Christians are cartoons. We all know how narrow-minded and nasty we are, don't we? It's the only way we non-believers can ever find out what it's like to be a terrible person -- to look at the way Christians do things. And there's only two kinds of Christians: Assholes and "Enablers".
Right?
Of course right.
I know this because I read the Democratic Underground Religion/Theology forum.
Well, a couple of hours ago, I was finally able to watch
Saved, and predictably, like all good pro-homosexual-agenda, God-hating, Jesus-rejecting, half-Jewboy, decadent, drug-abusing, fornicating, Clinton-forgiving, evolution-theorizing, child-non-spanking, Communist-condoning, Mel-Gibson-dissing, Piss-Christ-approving ...
... where was I going with this?
Yeah, I'm a bad person, and I saw
Saved! and loved it, from mixed-up innocently sexy woman-child Jena Malone to
über-virge Mandy Moore to twin crackpots Heather Matarazzo and Elizabeth Thai, even Eva Amurri, whose character smoked so much that I felt my sinuses clog up and my eyes getting bloodshot. And I've never seen Macaulay Culkin do better. (Mac, I take back all those catty things I'd written about you as a child actor. You, that is, not me.) Mary-Louise Parker, who played the part of Mary's (Jena Malone's) mom, was amazing, though I have yet to see her be anything
less than amazing. And for my fellow
Battlestar Galactica fans, Nicki Clyne -- deck-hand Callie on BSG -- had a painfully small part as the guitarist in the "Christian Jewels" rock band.
Martin Donovan probably did the best job, with the unenviable task of playing the Kartoon Kristian high-school principal Pastor Skip. He managed to be a complete cartoon ass, a husband and father going through a difficult marriage, a sexually repressed religionist struggling with his burgeoning love and/or lust for Mary's mom, and a homophobic Biblical legalist forced to confront his own multiple conflicts. His character won't be loved by most people who watch
Saved!, Christian and heathen alike, but it is he who carries half the pathos, along with Jena Malone's Mary.
Anyway, I went looking for the script. My hearing is lousy, and I usually miss about half the dialog in a rental movie, and upwards of 75% at the theater. Lately, I've been taking to reading along with the scripts on a second play of the movie.
But the search terms "Saved" and "Script" turned up a lot of computer-programming-related pages. When I added "Movie", most of the hits on Google were Christian movie reviews, most of them panning the movie as being "Extremely Offensive" or "Extremely Immoral".
Then I found the review at
Christian Answers.
Lo and behold,
Christian Answers gave
Saved! another "Extremely Offensive" rating. They really poured it on, too, including clips from other reviews and extensive quotations from this pastor and that.
But
Christian Answers was a different kind of website.
It also offered
readers' reviews.
Most of them were
Positive. Glowing. They disagreed with the official review, often strongly.
Positive - I LOVE and FEAR God and this movie fairly represents the Christian community. We are all sinners! I have seen so many Christians like the ones in this movie both antagonist and protagonist. We make mistakes and all the Christians in the movie realize their mistakes by the end! What this movie bashes are the people who sin constantly and never repent while using the bible as a weapon rather than a guide for life. As a Christian this movie made me reflect more on how I behave in and how I need to recognize the results of my actions. My Ratings: Better than Average/5
-------Jeremy, age 22
Almost all the Positives are like that; the respondents ranged from 13 to 60 years of age. I found that some of the oldest reviewers were the most positive.
The negatives are usually echoes of the official reviews. Several made the predictable gripes about Hollywood, Liberals, and Hollywood Liberals. More space is dedicated to negative ecclesiastical reviews of
Saved! than any of the movies I saw reviewed there, even
Rent.
As I expected,
Rent got a similar treatment, with more negatives, mainly because the eeevil homosexual in
Saved! gets sent to Mercy House (a high-priced Christian gulag) and doesn't have much of a role in the movie. In contrast, part of the cast of
Rent is gay, and death by AIDS is part of the backdrop of the film/play. The official clerical negative response seemed to be split between revulsion toward gays and turf pride with special venom reserved for the keynote song
Measure Our Lives In Love. But it wasn't the damn-the-torpedoes attack that it had launched against
Saved! Okay, so what is all this about?
Simple. The "eavesdropping" is easy to do -- read what the actual sheep of the flock are thinking about their faith, and compare it to the politicking pastorate. For the majority of the Christians, it's all about the message of salvation, redemption, forgiveness, and love. For the pastors and preachers, it's about power, politics, sexual hang-ups, judgment, and being a good Pharisee.
Whether you believe in Jesus or not, the story is one of the most enduring myths we have, and Christianity in all its forms has become one of the stronger parts of our culture. I have suspected for several years that there was a split taking place in the world of Evangelical/Fundamentalist Christianity -- the flock rejecting the Radical Right message, and the pastorate becoming increasingly strident and enraged.
Click on either link -- to
Christian Answers' reviews of
Saved! or to
Rent and read some of the remarks.
It's interesting ... both movies are about the redemptive power of love over the pain and imperfections of human life. Which, if you read the parts of the Bible that have to do with Jesus' message, is the whole point of what Christianity ought to be. For the born-again Christian,
Saved! offers a message of Christian hope. For the non-Christian, the non-believer, the atheist, and the agnostic, it affirms the message we find in living that Christians too often depend on their Bibles to find for them -- and come up empty.
No Man is an Island, and no Christian is a Cartoon. The political implications are likewise profound -- the Radical Religious Right can be undone by closing the Bible and opening the heart, because the Radical Religious Right was born in the same spirit of intolerance that sent Socrates to the hemlock and Jesus to the cross.
And may our loving, merciful, and forgiving God bless Sandy Stern and Michael Stipe and the crew and the producers and the wonderful cast.
Can I have an "Amen"?
--p!
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