Jesus Revolution, starring Kelsey Grammer, is making millions – despite being invisible to the mainstream. What’s behind this miracle?
You have probably never heard of this year’s most unexpected hit film. In its opening weekend, it grossed more than 10 times as much as Tár, the classical music drama and unending discourse generator. And it easily beat out both Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale and the most recent Magic Mike sequel: not bad for a decidedly mid-budget production made for $15m, now sitting pretty on a $40m box office haul. It is the highest-grossing film released by the studio Lionsgate since 2019 – beating even Ryan Reynolds’s big-budget action comedy The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard.
This film also has a nigh-unreachable audience score of 99 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, making it more popular than Casablanca or Citizen Kane. It’s called Jesus Revolution.
There’s an entire shadow ecosystem of Christian cinema out there: films that cost tens of millions to make, and which are often put out by major distributors. But despite often doing very well at the box office, they’re totally invisible to mainstream culture. In this hidden world, there are stranger versions of all the films you know and love. There are Christian romcoms, Christian thrillers, Christian action movies, and Christian dramas. There is also Christian TV: The Chosen is the world’s most successful crowdfunded scripted drama, producing three seasons about the life of Jesus of Nazareth with more than $28 million in donations.
Jesus Revolution is a Christian period piece, set in 1960s California, that dramatises the birth of the “Jesus People” hippie subculture. But what makes all this particularly weird is that a Christian film is not the same as a film that simply happens to be about Christianity.
Martin Scorsese is a Christian, and his 2016 film Silence is about Christianity: Jesuit priests wrestling with persecution and keeping their faith before the deafening silence of God. Paul Schrader is a Christian, and his 2017 film First Reformed is about Christianity: a small-town pastor trying to follow God’s clear demands in a world poisoned by the sins of man.
But neither of these count as Christian Films. A Christian Film is of a very particular type. It’s usually set somewhere in the wide flat belly of America, a brightly-lit highly-saturated world where all the men and women are orange and wear blue jeans with flannel shirts. There is a glorious sunset over the cornfields. There might be tragedy or heartbreak or conflict, but by the end of the film everyone must be healed and reconciled, hugging the family gratefully to a euphoric soundtrack. They have learned to trust God. The implicit message is always the same: that what God wants for them is to be happy.
The highest-grossing ever Christian film (after The Passion of the Christ, which – for obvious reasons – manages to avoid most of these tropes) is a 2014 production called Heaven is for Real. (It brought in $101.3 million worldwide.) Our hero is Todd Burpo (Greg Kinnear), a small-town Nebraska pastor who also appears to be the gym teacher at the local high school.
For a good chunk of the film, we just watch Todd having ordinary, banal experiences. He gets kidney stones. He takes the family to Denver to look at the botanical gardens. He has bills to pay; at one point, his wife starts worrying that she’ll have to get a job. It’s not entirely clear why we’re actually being shown any of this, until Todd’s four-year-old son falls ill and has to be taken to hospital. When he wakes up after surgery, he starts talking about meeting Jesus and angels in heaven, along with Todd’s grandfather, and a sister who’d died in the womb, which his parents had never told him about.
And that’s about it, really: a few more scenes of the child rattling off facts about Jesus, as his father slowly comes to realise that God is sending him a powerful message through this boy. There’s a final climactic scene in which Todd tells his parishioners about the good news and everyone hugs each other and cries. There are also a few sequences set in heaven itself, which appears to be a playground in a park with plenty of swings.
There’s some darker material in 2017’s The Shack. ($96.9 million.) Here, we meet Mack, another genial father in the middle of America, but this time his daughter Missy is kidnapped and murdered by a serial killer during a camping trip. Afterwards, Mack spirals, faithless, haggard, and morose, until God spirits him away to a shack in the woods for an extended therapy session. Here, God the Father – or “Papa” – is a wise middle-aged black woman. Jesus is a vaguely Middle Eastern hipster in a plaid shirt and jeans. The Holy Spirit is an ethereal East Asian woman who doesn’t say much. The four of them bake bread together, and talk about pain, and peek in on Missy’s new life in heaven. (This time, heaven is a big field with flowers.) Eventually, Mack learns to let go of his pain and accept Papa back into his heart. At the end, he’s back with his family again, on a fishing trip to a lake, smiling, and grateful to be alive.
For the really powerful stuff, though, you have to turn to the epic four-movie God’s Not Dead cinematic universe. ($98.2 million.) In the opening 2014 instalment, we meet a bright-eyed and sincere Christian college student who’s fallen into the talons of a bitter, miserable atheist philosophy professor played by TV’s Hercules, Kevin Sorbo. This professor has only one requirement for the philosophy of religion section of his course: all his students must write the words “God is dead” on a piece of paper, sign it, and receive their A. Our hero refuses, so the professor challenges him to prove God’s existence in a series of debates in front of the class.
In the end, our professor is hit in a random car accident. He’s lying on the tarmac with his ribs crushed, on the point of death, a passing pastor kneels by his side and asks him to accept Christ before he dies. He does.
There are three other God’s Not Dead sequels, each spinning further into this general atmosphere of persecution. Every single one of them has been almost universally panned by the critics. But there’s an audience out there that loves this material, and a well-oiled machine that keeps churning it out. In one, a schoolteacher is fired from her job for daring to mention Jesus as a possible inspiration for Martin Luther King. In another, a group of wild-eyed atheist students campaign to kick a modest church off their university’s campus. The fifth instalment, God’s Not Dead: Rise Up, will be released later this year.
