Page 2429 – Christianity Today (2024)

In a department-store line, I watched an undergarment commercial on a screen above the cashier’s desk. It featured women expressing dissatisfaction with their figures, while the camera zoomed in on their chests.

It seemed I was watching a series of dismemberments, as the infomercial’s editors divorced body parts from their owners in order to direct attention to deficiencies in quality and trajectory. I was struck by how tragic it is that millions of humans—impossibly complex in neurological makeup, fantastically unique, and almost unbearably freighted with potential—walk around obsessed with perceived appendage inadequacies (or superiorities).

This is no news flash: We live in a body-obsessed culture. Materialism—the conviction that only matter can be proven to exist and that belief in transcendence is at best a fond hope, and at worst a dangerous delusion—is the spirit of our age. Ironically, it leaves us with no spirit at all, just our bodies and their appetites, unbridled and insatiable. No wonder we approach the fridge—and each other—with a predatory eye. We’re just trying to survive.

I believe that the only cure is to embrace nonmaterial reality as an integral part of the universe and ourselves. The conviction that we cannot be reduced to bodies is foundational to my worldview. It has also enabled me to justify avoiding any sort of consistent physical exercise for much of my life.

My husband is a kinesthetic person; if he goes too long without activity he gets restless. I, on the other hand, can be perfectly and indefinitely happy with a book and a comfortable couch. Although I often have felt a vague sense of guilt (and, lately, gravity), I have found a way to spiritualize my inclinations. I focus on soul things (books, ideas, music, relationships), not body things (exercise, nutrition). It’s always seemed to me that exercising for exercise’s sake is like wasting your life constantly fine-tuning your car rather than driving it somewhere.

Then, this past year, my parents got sick. Seeing how stress on the body—both theirs and mine—affects the well-being of the soul, I began reconsidering my position on exercise.

When I am running, it’s not uncommon for me to wind up crying, laughing, praying, or praising. The neighbors must find this unsettling; I find it fascinating.

So I promised my 11-year-old son that I would run a race with him, and I downloaded a “Learn to Run a 10k in 13 Weeks” training guide. And I started to run.

Actually, run is a strong word. I began to shuffle forward in a continuous motion. But this was no small thing. I started rising an hour earlier than normal to jog before the kids got up for school. My friends said, “Who are you, and what have you done with Carolyn?”

I’ve been shocked by how spiritual an activity exercise has turned out to be. When I am running I am uniquely awake and open; it’s not uncommon for me to wind up crying, laughing, praying, or praising. The neighbors must find this unsettling; I find it fascinating.

I suspect that my longstanding protest against materialism has made me susceptible to another time-honored heresy: Gnosticism, the belief that matter is inherently evil. Gnostics wondered how a perfect God could be defiled in imperfect human form. Gnosticism had to be struck down repeatedly in order to reach an orthodox understanding of the Incarnation: Jesus was fully God and fully human. The Word became flesh (John 1:14).

The Incarnation shows us that matter is not all there is. But it also shows us that matter matters. Jesus came a long way to take on our molecular structure. He pointed to other kinds of existence, telling his disciples, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about” (John 4:32). But he also fully inhabited our bodily reality, so much so that many of his miracles involved food, drink, physical healing, and even resurrection. One of his final earthly acts was to cook fish on the beach for his friends.

So maybe our bodies aren’t the cars that drive our souls to the altar. Maybe they are an integral part of what we lay on the altar, and are up for healing and holiness with the rest of us.

After all, Jesus called us to love God with our hearts, souls, minds, and strength. Just as his words disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed, they call the overactive to stillness and activate the overly still. They restore the soul to those who overemphasize the body, and redeem the body for those who focus only on the soul.

“The physical part of you is not some piece of property belonging to the spiritual part of you,” says The Message translation of 1 Corinthians 6:19-20. “God owns the whole works. So let people see God in and through your body”—even if that means shuffling forward in a continuous motion, one step at a time.

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

More Christianity Today articles by Carolyn Arends are available on our site, including:

Saying More Than We Can Say | Why the arts matter even during a recession. (June 22, 2009)

Hiding What They Seek | In my desire to be ‘seeker-friendly,’ I’m often guilty of concealing Jesus. (March 30, 2009)

There Goes the Neighborhood | Do I have to love my neighbor if he breaks the law? (January 21, 2009)

It’s hard to imagine any parent sitting through Orphan without looking away—or walking out. The story of a family whose adoption of an older child goes horribly, horribly awry doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to jeopardizing children, both the characters and the actors playing them.

