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Faith on film and TV: Five takes on the life of Jesus that you can watch this Easter

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With Easter just ahead and many of us stuck at home during the coronavirus pandemic, there is no better time than now to both watch movies about the life and death of Jesus. You should be able to find several on television this weekend.

Christ has been depicted in a variety of ways on film over the last six decades. Some depictions have been better than others. Some of these movies made headlines and some did not. The debate over which portrayal of Jesus was most realistic, authentic or powerful has raged on for years.

In 1997, James Martin came up with his own list, republished two years ago in America magazine. In it, he made some controversial picks, ones that keep this debate going every Easter. For many, movies about Jesus allowed many people who would otherwise not have an interest in Christianity or faith and awaken some religious curiosity.

Easter — Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection — is the most significant event of the Bible, one that changed the course of history. There are a number of movies that have captured that moment in both a touching and stirring manner. At the same time, several actors have portrayed Jesus to great public acclaim. The movies, appealing to Christians of all denominations, are a wonderful way to celebrate Easter and educate younger people to the life and times of Jesus.

This list doesn’t consider edgy pop-culture phenomena such as Jesus Christ Superstar or sacrilegious ones like The Last Temptation of Christ, with its mentally unbalanced and rather depressed messiah who calls himself a sinner. Instead, I have focused on serious interpretations through the years of the life of Jesus. As Christians prepare for Easter, here are five movies about Jesus, both in theaters and on TV, that rise above the rest:


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This week's podcast: Are all those COVID-19 stories about rebel preachers fueled by bias?

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Veteran GetReligion readers will remember that I grew up as a Southern Baptist preacher’s kid in Texas and then, as an undergraduate, did a double major in journalism and history at Baylor University, along with a master’s in church-state studies.

Why bring up my Baptist credentials, right now? Well, they’re relevant to the topic that “Crossroads” host Todd Wilken and I discussed during this week’s podcast. (Click here to tune that in.)

You see, I have been listening to Bible Belt folks argue about journalism for a long time. My parents backed my career choice, but trust me when I say that I can quote chapter and verse on why many people think that “Christian” and “journalist” are words that don’t go together.

The bottom line: If you ask why so many journalists struggle to do accurate, balanced coverage of religion you’ll hear lots of conservatives in pews (and pulpits) say: “Well, journalists hate religious people.”

That’s a straw-man argument and simplistic, to boot. I have seen, and heard about, some strong examples of prejudice against religious folks in newsrooms, but I have never thought that negative prejudice was the biggest problem that skews religion coverage. For starters, I’ve met some journalists who don’t care enough about religion to, well, hate it. There’s way more journalists who think that there’s good religion and then there’s bad religion and they are pretty sure which is which.

Anyway, I continue to hear from GetReligion readers who are mad about all those news stories on independent preachers who ignore coronavirus crisis “shelter in place” orders requiring them to avoid business-as-usual worship. Here’s a chunk of the GetReligion post that served as the hook for the podcast:

… (The) question looks like this: Why are the few pastors who reject “shelter in place” orders getting so much ink with their face-to-face worship services, while the vast majority of clergy who have moved their rites online — often for the first time — are getting little or no coverage? I have already written about this twice at GetReligion — look here and then here. …

Here is what people are feeling: How come some angry preacher deep in the Bible Belt is getting all this coverage and, well, online efforts by the still massive Southern Baptist Convention are ignored?


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Photos of lilies at sunrise won't be enough: Talking 2020 Easter news with Eric Metaxas

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Yes, I wore the tacky “I (heart) New York” sweatshirt on purpose.

Note that it’s green, as well. Just to crank up the tacky factor, I bought this stereotypical sweatshirt for half price after St. Patrick’s Day — at a shop located deep in the dark, dismal, Dante’s Inferno-like lower floors of New York City’s Penn Station. If you’ve been there, you know what I am talking about.

So I wore it as an ironic nod to the fact that my old friend Eric Metaxas is — like all New York City writer-commentators — doing what he calls “bunker” broadcasts from his apartment somewhere in the 4, 5, 6 subway zone on the city’s East Side. He pops out from time to time for runs in Central Park (especially if there are Samaritan’s Purse field hospitals there).

