Saved

(courtesy of Andie Miller)

Save This
Patton Dodd
The Revealer

Evangelicals on film occupy an odd if unsurprising position: they are almost always represented as aggressors. Consider Robert Duvall’s conflicted evangelist in The Apostle,

Overly-aggressive evangelism?

John Swanbeck’s belligerent Baptist salesman in The Big Kahuna, and Robert Mitchum's evil preacher in Night of the Hunter—three characters who could not be more different save for the fact of their evangelical confidence. Opinionated, self-assured, and willfully subversive of the (im)moral status quo, aggressive evangelicals like these are out to make converts—to Jesus, sure, but moreover to a robust and strident conservatism. They thump their Bibles and beat their chests, roaring about the way things should be, the way things used to be. They seek not merely to convince, but to compel, by force if necessary.

Adding to this representation of evangelicals is this summer’s Saved!, the only recent movie outside of evangelicalism’s own filmmaking industry to be entirely concerned with evangelicalism. Saved!, as many reviewers have noted, is Mean Girls in Evangelicaldom, which means it is about what happens when you take typically addled teenagers and add Christian rock and prayer groups. It is also about evangelical aggression—the problem of noisy, nosy Jesus freaks in a live-and-let-live world.

Having played thus far only on in large markets and at film festivals (wider release begins this weekend), Saved! has nonetheless garnered a great deal of attention in anticipation of the attention it could garner. With rumors of the film’s parodies of evangelical culture abounding, Christianity Today noted last week that Christian groups have been nervously awaiting the film for an entire year (the converse, perhaps, to the eager anticipation of Mel Gibson’s Passion Play).

Read Entire Essay