Vera Farmiga (The Departed) and Peter Sarsgaard (The Mysteries of Pittsburgh) play Kate and John Coleman, a married couple who suffered a stillbirth with their third child. Kate, a recovering alcoholic, still grapples with her grief, but John is ready to move forward on adopting. During their visit to a girls’ home presided over by Sister Abigail (CCH Pounder), they find themselves smitten by Esther (Isabelle Fuhrmann), a nine-year-old Russian orphan with an archaic manner of dress and impeccable manners.

Esther’s homecoming isn’t as smooth as John and Kate would like. While their deaf daughter Maxine (Aryana Engineer) takes to her new sister immediately, older Daniel (Jimmy Bennett) thinks she’s weird. Kate and John chalk it up to the normal tensions after adoption, and work hard to make Esther feel welcome.

But questions are raised after a girl who bullied Esther ends up with a broken arm, claiming Esther pushed her off a play structure. Kate has her doubts, and a phone call with Sister Abigail brings up some troubling incidents from her past. It seems that no one knows much about Esther’s past, except that the last family who adopted her ended up dead in a house fire. Esther was the only survivor.

While Kate grows more and more suspicious, not to mention fearful for her other children, John becomes Esther’s champion. Their marriage grows fractured as old wounds rear their ugly heads, and Kate’s grip on reality comes under scrutiny—and then Sister Abigail ends up dead.

The plot of Orphan follows the classic “monster in the house” structure made famous in such movies as Single White Female and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, coupled with an evil kid straight out of The Bad Seed. There’s not much about the plot that surprises, apart from a twist that would’ve failed were it not for the skillful performances.

Orphan is a cerebral, moody, elegiac horror film that thankfully doesn’t pander to the torture p*rn crowd. For the most part, it’s well made, though director Jaume Collet-Serra (House of Wax) litters the film with creepy sneakups that lead to empty startles, and the lack of payoff grows tedious after awhile. Farmiga and Sarsgaard bring reality and humanity to their stock roles, and all three of the child actors are fantastic, particularly Fuhrmann.

However, the film’s treatment of the children is disturbing, to say the least. It’s hard to recall a recent film that’s been so graphic in presenting onscreen violence against children. It’s not uncommon to use children as pawns in a suspense film, but typically audience are spared seeing them actually come to harm. In Orphan, Collet-Serra shocks us with scene after scene where Danny and Maxine are in danger or actually harmed. It’s extremely hard to take.

Even more disturbing is what Collet-Serra requires of Fuhrmann, only 11 years old at the time of filming. It’s not that she’s unable to comprehend that she’s acting—she’s not going to turn into a sociopath just because she played one. But a late plot development requires that Fuhrmann and Sarsgaard play a scene with sexual overtones. It’s necessary to the plot, but Collet-Serra could’ve composed the scene with editing so that audiences filled in the blanks, rather than asking Fuhrmann to make acting choices that should be beyond an 11-year-old’s comprehension and experience. It bears mentioning that Fuhrmann also appeared in Hounddog, a much maligned film from Sundance 2007 where Dakota Fanning was filmed dancing suggestively in her underwear and asked to provide reaction shots for a date rape (that mercifully was composed the way this particular scene from Orphan should’ve been).

There has been a much-publicized outcry against Orphan on behalf of adoption advocacy groups, and it’s easy to understand why. However, the horror genre in film and literature has always plumbed the depths of our collective anxieties. Because film, unlike literature, is such a visually intense medium, these anxieties become more immediate and threatening, particularly when children are involved. Adoption shouldn’t be a taboo subject for exploration, because it does involve bringing an outsider into a family’s inner sanctum, and it seems unlikely that people will write off the whole concept just because of one film.

From the most horrific birth scene ever committed to film, to a drawn-out ending confrontation, Orphan is a mostly successful horror film. But because of the subject matter and filming style, only the toughest viewers will be able to stomach what comes in between. It’s sad to see such great performances in service of a film that mistakes gimmicky shock for elucidating terror.

Talk About It

Discussion starters

1. What responsibilities does a director have toward child actors?
2. Do you feel called by God to adopt? Why or why not?
3. How does Scripture use adoption to explain our relationship to God? How does God behave toward us when we act as Esther does?

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

Orphan is rated R for disturbing violent content, some sexuality and language. Strong sexual content includes one graphic sex scene and one implied sex scene. The children utter profanity, as do the adults. The violence is unflinching. The character of Esther carries a Bible, and is mocked as “Jesus freak”—though she does not ever identify herself as a Christian, mercifully.

