken in lm by theologians and religious studies scholars. Among lm theorists in particular, the religious nature and orientation of lm is substantially overlooked, if not altogether dismissed, as a viable or authoritative interpretation (see Deacy 2001, pp. 1516), and Gaye Ortiz has indicated that whenever a new book on theology and lm is published the academics in lm studies titter and scornfully dismiss churchy types who dare to bring God into the raried presence of cinematic discourse (cited in ibid., p. 16). Likewise, according to Paul Giles, writing in 1992, it is still not easy to discuss religion within a contemporary cultural context, since the prevailing ethos is that the academic study of culture is, per se, a rationalistic enterprise, with no space for what is purported to be the mumbo jumbo of spiritual belief (cited in ibid., pp. 1617). In more recent years, the success of Richard Dawkins The God Delusion (2006), Christopher Hitchens God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) and other writings on the New Atheism have demonstrated that there is still a widespread suspicion, certainly at a popular level, that discourse involving religion has anything constructive to offer in the modern world. In Dawkins words, theology is not of the smallest use to anybody, while theologians themselves have never said anything that was not either platitudinously obvious or downright false (Dawkins 1998, p. 6). Within such a climate, a module on religion or theology and lm can actually be a harder, rather than a more easy, sell in the university at large, in much the same way as in one British university religious studies staff trying to promote a new programme in the study of Cosmology & Divination encountered strong resistance from physicists in the same institution who felt, whether rightly or wrongly, that the academic integrity of their own research into cosmology was being undermined. Even within religious studies itself, Margaret Miles has written in the past about how hard it can be to convince fellow scholars of religion about studying lm in the sociocultural context of America since they tend to see the pursuit as a lark (Miles 1996, p. ix) and as a deviation from serious academic work. And, my own experience of teaching a group of divinity students training for the priesthood one year was that the attempt to bring theology and lm together comprised, at best, the act of dumbing down, and, at worst, nothing short of blasphemy. Perhaps with the combined fear of not being taken seriously within ones own discipline (theology, biblical studies and religious studies) and being dismissed out of hand by those outside, it is notable that many of the books produced in religion theology and lm regularly contain an apologia in the introduction or preface justifying a writers decision to stray from the territory of
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more respectable study together with an emphasis that their scholarly credentials were earned by prior successful engagement with more conventional subject matter (Wright 2007, p. 11). In response to such wariness, however, scholars are increasingly mindful of the fact that the way forward for the religion and lm eld is to build bridges with other disciplines. It was, after all, the eminent Russian lmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky who attested that Cinema should be a means of exploring the most complex problems of our time, as vital as those which for centuries have been the subject of literature, music and painting, and that it is only a question of searching, each time searching out afresh the path, the channel, to be followed by cinema (cited in Mitchell & Plate 2007, p. 228). To this end, one way of moving forward is to ensure that work on religion and lm uses methodologies that are recognised and practised within lm studies. The tendency among many religion and lm scholars to overemphasise the narrative dimension of lm at the expense of such ` ne, cinematography, editing and sound is increasingly lmic techniques as mise-en-sce seen as a distinct problem. As Wright puts it, A written text draws on verbal sign systems; in lm a multiplicity of different signiers (aural, visual, verbal) are contained within the space of a single frame or series of frames (Wright 2007, p. 21). When lm is not seen qua lm but only for its afnity with literature, Wright continues that limited analysis results, and that despite the growing bibliography and plethora of courses in religion theology and lm she questions whether lm is really being studied at all (ibid., p. 22). By the same token, Ostwalt suggests that
While religious studies, especially in the Western tradition, sometimes trick us into thinking that religion and religious authority are primarily textual, in reality, religion functions on a variety of experiential levels, and when the experiential component of religion is part of the equation, one might argue that religion is more sensorial than textual. (Ostwalt 2008, p. 37)

