God at the Movies

The New York Times notes this morning that God is in at the movies:

"You don't believe in God?" Tom Hanks's character asks Audrey Tautou, who plays his partner-in-ciphers in "The Da Vinci Code."

"Do you believe in God?" Liev Schreiber's character asks a therapist who doubts that his adopted son, Damien, has devil genes in the new version of "The Omen."

"Get right with God," William Hurt preaches in the small, intense film "The King," but he's playing an evangelical minister, so he's a lot more certain.

With echo upon echo of faith-based dialogue, movie theaters today often sound like church. But what seems like a new willingness to explore questions of faith — as if Mel Gibson's blockbuster "The Passion of the Christ" had made religion safe for Hollywood — has the spiritual depth of the "Daily Show" segment "This Week in God," with its quiz-show-style "God Machine" that spits out religions to satirize.

The article comments that what is surprising about all of these movies, with the exception of The Passion of the Christ, is the skepticism that runs through these movies. What is surprising to me is that anywone would think this surprising. Hollywood is not exactly the Bible Belt. It is full of skeptics - and I am not saying that is a bad thing - and it is no surprise to me that when they approach the subject of religion they do so through skeptical eyes.

The article has this to say about the beliefs portrayed by the lead characters in The Da Vinci Code:

And while the movie's fidelity to the book is the flaw that makes it seem like some lifeless, illustrated version of the swifter novel, one of the film's biggest departures is its blunter dialogue about faith. Akiva Goldsman's leaden script, not Dan Brown's novel, has Robert Langdon (Mr. Hanks) and Sophie Neveu (Ms. Tautou) stop for a chat about whether a deity exists. Sophie answers no to the God question, saying, "I don't believe in some magic from the sky, just people."

By the end, when her skepticism has been challenged, Langdon tells her that it doesn't matter whether Jesus was mortal or divine. "The only thing that matters is what you believe," he says. That line, invented for the movie, sums up its attitude toward faith: a reassuring humanist shrug that says, "Whatever."

Let me point out that Langdon's line to Neveu is taken out of context here and does not refer to belief in God but to belief about her royal lineage that had just been revealed to her. She was going to have to decide whether she believed it. It wasn't just a "we can all believe whatever we want to believe and that's all that matters."

Still, my final comment on the thrust of this article that belief in God is being discussed in these movies is that this is the wrong discussion, or it's not the most important discussion. I say it frequently on Sundays: it isn't what we believe that matters; it's how we live. That is why I don't care if I have evangelical Christians or liberal Christians or Jews or agnostics or seekers in my congregation. It isn't what we believe that matters; its how we live our lives day in and day out.