I have known Metaxas for nearly a quarter century now, dating back to early Internet contacts in the days when he was a freelancer and VeggieTales scribe (see his interview with Phil “Bob the Tomato” Vischer).

Note that means that our friendship dates way, way back before we needed to avoid talking about Citizen Donald Trump. I also do not understand his obsession with late 1970s radio classics, but that’s another issue altogether. I mean, Trump plus “Bennie and the Jets”? Come on.

But I thought GetReligion readers might enjoy this video on this weekend, in particular, since it focuses on news coverage of this very unique Easter season — both in the churches of the East and West. Metaxas grew up in Greek Orthodoxy and has traveled into evangelicalism, while I grew up Southern Baptist and have converted into Eastern Orthodoxy. We are both bilingual, in a way.

This is not — to say the least — a year when newspaper editors will be able to get away with a glowing picture of Easter lilies at sunrise and that’s that.


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Yes, there's still a November election and propaganda about religion will merit examination

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Despite the dormant U.S. campaign and 24/7 news coverage on COVID-19, political verbiage continues unabated, some of it religious in flavor.

Writers are unlikely to scan this scene at the moment, but The Religion Guy thinks it merits examination sometime before Election Day seven months hence.

The overriding trait of U.S. political propaganda in our time — from left and right — is that it ever more narrowly “preaches to the choir,” as the old saying goes, reinforcing prior mindsets and allegiances rather than trying to persuade fence-sitters or people with opposite views. Ditto with religious verbiage.

There are two categories of propaganda. (1) Promotional material disgorged by political groups themselves. (2) Opinion journalism that drifts toward the rabidly partisan newspapering of the Adams-Burr-Hamilton-Jefferson days. Click here for a sample.

A typical example of appeals to hidebound attitudes is a direct-mail plea that Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition says went to 10 million Christians. They were asked to donate $22.5 million to register 5 million new voters in 16 battleground states, re-elect President Donald Trump, and maintain Republicans’ Senate control.

The mailer said 81% of “conservative Christians” voted for Trump, which signaled that the intended audience here was white evangelical Protestants, not minority Protestants or Catholics who resent it when the “Christian” label is co-opted this way.

Reed’s mailer came in mid-March, just before the president shifted to sterner warnings about COVID-19, so that looming crisis went unmentioned while the then-booming economy was touted. The pitch cited federal judge appointments but notably skipped past other evangelical concerns like support for Israel, religious liberty, LGBTQ and gender identity disputes, the drug epidemic and abortion.

Instead, believers were told to combat the “OPEN BORDERS, socialist, anti-God, anti-family agenda of today’s Democrat Party” whose “VOTE FRAUD” threatens democracy, all of this abetted by the “dishonest media.” The enemy would “erase Christianity from America” and have the U.S. “governed by the United Nations” instead of its Constitution. Those “vicious and unhinged” liberals “can destroy America forever” so it becomes “a failed, corrupt, one-party socialist country like Cuba or Venezuela.” Etc.

With propaganda via journalism, let’s start at the elite level with Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate, emeritus economics prof at Princeton and New York Times columnist. His March 28 opus accusing the Trump administration of inadequate COVID-19 response blamed its “denialism” in part upon “the centrality of science-hating religious conservatives.”


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Court frees Cardinal Pell: Washington Post offers basic journalism. And the New York Times?

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This will be a very simple post about a very complicated religion-news story.

I am referring to the news that lit up Twitter the other day, when the news broke that Australia’s highest court had — with a 7-0 vote — overturned controversial (I need a stronger word) decisions by two lower courts convicting Cardinal George Pell of sexually assaulting two choirboys at the Melbourne cathedral in the 1990s.

I will not attempt to hash out the many ways that the secret nature of these Aussie court proceedings affected the news coverage. I will not discuss the details of the victim’s testimony against Pell and whether it was possible for a bishop, wearing many layers of thick, complicated vestments and almost certainly accompanied by an aide, to have committed these crimes in a public place.