The embryonic work that has been carried out to date by theologians and religious studies practitioners in the area of lm music (see Barry Taylor 2007 and Ostwalt 2008) and Lacanian lm theory (Steve Nolan 2005) is one such way in which religion theology and lm might be taken more seriously in the future within lm studies. As far as scepticism within religious studies is concerned, further, there is plenty of scope for interdisciplinary encounter between the latest cutting edge work in religion and lm and the language and methodology used by key gures in the study of religion. According to John Hinnells, arguably one of the most important gures in the comparative study of religion, there is something intrinsically uid about the boundaries of what comprises religion, in which events, like people, are complex, and can have both religious and secular dimensions; having one does not exclude the other (Hinnells 2005, p. 7). For Ninian Smart, also the founder of Religious Studies as a discipline in the United Kingdom it is articial to divide secular ideologies too sharply from their religious counterparts on the grounds that they sometimes function in society like religions and because the distinction between religious and secular beliefs and practices is a modern Western one and does not represent the way in which other cultures categorise human values (Smart 1998, p. 10). That there is potential for dialogue is thus very much in keeping with the direction of religious studies as a discipline, to the point that S. Brent Plate even sees the kind of dynamic at work in lm to be akin to what takes place in religious rituals inasmuch as the attraction and indeed promise of cinema is the way it offers a window into another world, even if only for 90 minutes at a time, which is as much as can be said for the promise of myths and rituals in religious traditions (Plate 2008, p. 223). Plates hypothesis is that both in lm and religious rituals such as the
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Jewish Sabbath the known world is being re-created. In the case of religion, individuals and communities use symbols, myths, rituals and stories to achieve this aim, while as far as cinema is concerned lmmakers are adept at using the raw materials of space and time and re-situating them by means of such processes as editing, sound, movement and music. Accordingly,
We the viewers are invited into other worlds, alternate renditions of reality that through seamless editing, precise special effects, carefully placed cameras, and elaborate props offer views of the world that seem uniquely realistic. (cited in Mitchell & Plate 2007, p. 434)

Both lm and religion are thus capable of presenting insights into alternative realities, of a world that could be, of a world that viewers want to live in or in the case of apocalyptic lms a world viewers want to avoid (ibid.). In the light of such considerations then, as Lyden accurately puts it, remaining impervious to dialogue will leave us unchallenged in our assumptions and unable to develop and deal with new experiences and new data (Lyden 2007, p. 209). At the same time, it would be wrong to go so far down the path towards homogeneity that lm and religion end up being seen as virtually indistinguishable. Many scholars take the line, for example, that lm and theology may actually be advancing different, even incompatible, agendas, as indicated by Popes assertion that in marked contrast to the radical Christian scheme of salvation movies merely
support a general morality, they afrm the vitality of the human spirit and they appeal to vague notions of a civic religion but they do not specically promote Christianity or, for that matter, any organised religion. (Pope 2005, p. 179)

Pope also asserts that lms do not exactly offer the kind of information traditionally offered by religion such as the why or wherefore of the universe, the meaning and purpose of life, forgiveness of sin and salvation (ibid.). Pope further makes the pertinent observation that even though religion often forms the backdrop of lms such as Stigmata (Rupert Wainwright, 1999), End of Days (Peter Hyams, 1999) and The Da Vinci Code (Ron Howard, 2006), there are a number of fundamental differences between the often negative or at least ambivalent way in which the institutional (in each of these cases Roman Catholic) church is portrayed while the heroic protagonist tends towards agnosticism and saves the day through a combination of personal courage and wisdom rather than through the intervention, or the special empowering, of a deity (Pope 2007, p. 1). A similar issue arises in the case of Robert Jewett who though, on the one hand, is keen to show that Pauline theology should take account of lm on the grounds that St Paul, as someone who placed himself where other people were, to communicate the gospel on their turf, would have been a discerning partner in discussing secular movies, had they been available in his time (Jewett 1993, p. 6) is nonetheless quick to afrm that this is not a relationship of equals. To give one example, there is, according to Jewett, an innate dichotomy between Christianitys gospel of sacricial love and the tendency in many movies to preach the gospel of regeneration through violence (see, e.g., Deacy & Ortiz 2008, pp. 1457 and Jewett 1999, pp. 147161). There is also the consideration that, tempting though it may be for some scholars (and students) to go down the path of searching for Christ-gure motifs in lm along the lines of Kozlovics claim that innumerable Christ-gures and other holy subtexts are hidden within the popular cinema, such that secular lms can engage in religious storytelling about biblical characters, ideas, and themes without appearing religious (Kozlovic 2004, p. 5) what is often overlooked is that there may be occasions when a point of departure, rather than a parallel, exists between the gure at the heart of a two-thousand-year old tradition and the
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protagonist in a lm (for more on this see Deacy 2008). The single-minded pursuit of looking for Christic resemblances is also unhelpful when, as Johnston puts it, There is a danger, as anyone teaching in the eld of Christianity and the arts knows, in having overenthusiastic viewers nd Christ-gures in and behind every crossbar or mysterious origin (Johnston 2000, p. 53). Lyden similarly counsels that If every bloodied hero becomes a Christ-gureit will seem that we can nd Christianity in every action lm, thereby stretching the interpretation of such lms to the breaking point and concomitantly doing an injustice both to Christianity and to the lms in question (Lyden 2003, p. 24). In conclusion, whatever the future has in store, it is clear that, while there may be no uniformity in the eld (which in itself is no bad thing as every discipline has its competing methodologies and models), there is enough interest on both sides to merit further exploration. It is certainly the case that theologians and religious studies practitioners are being given new ways of assessing the paradigms they may have hitherto taken for granted, so that when Marsh, for instance, makes the groundbreaking claim that as a major component (binding commitment) in a persons lifecinema-going is functioning as a religious practice for some (Marsh 2004, p. 1) and that going to the movies often achieves an important theological function since it is not possible to be moved to the core of ones being, or to ask questions about ultimate meaning and value without raising theological questions (ibid., p. 10), then theologians should overlook the ramications of such a position at their peril. After all, as Marsh suggests, those who work in lm may even be functioning more authoritatively or at least more inuentially than bishops (ibid., p. 3), which supports Popes assertion that religion, or at least the religious questions of origins, meaning and destiny in life, have maintained their potency in contemporary culture even when the popularity of institutional religion has declined (Pope 2007, p. 1). Indeed, for a sociologist of religion working with secularisation theories, it is clear that the repercussions of work being carried out at the interface between religion and popular culture are wide-ranging. In Ostwalts words,
if it is true that the institutional church is losing authority in contemporary societywe should not be surprised to nd religion expressed with new vitality outside the institutional churchin secular cultural forms like literature, lm, or art. (Ostwalt 2003, p. 5)

