How the Power of the Holy Spirit Can be Portrayed in Successful Motion Pictures

"It sort of makes you stop and think, doesn't it?"

As many of my Nineveh's Crossing followers know, I'm primarily a filmmaker, who spends some of his time producing and distributing Christian media. In my film and story consulting work (most of which is in the secular realm with Hollywood writers or producers) I sometimes end up coaching Christians who want to be filmmakers or better storytellers. It's a tough job.

"Christian Filmmakers" Have a Few Problems

First, I define Christian Filmmakers as people who are primarily Christians and only secondarily are they Filmmakers. That is, they are not "Filmmakers Who Happen to be Christians." Second, Christian Filmmakers are not really interested in becoming good filmmakers, they're more interested in becoming good evangelists. A good filmmaker is a good storyteller...preaching is another thing entirely. Third, Christian Filmmakers tend to be more interested in praying than in learning the craft. But prayer has never been a substitute for craft. If it was no Christian would ever bother go to school, or discipline their bodies to be healthy. In fact, it is in Genesis that God said to Adam and Eve, "subdue the earth" and "by the sweat of your brow you will have to work to eat." God did not say "get on your knees and ask me to do the work for you you."

We were made in God's image...God's creative image. Being creative requires work. Yes, ask the Holy Spirit for inspiration...then get off our knees and go to school, learn the craft, sacrifice your time and money, move to Hollywood or New York...and stop hiding in your church basement waiting for the cultural storm to pass over.

The other epidemic thing about "Christian Filmmakers" is that they believe that preaching is the best way to communicate. I wonder where they got that? No, they didn't get it from the Bible. The Bible is 75% narrative and storytelling, a percentage you can come up with by categorizing chapters of the Bible as being either Narrative or Didactic. I wrote a good post on that topic years ago and recently updated it. See it here: How to Change the World at Bedtime over on my Moral Premise Blog. 

Anyway, Christian Filmmakers tend to think that their movies cannot possibly reveal the presence of God or the Holy Spirit without explicit scenes of a character reading a Bible, going to church, listening to a sermon, being counseled by a preacher, or being prayed with. But, God and his Spirit are ubiquitous in our lives by simply breathing and living in cooperation with Natural Law. The Spirit of the Most High surrounds us, and we have a choice to obey or ignore. When we obey we grow closer to God, when we ignore Natural Law we suffer the consequences. Thus, our physical life becomes a spiritual journey... which, BTW is the implicit premise behind my work and my book The Moral Premise: Harnessing Virtue and Vice for Box Office Success.

To help "Christian Filmmakers" get a better grip on good storytelling, I wrote the following post for the Moral Premise blog, which I have edited here to appear a bit more spiritual.

How Can a "Christian Filmmaker" Connect With Audiences?

[The overarching answer: Become a filmmaker who just happens to be a Christian.]

Rule No. 1: Audiences connect best with characters when you tell a story that the audience believes is universal, logical, and organic. 

• Universal means the story centers on a universal values that the audience believes are universally true...that means what is right vs. what is wrong. In 90 minutes you can't change the audience's moral values more than a smidgen, so you better start and end where the audience generally is. You can nudge people, but you can't convert them. If you want to convert people produce a documentary and present the most biased interviews and visuals you can find. But don't figure you can figure which way the conversion will flop. A pro-Trump doc may just turn people against him, as Dinesh D'Souza has probably discovered, and a anti-Trump doc may create more Republican voters...as Michael Moore has discovered. 

• Logical means the story's cause and effect elements are logically consistent with Natural Law. Now, there are two kinds of natural laws. There is physical kind, e.g. gravity, momentum, inertia, etc.; and there are psychological [or spiritual] kind, e.g. guilt, generosity, lust, envy, etc.  You violate one and there will be natural consequences to answer to. [God mostly communicates his moral will to mankind through natural consequences, though it may take a preacher to explain it to the dense and arrogant.]

• Organic means the filmmaker's ability to surreptitiously foreshadow events... while still being universal and logical. [Explosions and miracles both require a logical basis and universal setting. See Rule No. 4.]

Rule No. 2: Every one of the universal, logical and organic elements consistently conforms to a single Moral Premise Statement:

[some moral vice] leads to [some physical detriment], but

[some moral virtue] leads to [some physical betterment].

To expand: The vice and the virtue in the statement need to be universal values that most everyone in a general audience will understand at some level, e.g. greed vs. generosity, selfishness vs selflessness, arrogance vs. humility, etc.

The detriments and betterments are logically the natural consequences of the vice or virtue. Greed leads to isolation, generosity leads to friendship. In the political arena, arrogance (both Trump and the Acosta) leads to distrust, but humility (Jordan Peterson) leads to respect. 

Rule No. 3: Avoid parochial content and jargon...unless your audience is parochial and expects you to use jargon. For instance, Christian faith films often lapse into trite visuals, scenes, and jargon, the meaning of which is obscured to the non-believer. Someone asked Jordan Peterson once, "Are you a believer?" Peterson's logical response was, "I believe a lot of things." 

Rule No. 4: Tell the Truth.

Seems simple, but here's what it means.

When you set up a conflict between a flawed character and a universal vice and universal virtue, remember these three things:

1. Things Don't Happen by Accident. Either nature delivers, or your character is motivated by some value. 
2. The Universe is run by the Eternal Purposes of God. Generally, that means Natural Law is benevolent toward humans, unless humans ignore what is benevolently given them.
3. Novel and unexpected events (e.g. a miracle) occur to accomplish the universe's larger purpose. In such an event, it may appear that Natural Law is violated, but to the clever writer the event is always natural.