Photos © Warner Bros. Pictures

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Last year, in my review of Journey to the Center of the Earth, I wrote:

Many of the more impressive scenes involve computer-generated backgrounds and other kinds of special effects, such as a sequence involving a loose bridge of levitating rocks that stretches across a deep, deep chasm. But there is wonder and awe to be had in some of the natural scenery, too. As Trevor, Sean and Hannah hike up an Icelandic volcano near the beginning of the film, we can see the other mountains and the landscape stretch for miles around them, and it’s almost enough to make you wonder what an epic, scenic film like, say, Lawrence of Arabia could have looked like if it had been produced in 3D.

I am happy to report that Jeffrey Wells now shares my curiosity.

It’s getting to the point where you could almost base a small theology course on Paul Bettany movies.

The actor has already played an albino assassin monk in The Da Vinci Code, a priest on the lam who joins a medieval morality-play troupe in The Reckoning, and a famous scientist who wrestles with his doubts in the upcoming biopic Creation, and he will soon star in the comic-book adaptation Priest as a man of the cloth who turns against the church to track down some vampires who have kidnapped his niece.

Right now, however, the religion-themed movie of his that’s getting all the attention is Legion, in which Bettany will play the machine-gun-toting archangel Michael; director Scott Stewart appeared with co-stars Bettany, Tyrese Gibson and others at the San Diego Comic-Con to promote the film yesterday, and they unveiled a new poster for the film and a few clips, besides.

The premise of this film is more than a little cheesy, not to mention theologically suspect. As Variety put it last year:

Scripted by Stewart and Peter Schink, the thriller casts Bettany as the archangel Michael, the only one standing between mankind and an apocalypse, after God loses faith in humanity. Man’s lone hope rests with a group of strangers who must deliver a baby they realize is Christ in his second coming.

And whereas the word “Legion” typically brings to mind the many demons who possessed a single man in Jesus’ day (Mark 5:9; Luke 8:30), an even earlier story from Variety indicates that this movie is called Legion because “God loses faith in humanity and sends his legion of angels to wipe out the human race for the second time.”

And so, FilmoFilia indicates that one of the villains against whom Michael does battle will apparently be the archangel Gabriel, played here by Kevin Durand. (Durand would not be the first actor to play Gabriel as a bad guy; Christopher Walken did it in The Prophecy and its sequels, as did Tilda Swinton in Constantine.)

Personally, I can sort-of handle a movie that imagines what might happen if Gabriel or one of the other “good” angels turns bad. I’m not very keen on the idea, for the same reason I wouldn’t be very keen on the idea of movies that depict my friends or family members as bad guys; if we really believe that Gabriel exists and plays a role in our lives, then we can’t just treat him as another mythical figure to re-invent as we will. But a part of me appreciates how the shock of seeing Gabriel as a villain can remind us of what it must have been like when Lucifer turned against God.

No, there is something else that bugs me about this movie’s premise. Two things, actually.

First, the idea that God would lose faith in humanity and try to wipe us out again. In the other films where Gabriel has turned into a bad guy, he has done so in rebellion against God. But here, it seems that he is working on God’s behalf, in which case God himself would seem to be a bad guy, too; at any rate, the heroic Michael, by fighting Gabriel and all the other angels, would ultimately be fighting against God himself.

What makes this movie’s premise even more puzzling is the idea that Christ is already here, inside a woman’s womb. Why would the God of this film try to wipe out humanity so soon after sending his Son back to Earth?

And that brings me to my second beef with this movie’s premise, namely the idea that the Second Coming will be just like the first, with Jesus being born as a baby, etc. Seriously, it never ceases to amaze me how many secular apocalyptic films pursue this line of thought, from Omen III: The Final Conflict to Bless the Child. It completely misses the point of what the Second Coming is all about. It’s not going to be a mere reincarnation.

What makes this movie even more of a curiosity is that it features at least two actors who have been rather open about their own Christian faith. Dennis Quaid spoke to us a few years ago about his spiritual journey (he discussed it at the time with Beliefnet, too); and Doug Jones has talked about how he almost turned down the part of Abe Sapien in Hellboy until he read the script and realized how it “nurtured and challenged” his faith. I’d be curious to know what appealed to them about this script.

