c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) This was an extraordinary year for religion in film because:

A. A film about the last hours of Jesus made in two dead languages _ Aramaic and Latin _ is the third-highest grossing movie of the year.

B. Religious filmmakers broke traditional artistic boundaries to tell their stories in R-rated movies that pushed the Jesus-film envelope in depictions of violence, drug use and sexuality.

C. In some markets, filmgoers could walk into a commercial movie theater this past year and view a retelling of the Passion by a major Hollywood filmmaker, a drama centered on an evangelical revival, and biographies of the Catholic saint Therese of Lisieux and the Islamic prophet Mohammed.

The answer most longtime observers of religion and film would give, of course, is D: All of the above.

And with the Hollywood Hills alive with the sound of box-office registers ringing to the tune of $370 million for “The Passion of the Christ” in domestic release alone, many people expect to see a lot more movies with explicit religious themes in 2005.

“These films are popular, and they’re meeting a very real need,” said Harry Forbes, director of the Office for Film and Broadcasting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which rated “The Passion” as one of the year’s top 20 picks. “Certainly `The Passion’ seems to be a blazing affirmation of the public wanting this kind of movie fare.”

The 2004 movies raised numerous concerns _ that “The Passion” would promote anti-Semitism, that the films would be either too reverent or not reverent enough and that religious movies would have no staying power at the box office. Yet one point of consensus emerged: The movies got people talking in Los Angeles and around the country about questions of art and faith.

“The Passion” tied with the issue of faith and politics in the national election as the top religion story of 2004 in a poll of religion writers. The movie is already the subject of several books and was debated in settings from church basements to the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion.

“This is provocative. This provokes us. This forces us to be thoughtful,” said Nelson Vos, executive director of the Society for the Arts, Religion and Contemporary Culture.

The film portrayals might not always be pretty, he said, but they give people an opportunity to “relook at who we are and what we believe.”

Any look back at religion and film in 2004 has to begin with Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” The biblical picture was ignored by the major studios, starred lesser-known actors and was dismissed early as Mel’s folly. But massive amounts of publicity speculating on the depictions of its Jewish characters and a get-out-the-moviegoers campaign in evangelical churches led to a $117 million gross in the movie’s first five days, then the second-highest take ever for a Wednesday release. The film, which was released on DVD on Aug. 31, has a worldwide box office of more than $600 million and counting.

In the end, the film did not provoke riots in the streets. But it did make for an unusual twist in the culture wars, with liberals talking about the moral limits of artistic freedom and conservatives saying it would be unfair to censor films because they have the potential to inflame anti-Semitism by sticking close to biblical texts.

“There is a sense people of faith feel under attack, under assault,” said William Blizek, editor of the journal Religion and Film at the University of Nebraska, Omaha.

So even if the film recently was snubbed by the Golden Globes, the breakout box-office success of “The Passion” was an important affirmation in the marketplace, Blizek said.

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Ted Baehr, chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission and publisher of Movieguide, said the movie’s success also is a symbol of an evolution in religious conservatives’ attitudes toward secular films. Christians generally tend to go through four stages with popular culture, he said, from retreat to living within it to fighting it to engaging culture in an attempt to redeem it.

“In terms of the evangelical church, we are just getting out of the fighting part and are in the redemptive mode,” Baehr said.

Movies such as “The Passion” and “Woman, Thou Art Loosed” also showed filmmakers could break out of the Jeffrey Hunter, G-rated costume drama approach and be embraced by religious audiences even as they pushed back artistic boundaries.

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One immediate beneficiary of Gibson’s groundbreaking effort was the television evangelist T.D. Jakes, who promoted the movie “Woman, Thou Art Loosed” based on his best-selling book in private showings for pastors across the country.

The gritty screen adaptation included scenes of child rape, drug use, domestic violence and murder in telling the story of a young woman searching for hope after a lifetime of abuse, poverty and addiction. His pitch was that while “The Passion” told how Jesus was crucified, his film told why Jesus was crucified, to offer hope to people suffering today.

So far, so good. The low-budget film has taken in $7 million.

Evangelicals were not the only group in this breakout year for religion and film to emerge from church, synagogue or mosque halls or basements to see religious films. “Therese,” a film about the life of St. Therese of Lisieux, and the animated film “Mohammed: The Last Prophet” also drew audiences.

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What about the future for religion in film?

“Next year is going to be even more interesting,” Blizek said. “It really is going to open up a lot of things.”

Traditional religion still will come under attack in films such as “Saved,” a satire of religious hypocrisy. One of the more anticipated films expected to be shot next year is Ron Howard’s adaptation of “The Da Vinci Code,” a fictional thriller challenging beliefs in Jesus’ divinity and celibacy and imagining a vast political and religious conspiracy behind biblical texts.

But there is an expectation filmgoers also will see more religious films.

“If this is making money, you’ve got to figure lots of people are going to be making movies of this sort,” Blizek said.

KRE/JL END BRIGGS