God’s Not Dead was technically the most successful indie film of 2014, produced and distributed by an evangelical firm called Pure Flix. They partnered with Lifeway, the publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, to promote the film in churches located far from Hollywood; they grabbed free publicity by featuring cameos from TV celebrities like the Duck Dynasty brothers. (A similar strategy has been adopted by the producers of Jesus Revolution.)
The original film even ended with a fiendishly clever marketing trick, an onscreen call to action asking: “Are YOU up for the challenge? Text ‘God’s Not Dead’ to 10 friends RIGHT NOW!” It quickly went viral, leading to many confused text recipients who had no idea what was going on.
This is the traditional route for Christian media: you might not have a billion-dollar marketing arm, but there’s a network of believers out there willing to spread the good news. Since then, though, things have changed. Pure Flix has partnered with Universal Pictures for its home media distribution, and sold its Netflix-for-Christians streaming service to Sony.
God’s Not Dead star Sorbo is a fixture on the service, popping up in films such as What If…, a drama described as follows in the Viewer’s Guide section: “Very strong evangelistic Christian, biblical worldview about a man coming back to faith after years of putting fame and fortune first; no foul language; car stops inexplicably and airbag knocks man out, angel slugs man humorously at different times to transport him to the place he’s supposed to be, and dying man in hospital bed; no sex; no nudity; no alcohol; no smoking; and, nothing else objectionable.”
Faith-based films are, unfortunately, almost uniformly bad – not because they’re too religious, but often because they’re not religious enough. They don’t want to grapple with the themes of sin and doubt and powerlessness and the infinite silence of God. What’s powerful in Christianity – even for unbelievers – is the sense of a God who doesn’t provide an easy answer for human suffering, but simply suffers alongside us. But these movies traffic in simple answers; they needs to tell you, at the end of every film, that everything is fine.
Many faith-based films are deeply integrated into the mainstream. The Shack was produced by Lionsgate under its Summit Entertainment brand – the same outfit that gave us the Twilight films. Heaven is for Real was produced in-house by Sony Pictures. And Jesus Revolution is made by the Kingdom Story Company, a film studio which has exclusively partnered with Lionsgate to make faith-based content. The film’s co-writer and director Jon Erwin has form in this area: his previous works include October Baby, about young mums finding God in an abortion clinic, and Woodland, which features young mums finding God on an equalities march.
“We’re entertainers first. I want to make you laugh; I want to make you cry,” Erwin told Christianity Today. “But underneath all of that, there’s this universal message about hope. That’s what’s so interesting about it. It’s set in the church; it’s called Jesus Revolution; it’s about a spiritual awakening in America. And yet people who have no affiliation to Christianity love this story.”
He continued: “Within the entertainment industry specifically, I think there’s an uprising on the behalf of Christianity. I think there’s a resurgence in belief and a sudden increase in spirituality in America, even though church attendance is going down. It’s an exciting moment to be in the business. We’re at the forefront of a return to God.”
Yet in a conversation with MovieMaker Magazine, he also cited an unlikely inspiration. “I’ve talked a lot about this with Jason Blum. He’s one of the great minds in our business.” Blum is, of course, the man behind huge franchises like Paranormal Activity and The Purge, who convinced big studios that there was serious money to be made in shlocky horror. Now, there’s a glut of slick, prestigious horror cinema, and Jesus is getting the same treatment as axe-murderers and ghosts. Plenty of mainstream actors are willing to work in Christian productions, including a few who don’t show any signs of personal religiosity: it’s a gig like any other, after all. The culture at large might not talk about these films, they might need their own specialised awards shows, but it all comes out of the same machine.
Erwin, certainly, is betting big on the future of Christian film. “We’ve only scratched the surface on what faith-based entertainment can be. We’re wondering, ‘How can we make the Bible a cinematic universe?’” Religion is just another form of intellectual property.
Jesus Revolution stars Kelsey Grammer (himself an outspoken member of the Christian Science movement) as a staid, boiled-potato-eating California pastor, darkly worried about what all these kids are getting into: their long hair, their rock and roll, their free love, their drugs. His life is changed when he meets a grinning hitchhiker named Lonnie Frisbee, who looks like Jesus and is in fact played by Jonathan Roumie, the actor who portrays him in The Chosen. Frisbee is on a mission to rescue the wayward hippies and bring them into the embrace of God; soon, the pews are full of barefoot bearded freaks.
One of the older parishioners complains that this new crowd are ruining the church’s carpets, so Kelsey Grammer washes their feet. Here, Christianity ends up being the natural endpoint of the counterculture. You were searching for meaning and authenticity: here it is. Wear your jeans, stop taking drugs, and go to church instead.
Jesus Revolution has some conflict and drama, barely sketched in, but at the end everyone reconciles and hugs it out on a beautiful brightly-coloured beach. It’s based on a true story, but it’s not the entire story. Lonnie Frisbee was a real person, who really did kickstart the Jesus movement. He was also gay. In public, he preached that homosexuality was sinful, but in private he couldn’t help sinning. Lonnie Frisbee was torn between the faith he’d adopted and the way he couldn’t help but be. He died of Aids in 1993, excommunicated and outcast from the movement he’d founded. None of this stuff gets any mention in the film. But that, perhaps, would have been a much better story.