No, my goal here is to contrast the journalism in two elite-media reports — in The Washington Post and then The New York Times — about this final court decision, which set Pell free and unleashed hurricanes of online arguments (yet again).

In terms of journalism, what is the essential difference between these two stories?

First, let’s look at the Post story, which ran with this headline: “Cardinal George Pell is released from prison after court quashes sexual abuse conviction.” If you read this story, you will find several passages like this:

In a written statement, Pell said he felt no ill will toward his accuser and did not want his acquittal to add to the bitterness in the community.

"There is certainly hurt and bitterness enough," he said. "However, my trial was not a referendum on the Catholic Church, nor a referendum on how church authorities in Australia dealt with the crime of pedophilia in the church.

"The point was whether I had committed these awful crimes, and I did not."

Readers will also read passages like this one:

The decision is likely to upset Pell's many detractors, who hold him responsible not just for the alleged assault on the choirboys but for the broader record of the Catholic Church in Australia, where some 4,444 people reported being abused in recent decades, according to an official inquiry. Their average age was about 11 years old.


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Stories near you? Ultra-Orthodox Jews making news in a time of coronavirus self-isolation

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TV binge-watching has emerged as a primary coping strategy for — I’m estimating here — the gazillions of people tired of 2,000-piece puzzles and cleaning their homes, but who still find themselves indefinitely sequestered because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Dare I say, thank God for cable streaming?

I’d include in my moment of praise the new four-part Netflix series “Unorthodox,” the story of a young Jewish woman raised in the ultra-Orthodox, Hasidic Satmar community in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood who runs away because, as she says, “there are too many rules.”

Click here to view the show’s official trailer. The dialogue is in Yiddish, German and English — a linguistic stew that my late in-laws also spoke, often in the same sentence. They also added some Hebrew and were particularly adept at mixing curse words. But I digress.

The show is based on the real-life story of Deborah Feldman. As with virtually all such shows, some details of Feldman’s best-selling (according to Amazon) memoir were changed or invented for dramatic impact.

Media depictions of insular religious communities — be they polygamist Mormons, as in HBO’s TV series “Big Love,” or the Amish in the Academy Award-winning Harrison Ford film “Witness” — require unusual sensitivity.

Journalism, regardless of the form taken (I’m including here cinematic documentaries), requires an equally deft hand. One reason is that the most insular religious groups are notoriously mistrustful of outsiders, making them difficult to penetrate. That in turn often leads to innocent misunderstandings that undercut credibility. (I’ll leave intentional distortions and sensationalism for another post.)

I’ll get back to the how-to issue below. But first let’s give “Unorthodox” a deeper look. This is a topic that could point to news stories linked to other tight-knit religious communities, here in America and around the world.


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No confessions? Coronavirus crisis creates legal, doctrinal Lenten minefield for priests

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No confessions? Coronavirus crisis creates legal, doctrinal Lenten minefield for priests

Every now and then, while a priest is traveling or out running errands, a stranger will approach and ask: "Father, will you hear my confession?"

This can happen on a city sidewalk or in a quiet corner of a big-box store. Often the question is urgent -- because something disturbing has shaken someone's faith.

"I've been asked for confession in a taxi. I've been asked while on a train," said Father Fergal O'Duill, part of the Dallas-Fort Worth branch of the Catholic movement Regnum Christi. His name is pronounced "O'Doul" and he is originally from Dublin, Ireland.

These requests happen, he added, because "people see you and they know you're a priest. We're priests no matter where we go."

Hearing confessions is crucial during the penitential season of Lent, which precedes Easter, which is on April 12th this year for Catholics and Protestants (and April 19th for Eastern Orthodox Christians). Centuries of Catholic and Orthodox tradition urge believers to go to confession during Lent, before receiving Holy Communion on Easter.

The irony, right now, is that O'Duill can hear confessions during chance encounters, but not during scheduled times at the school where is serves as a chaplain.