(Well, okay, Jones, at least, did discuss this point at Comic-Con yesterday, as per the video clip to the right; he says the film explores the possibility that mankind might be “in a place today that would bring about another flood, as in the days of Noah.” Make of that what you will.)

Finally, Charles S. Dutton is playing a character named Percy Walker. That has to be some kind of strange in-joke.

A new movie about former gang member Nicky Cruz, whose story was told in The Cross and the Switchblade (the book and the 1970 film starring Pat Boone and Erik Estrada), is on track for release next summer.

Run Baby Run, with a $12 million budget, will be intended for mainstream audiences, not just Christians, David Urabe, president of Convolo Productions, told the Colorado Springs Gazette.

Cruz told The Gazette that it won’t be a “cheesy” Christian movie.

> Soldiers of Conscience, a documentary about soldiers who are reluctant to shoot to kill (some because of their Christian faith), has been nominated for an Emmy. We wrote about the film last year.

> Cloud Ten Pictures, the studio that made all the Left Behind movies, announces it will be releasing the DVD version of The River Within in November. The press release says the film “explores relationships between father and son, pastor and congregant, and God and man; and broaches head-on the age-old human dilemma of discerning God’s plan for each of us.”

More than 4,000 people attended John Hagee’s Night to Honor Israel dinner in Washington D.C. earlier this week, according to Erick Stakelbeck’s report for CBN news. Speakers at the Christians United for Israel (CUFI) event included Senator Joseph Lieberman, Fred Barnes, Gary Bauer, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (via satellite).

This year, CUFI delegates will ask their representatives on the hill to support Israel by respecting the government’s decisions, and to support further legislative sanctions against Iran. Another topic of concern to CUFI and its pro-Israel members is America’s foreign policy toward Israel undergo under the new administration. Hagee told Dan Gilgoff:

I have some concerns about President Obama’s approach to peacemaking. He may believe that by securing concessions from Israel he will get leverage with which to win reciprocal concessions from the Arabs down the road. Yet I do not believe that the history of Arab-Israeli peacemaking to date supports this view.

Conservative Christian organizations that are pro-Israel might wield the political pressure Netanyahu is counting on in ongoing Middle East peace negotiations, Time reports:

Netanyahu will get strong political support within Israel for standing up to Washington on Jerusalem (as he has done by resisting pressure for a settlement freeze), and he expects that the more symbolically powerful issue of the Holy City will win him support in the U.S. from Jewish leaders and Christian conservatives. In introducing Netanyahu via a video link at the annual conference of his Christians United for Israel group, arch-conservative Pastor John Hagee promised the support of 50 million Christians for “Israel’s sovereign right to grow and develop the settlements of Israel as you see fit and not yield to the pressure of the United States government.”

The problem facing Obama is that pressing for a two-state solution has put him at odds with a reluctant Israeli government that has now chosen the emotive issue of Jerusalem as the test of how far he’s willing to go.

Other Christian leaders have taken a different approach to supporting Israel. A 2007 letter to President Bush signed by 34 Evangelical leaders took a different approach to Middle East peace by expressing support of a two-state solution and stated that “both Israelis and Palestinians have legitimate rights stretching back for millennia to the lands of Israel/Palestine.”

One could become wistful about the time in history when marriage was a settled affair, when everyone agreed on what it was, when no nation on the planet would have entertained the idea of legalizing same-sex marriage. But wistfulness is usually reserved for times long ago and places far away—not for a state of affairs that existed less than a decade ago.

In December 2000, the Dutch parliament became the first to pass legislation that gave same-sex couples the right to marry, divorce, and adopt children. On April 1 of the following year, the mayor of Amsterdam officiated, for the first time in human history, at the ceremonies of the first four gay couples. In the ensuing eight years, Belgium (2003), Spain (2005), Canada (2005), South Africa (2006), and Norway (2008) followed the Netherlands’ lead, and Sweden may now not be far behind.

While we shake our heads at those libertine Dutch, traditional marriage was challenged in the U.S. even earlier, in 1993, when the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that the state’s prohibition of same-sex marriages amounted to discrimination on the basis of sex. For the first time in U.S. history, a state supreme-court ruling suggested that gay couples may have the right to marry.

Social conservatives were galvanized into action and enacted a series of protective measures. Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act (doma) in 1996. Three states soon adopted constitutional same-sex marriage bans: Alaska (1998), Nebraska (2000), and Nevada (2000).And in a few years, 42 states enacted statutes similar to doma (although three of those bans have since been overturned).

