It’s hard to know where to start with this one. The basics: These are two films that open on Valentine’s Day 2015. Both are boy-meets-girl stories that deal with love and romance. One is based on a bestselling novel; one has a novel based on the film that will be released at the same time. One has a soundtrack featuring Beyoncé; the other, I assume has music.

Yes, Fifty Shades of Grey has some competition, in the form of a film called Old Fashioned. The premise appears to be that a man who has Ideas about Dating and Relationships finds those ideas thrown into question by a “free-spirited young woman with a restless soul.”

In its defense, Old Fashioned doesn’t look like a terrible movie! It looks like it might be sort of okay, and I’m not damning with faint praise when I say that-if you’re in the mood for a religious romantic comedy, I bet you could do far worse than this film.

That being said, I have two major bones to pick with the this film.

First of all, the title. I get that we aren’t always supposed to imbue titles with a lot of meaning, but I can’t help getting frustrated over this one. The myth of “old-fashioned” is a big part of what is harmful about contemporary Christian culture, promoting this sort of escapist nostalgia that says that we would be better off if we could just return to a time when men were men and women knew their place was in the home. We use “old-fashioned” as shorthand for 1950s cultural values without examining whether those values were helpful or Biblical to begin with. “Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is…Old Fashioned,” the film’s promotional poster proclaims, borrowing from both 1 Corinthians 13 and this twisted notion that conflates nostalgia with Christian values.

Rik Swartzwelder and Elizabeth Ann Roberts in OLD FASHIONED. Photo courtesy Skoche Films.

Secondly, though, and more importantly, is the reactionary nature of so much Christian art. Don’t agree with a certain book? Write a book-length response! We observed this phenomenon with the release of Rob Bell’s Love Wins, which saw the publication of at least four books attempting to correct Bell’s theology. According to its writer/director/star Rik Swartzwelder, Old Fashioned wasn’t conceived as a response to Fifty Shades, but the release date was pushed back so the two could make their debut at the same time.

There will also be a book and a devotional released at the time of the film; no doubt hoping to capitalize on the interest generated by playing the story as the church’s response to Fifty Shades. That’s not a bad thing per se, but it makes the whole thing feel a little derivative, like its strength depends on being the alternative to someone else’s idea. Christians can have so much to offer around issues of sex and dating (although you don’t see a lot of that played out in the national arts scene, it’s there!) but when they confine their efforts to responding to other people, everybody loses.