The evolving coronavirus pandemic has turned Lent into a confusing minefield of legal and doctrinal questions for pastors and their flocks. In many communities, but not all, state or local officials have ordered people to "shelter in place" -- staying home unless they have "essential" needs elsewhere. This has raised an obvious question: Is going to confession "essential," even if Catholics are preparing for Holy Week and Easter rites they will have to watch on digital screens at home?

For most of March, O'Duill was one of several priests who heard confessions in a giant parking lot, or in a pair of tents, near the Highlands School in Irving, Texas. Every effort was made to provide enough privacy to maintain the "dignity" of the sacrament, he said, while priests remained a safe distance from the penitents. Priests offered similar "drive-through" confession opportunities in a few other parts of America.

Then, on March 22, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins issued a "shelter in place" order effective through April 3 and, perhaps, beyond.

The ground rules changed.


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Sex ed bill in Washington state gets lots of boos but where was the religious community?

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To think from all the photos of the embattled Washington State Gov. Jay Inslee earlier in March, one would think he was locked in a 24-hour battle for the life of his state’s 7.8 million residents. Inslee was seen everywhere as trying to abait a virus whose national epicenter – for about two weeks – was near Seattle.

But Inslee had other pots on the fire that almost no one was reporting on including a bill that mandates sex education for all public school students in Washington state.

Religious folks were very involved in opposing it, but you would have never known that fact by looking at the sparse news coverage.

A story on MyNorthwest.com, the print version of KIRO TV Ch. 7 in Seattle tells us the basics. It’s dated March 7.

A controversial sex education bill was passed by the Washington State Legislature Saturday afternoon.

Despite a passionate fight from Republicans — who at one point added over 200 amendments in the hopes of keeping the bill requiring comprehensive sex health education from coming up for a vote — the legislation cleared its final hurdle and passed in the Senate.

Now, I am not sure why the story doesn’t mention a floor debate that went on until 2 a.m. about the bill with Republicans talking about thousands of emails flooding their inboxes (like close to 5,000) against the bill.


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Angry preachers fight 'shelter in place.' #NEWS Major religious groups follow rules? #SOWHAT

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If you were going to create an FAQ built on complaints from ordinary news consumers about the journalism biz, some variation on this question would have to be at or near the top of the list: “Why do journalists cover so much bad news? Why do they ignore all the good things that people do in our town/city/country/world and focus only on the bad things that a small handful of people do?”

I believe it was the late Walter Cronkite of CBS Evening News fame who said something like this (I’ve been hunting, but can’t find the quote): It would be a terrible thing if we lived in a world in which good news was so rare that everyone considered it unique and truly newsworthy.

If you pay attention to religion threads on Twitter, you know that we are living through a textbook case study of people arguing about this subject. This time, the question looks like this: Why are the few pastors who reject “shelter in place” orders getting so much ink with their face-to-face worship services, while the vast majority of clergy who have moved their rites online — often for the first time — are getting little or no coverage? I have already written about this twice at GetReligion — look here and then here.

Some people are upset, I think, because the rebels are all independent church leaders who, as a rule, perfectly match each and every stereotype of the angry white evangelicals and Pentecostals who back, you know, Citizen Donald Trump. In a way, this is a life-and-death example of the great evangelical monolith myth. Here is what people are feeling: How come some angry preacher deep in the Bible Belt is getting all this coverage and, well, online efforts by the still massive Southern Baptist Convention are ignored?

Frankly, the leap to online worship hasn’t been ignored. It has been covered over and over in local and regional news and in a few national stories that have not received all that much attention.

It’s also true — you know this if you follow Twitter — that Catholic and Eastern Orthodox people have been arguing about “shelter in place” rules, as well. The news there is that bishops have been making decisions to protect their priests and laypeople (see my most recent “On Religion” column). That’s a big story, too.

So what do these mad-preacher stories look like? For some reason, Reuters seems to be Ground Zero. Consider this headline: “The Americans defying Palm Sunday quarantines: 'Satan's trying to keep us apart'.” The story opens with a brave woman near Cincinnati who is staying at home and then jumps to this:


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