Even if audiences are not exactly gathering at movie theatres for worship many may well nd in the experience uplift, community, sensation, value denition, and so forth (ibid., p. 142) in other words, they may discover many of the same things that have historically been encountered in religious agencies and practices. This is an age where, as Plate has recently highlighted, lm plays an integral role in the shaping of contemporary religiosity, as evinced by the numbers of people, especially in America, who dress for weddings in Matrix-style clothing or have Terminator-themed bar-mitzvahs and Titanicthemed bat-mitzvahs not to forget how
thirty years after its creation, in almost any major city across the United States and elsewhere, at the liminal hour of Saturday Midnight, one can nd a screening of [The Rocky Horror Picture Show] and a devoted crowd of people still gathering, donning costumes related to the lm, along with their special props. (cited in Mitchell & Plate 2007, p. 433)

With such considerations in mind, there is plenty of evidence to substantiate Marshs thesis that at a time of considerable uncertainty as to whether there is, or can be, any overarching way of making sense of human life (Marsh 2007, p. 16), it is participation in such practices that go some way towards addressing the question of the meaning of life for many people in the world today. Quite apart from whether audiences go to the cinema
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918 Christopher Deacy

for escapism per se, Marsh is also correct in his attestation that they often keep on going precisely because much more happens to them, which is not only entertaining but also cognitively satisfying, ethically stretching and intellectually stimulating (ibid., p. 31), and which is, at the end of the day, how theological reection occurs namely, in response to the business of living (ibid., p. 17).3 Work at the religion theology-lm interface thus continues to have much to offer to contemporary scholarship. Short Biography Christopher Deacy is Senior Lecturer in Applied Theology at the University of Kent and has published widely in the eld of theology and lm. His publications include Screen Christologies: Redemption and the Medium of Film (University of Wales, 2001), Faith in Film: Religious Themes in Contemporary Cinema (Ashgate, 2005) and Theology and Film: Challenging the Sacred Secular Divide (co-authored with Gaye Ortiz, Blackwell 2008). He is currently working on a monograph for Routledge, Screening the Afterlife: Theology, Eschatology and Film, which critically examines theological perspectives on cinematic representations of death and the afterlife. Notes
* Correspondence address: Dr Chris Deacy, Cornwallis Building, University of Kent, Canterbury CT2 7NF, United Kingdom. E-mail: c.deacy@kent.ac.uk.
1

In contrast, however, Swansea lifted its ban on the movie in 1996, and Torbay Council lifted its prohibition in September 2008 see BBC News 2008b http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/7633749.stm and Morris 2008 http://www.guardian.co.uk/lm/2008/sep/25/britishidentity.comedy. 2 Montanism was a second century movement within the Church, whose members wanted to re-establish the primitive charismatic ministry against the pretensions of an institutional hierarchy. They opposed the existence of clergy and sought the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit on all occasions. This went against the grain of the Catholic Church who deemed revelation to have come to an end with the apostolic age. Holding that new prophecy superseded any previous manifestations, they seemed to be adding to the basic deposit of faith, and thereby disputing the nality of the revelation given in Scripture. For the Catholic leaders, this was an attack on the original, fundamental revelation and the last thing that was needed at a time when unity was required. 3 Rob Johnston similarly speaks for many in the eld when he claims that, at their best, movies engage with their viewers in ways that can productively transform our attitudes, actions, and horizons, even our interpersonal, communal, and spiritual possibilities (Johnston 2007b, p. 318).

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