Thursday, February 24, 2005

Passionate Cyncism?:

It was Jesus who said that the children of this world are wiser than the children of light, a point that seems to be borne out by this post from blogger Michael Gallaugher of Christian Convervative.

At one point, for instance, he complains that Hollywood continues to church out movies like Sideways ($58 million) and Million Dollar Baby ($54 million) rather than producing more blockbusters like the Passion of the Christ ($370 million gross). Then, in the very next sentence, he writes: "But they don’t care. Their view of the world is so cynical it transcends money."

Huh? Isn't it the cynical who care about nothing of the art of storytelling and therefore make movies based solely on the bottom line?

No doubt people are cynical in many different ways, and for many different reasons. But I don't think it either conservative or Christian to suggest that naked materialism would somehow be a preferrable mode of cynicism.

Update: Gallaugher says that I mischaracterize his point. Apparently, he was appealing to the bottom line to suggest that Hollywood has an inherent anit-Christian bias--something that, no doubt, is true. But in this I suspect that Christians are not entirely without blame. I wonder, for instance, how many Christian writers there are who (1) actually write decent scripts that (2) dramatize faith rather simply moralize or push theology?

I have no idea what the answer to this question is. But it does seem like something that ought to be investigated before we start casting stones. But, alas, in this century as in the first, the latter option seems to be ever so much simpler.

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