Gay marriage advocacy was given new life with Massachusetts’s historic 2003 high court ruling, which said that it was unconstitutional to deny same-sex couples the right to marry. It became clear that statutory bans were not enough; judges could throw out the laws if they felt the bans violated state constitutional rights. Over the next three years, voters in 23 states immediately amended their constitutions to limit marriage to heterosexuals.

Since then, the issue has ebbed and flowed, like trench warfare, with each side gaining only yards of territory with each new legislative or judicial assault. When the battle of Election 2008 had ended, it appeared that social conservatives had the momentum when constitutional amendments banning gay marriages passed in three more states.

But seemingly out of nowhere, gay marriage advocates have won stunning judicial, legislative, and social victories. Connecticut began granting marriage certificates to spouses of the same gender in November 2008. In April 2009, Iowa’s high court ruled that banning gay marriages was unconstitutional, and gay couples began lining up at Iowa court houses.The Vermont legislature legalized gay marriage that same month, while Maine and New Hampshire legalized gay marriage in May.

All the while, Rick Warren and Miss USA contestant Carrie Prejean were hit hard for their public statements against gay marriage. To be against gay marriage now carries a social stigma. A recent poll of Massachusetts residents revealed that 36 percent of voters who oppose gay marriage agreed with the statement, “If you speak out against gay marriage in Massachusetts you really have to watch your back because some people may try to hurt you.”

In short, traditional Christians feel like the armored tank of history is rolling over them, crushing traditional marriage under its iron treads, impervious to argument, the ballot box, or judicial logic. Even more disheartening has been to witness how, in each mainline denomination, and even in some evangelical seminaries, fellow Christians lobby hard for gay marriage.

The depressing feeling of inevitability is precisely what advocates of gay marriage want to instill in their opponents. But relying as many do on historical determinism—”Side with us because we’re going to win”—suggests that gay marriage advocates have run out of arguments. It also demonstrates historical amnesia. Arguments from historical inevitability have often been assumed by millions—to take two examples, the inevitability of Communism and the death of religion—and yet have proven to be wrong.

Still, we are at our wits’ ends about what to say next, impervious as the gay marriage juggernaut is. We know biblically and instinctively that “male and female he created them,” and that these complementary sexual beings are designed to become one flesh. We know that this spiritual instinct and biblical argument will not make much headway in the public square. So what do we say?

We can make secular arguments, of course, but the more we look at the strongest secular arguments we can muster, the more those arguments cut two ways. And one of the edges of those arguments will make evangelicals bleed, I’m afraid.

The Nonreligious Case

One way to get at the heart of an argument is to listen to allies who take the opposite view on this issue. There are some social conservatives, for example, who argue for gay marriage on conservative grounds.

Take The Atlantic’s foremost blogger, Andrew Sullivan, a Roman Catholic. He also happens to be gay, but his argument does not rest on his sexual preference. His case, as he asserted in a 2003 Time essay, is “an eminently conservative one—in fact, almost an emblem of ‘compassionate conservatism.'” He says the institution of marriage fosters responsibility, commitment, and the domestication of unruly men. Thus, “bringing gay men and women into this institution will surely change the gay subculture in subtle but profoundly conservative ways.” Growing up gay, he realized he would never have a family, and that it’s “the weddings and relationships and holidays that give families structure and meaning.” And thus, “when I looked forward, I saw nothing but emptiness and loneliness. No wonder it was hard to connect sex with love and commitment,” Sullivan wrote.

Or take the argument from the street, so to speak, from a common blogger in Algonquin, Illinois. He is a heterosexual who lives with a woman, and a political conservative who supports legalizing gay marriage. He says we must accept the fact that American society has moved on and “embraced different ways people choose to live and love.” And “when you take away all the legalisms, the moral quotient, the religious implications, and the needs of society,” he writes, “what we are left with is nothing more than how people choose to define their relationships where they feel love for another human being.”

These two writers—one from the center of American culture and the other from the heartland—summarize a privatized view of marriage. Marriage is about the fulfillment of the two people involved. It will help them to mature as human beings and to express more deeply their love for one another.

Marriage is inescapably connected to children and thus family, and family is inescapably connected to society.

This, of course, strikes at the heart of how Christians have traditionally understood marriage. David Blankenhorn, president of the New York–based Institute for American Values and author of The Future of Marriage, argued this in a nonreligious way in a September 2008 Los Angeles Times op-ed. There is one constant in the constantly evolving understanding of marriage, he says: “In all societies, marriage shapes the rights and obligations of parenthood. Among us humans, the scholars report, marriage is not primarily a license to have sex. Nor is it primarily a license to receive benefits or social recognition. It is primarily a license to have children.”

Further, he says, “Marriage says to a child: The man and the woman whose sexual union made you will also be there to love and raise you. Marriage says to society as a whole: For every child born, there is a recognized mother and a father, accountable to the child and to each other.”

The argument is nuanced, and goes on to take into account heterosexual couples who will not or cannot have children. But he grounds marriage not in two people, but in two communities: the family and the state.

McGill University law professor Margaret Somerville, in a 2003 brief before Canada’s Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, argued in much the same way. She says that to form a society, we must create “a societal-cultural paradigm.” This is a constellation of “values, principles, attitudes, beliefs, and myths” by which a society finds value and meaning, both individually and collectively.

“Reproduction is the fundamental occurrence on which, ultimately, the future of human life depends,” she says. “That is the primary reason why marriage is important to society.” Thus, it is crucial that societies protect marriage as a fact and as a symbol, as that institution that fosters human life, doing so in the context of family and society. “Even if a particular man and woman cannot or do not want to have a child, their getting married does not damage this general symbolism.”

Again, the argument is involved and nuanced. Both Blankenhorn and Somerville ground marriage in something larger than two selves who wish to find fulfillment. Marriage is inescapably connected to children and thus family, and family is inescapably connected to society.

In a highly individualistic culture, this argument swims upstream, but conservative Christians recognize that it corresponds to their basic theological instincts. The narcissism of mutual self-fulfillment will never be a solid foundation for a particular marriage, let alone for the most fundamental institution in society. This is an argument we can press publicly as the opportunity arises.

We’ll have to press it humbly, however, because as it turns out, we are very much complicit in the unrighteousness we decry.

Evangelical individualism

The thrust of the pro-gay-marriage argument rests on the assumption that the happiness of the individual is paramount, and that the state’s responsibility is to protect the rights of individuals to pursue whatever they think will make them happy, as long as no one gets hurt. The irony of radical individualism is that it will eventually hurt somebody. In practice, the happiness of one individual always runs into the happiness of another, and then only the strong survive. The weaker individual is no longer treated as fully human, and thus his or her right to happiness is compromised. In our nation, we see this in the way we treat individuals at both ends of life, in how expendable they are if they interrupt the happiness of the fully functioning—take the increasing acceptance of euthanasia, and the on-the-ground fact of abortions in the thousands every day.

Evangelicals are sensitive to this reality, but are less aware of how much we proactively participate in the culture of individualism. While stopping short of abortion, we have not given much thought to our easy acceptance of artificial contraception. I’m not arguing for or against contraception here, only pointing to the reality that contraception has separated sex from procreation. That, in turn, has prompted most couples, evangelicals included, to think that sex is first and foremost a fulfilling psychological and physical experience, that a couple has a right to enjoy themselves for a few years before they settle down to family life.

In essence, we have already redefined marriage as an institution designed for personal happiness. We see ancillary evidence of this at the other end of marriage: Though it is a difficult thing to measure, the rate at which evangelicals divorce is hard to distinguish from the larger culture’s, and the list of reasons for divorce seems no different: “We grew apart.” “We no longer met each other’s needs.” “Irreconcilable differences.” The language of divorce is usually about the lack of self-fulfillment.

Add to that our penchant for changing churches, usually because “I just wasn’t being fed,” as well as our need to test every church and pastor against our personal reading of the Bible—well, you can see why Protestants have managed in 500 years to create out of two traditions (Orthodox and Catholic) some 30,000 denominations. While the Baptists are known for their doctrine of “soul competency,” a version of the doctrine is woven into the fabric of broader evangelicalism, though it has morphed into sole competency. Thus, the death of mutual accountability and church discipline in our movement. Thus, the exaltation of worship in which the personal experience of the worshiper so often becomes more important than the object of worship. Thus, the continual proliferation of churches, parachurches, and movements because the group we belong to just doesn’t do it the way we think “the Lord is leading me” to do it.

We are, of all Christian traditions, the most individualistic. This individual emphasis has flourished in different ways and in different settings, and often for the good. It has challenged moribund religion (Reformation), prompted revival (Great Awakenings), ministered to the urban poor (Salvation Army), abolished slavery (William Wilberforce), and led to explosive worldwide church growth (Pentecostalism). But it is individualism nonetheless, and it cuts right to the heart of one of our best arguments against gay marriage.

We cannot very well argue for the sanctity of marriage as a crucial social institution while we blithely go about divorcing and approving of remarriage at a rate that destabilizes marriage. We cannot say that an institution, like the state, has a perfect right to insist on certain values and behavior from its citizens while we refuse to submit to denominational or local church authority. We cannot tell gay couples that marriage is about something much larger than self-fulfillment when we, like the rest of heterosexual culture, delay marriage until we can experience life, and delay having children until we can enjoy each other for a few years.

In short, we have been perfect hypocrites on this issue. Until we admit that, and take steps to amend our ways, our cries of alarm about gay marriage will echo off into oblivion.

Witnesses to Another

This does not mean we should stop fighting initiatives that would legalize gay marriage. Gay marriage is simply a bad idea, whether one is religious or not. But it’s bad not only because of what it will do to the social fabric, but because of what it signals has already happened to our social fabric. We are a culture of radical individualists, and gay marriage does nothing but put an exclamation point on that fact. We should fight it, because it will only make a bad situation worse.

That being said, we are as compromised as the next gay couple when it comes to radical individualism. This means that alongside our call to maintain traditional marriage, we should “bewail our manifold sins and wickedness,” as the Book of Common Prayer puts it. We should acknowledge how much Protestant culture has shaped American culture, how much we’ve collaborated in the flowering of individualism, and how we continue to do so even when the flower has become a weed that is choking off life.

We well may lose the marriage war. But we are called into the battle not because we are promised victory, but because we’re called to be witnesses of a greater battle. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has famously said that “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts.” In our time and place, it is a battle with the original temptation: to imagine we are gods, captains of our own souls and masters of our fate—a habitual unwillingness to submit to anything bigger than the self.

As we contend with gay marriage proponents, then, we contend as both prophets and penitents. Like Isaiah, we can announce to our culture the poisonous fruit of immorality, while saying, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips” (Isa. 6:5, esv). Like Paul, we can forthrightly warn others of the horrific consequences of sin, but in the next breath acknowledge that we must admit we are “the chief of sinners” (1 Tim. 1:15).

What we bring to the public table, then, is not our righteousness or even our humility. We come in the name of the One who came into the world to save sinners of all political and social persuasions. We raise our voices on behalf of righteousness not in a way calculated to win the culture—for sometimes we will, sometimes we won’t—but as witnesses to the only Righteous One. We live in a culture that by all accounts is descending into darkness, and our job is to reflect the light of Christ. We speak for what he says is right, using the lingua franca of the culture to argue that as best we can, using the political and social instruments at our disposal to the best of our ability, acknowledging our own complicity in the sins we decry, and pointing to the One who must save us all.

Mark Galli is senior managing editor of Christianity Today. He is author of A Great and Terrible Love: A Spiritual Journey into the Attributes of God (Baker).

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

Christianity Today has a special section about Same-Sex Marriage on our site, including:

Iowa Churches: We Need to Be Clear on Same-Sex Marriage | But pastors disagree whether last week’s court decision should mean more activism on the issue. (April 14, 2009)

Looking for a ‘Serious’ Conversation | The Newsweek religious case for gay marriage is mostly an attempt to marginalize the opposition. (December 9, 2008)

Up for Debate | Publicly arguing for traditional marriage is worth it even if I don’t change many minds. (December 8, 2008)

Over the last decade or so, a movement has been gaining a voice in Christian ministry literature. It’s known by several names–the micro church, organic church, simple church. Some micro churches are also house churches, but not all of them are. These terms aren’t necessarily all synonymous. But I’ve found that it takes a fairly careful observer to be able to distinguish significant differences between them. For our purposes right now, let’s assume they are roughly the same.

Micro/simple/organic churches all have a few characteristics in common. They are intentionally streamlined in organization. They don’t run programs, they probably don’t have paid staff, and they place much less emphasis on a Sunday morning service than more traditional churches do. Philosophically, they reject the idea of professional clergy in favor of a thoroughgoing commitment to the priesthood of all believers. In most cases, the motivation for staying simple (or organic) is ease of multiplication. It’s difficult to duplicate and plant a church that requires a paid pastor, gifted worship team, dedicated facility, and programs for outreach. But if a congregation is led by lay people, focused on discipleship and Bible study, and less concerned with professional worship experiences, it can easily be multiplied.

There are two major theological and/or philosophical motivations for micro churches.

The first is the desire to be “missional.” The term “missional” has come to mean a lot of things. But for micro churches, the emphasis tends to be that these congregations put the mission of the church before the institution to such an extent that they totally neglect the institution. For proponents of micro ministry, paid staff, programs, mortgages, and utility bills are unnecessary obstacles to fulfilling the Great Commission. So they jettison them. Related to this is the conviction that simple churches are easier to reproduce–and more smaller churches are better positioned to reach the lost than fewer larger ones. Neil Cole, founder of Church Multiplication Associates, is a leading spokesman in this part of the movement. (http://www.cmaresources.org/)

The second major impulse for many micro ministries is the conviction that the institutional church–with its paid clergy and programs and buildings–is a perversion of the first-century church. Many folks are looking for a more pristine church experience stripped of the baggage of tradition and polity and church politics. They find this original expression in the micro church. Frank Viola is an outspoken proponent of this way of thinking. (http://www.ptmin.org/)

Finally, many people see in micro churches a greater potential for more people to be involved in ministry. The old saying goes that 20 percent of the congregation does 80 percent of the ministry. The assumption in micro congregations is that there may be fewer people, but all of them are actively and intimately engaged in the work of the church. In other words, the micro methodology eliminates (or at least reduces the number of) passive observers in the church. Alan Hirsch is an articulate defender of this slice of the micro movement. (http://www.theforgottenways.org/)

There’s nothing wrong with G-Force that John Lasseter couldn’t fix.

For that matter, the Pixar honcho, now head of Walt Disney Animation Studios, has already done this story right: It was called Bolt, and it was the first theatrical release from Disney Animation under Lasseter’s watch (he also produced). If you missed Bolt in theaters last fall, it’s well worth catching on DVD—particularly as a counterpoint to G-Force, which is pretty much the film that Bolt could have been if it were Disney as usual … which, thanks at least in part to Lasseter’s absence, it wasn’t.

Consider first the similarities. G-Force and Bolt are both 3-D family action-comedies centered on elite, high-tech, computer-animated animal agents. In both films, the agents are driven off the reservation by extenuating circ*mstances, where they team up with civilian animals (including a colorful pet hamster/gerbil type whose ancestry is said to include more ferocious species), face up to humbling discoveries regarding their belief in their own high-tech specialness, and ultimately decide that what really matters is the ones they love.

Both G-Force and Bolt feature hamster balls in high-octane action, flashy pyrotechnics and stereotyped 007-style villains who turn out to be not what they seem. Both are also first-time feature films from directors with no more than a single short to their names.

Yep, practically the same movie, with one tiny, crucial difference: In G-Force, the computer-animated heroes share the screen with live-action human beings in a real-world setting. Which means that G-Force is from Walt Disney Pictures, not Walt Disney Animation Studios. Which means Lasseter had nothing to do with it. In fact, where Bolt was produced by Lasseter, G-Force was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer—whose record, to be fair, does include a decent family film or two (Pirates of the Caribbean, National Treasure) as well as a lot of trashy detritus (Kangaroo Jack, Bad Boys II, Bad Company, Coyote Ugly).

So while Bolt had, among other things, (a) actual characters you care about and relationships that matter, (b) a well-constructed story with real dramatic beats and emotional hooks, (c) a wittily self-aware spin on the premise of animal super-agents, and (d) slang and speech mannerisms that weren’t just supposed to be generically hip but created a sense of place, from NY to LA, G-Force has none of these things.

Instead, we get (a) generic stereotypes (the serious leader, the hootchie-mama Latina, the hip-hop color character, etc.), (b) a story that plays like James Bond on nitrous oxide, with stuff blowing up good without the slightest dramatic or emotional resonance, and a resolution that makes no sense whatsoever, and (c) good old reliable potty humor, including an explosion generated by breaking wind into some sort of incendiary mechanism.

The premise: Ben (The Hangover‘s Zach Galifianakis doing Rick Moranis duty) and his irrelevant assistant Marcie (wasted Kelli Garner of Lars and the Real Girl) are federally funded researchers charged with developing a government intelligence program using animals. Their team consists of three commando guinea pigs—Darwin (Sam Rockwell), Juarez (Penelope Cruz) and Blaster (Tracy Morgan)—as well as a computer-whiz mole named Speckles (unrecognizable vocal stylings from Nic Cage) and a camera-carrying housefly named Mooch (Dee Bradley Baker, probably equally unrecognizable).

The plot: A wealthy technology mogul named Saber (Bill Nighy), whose empire includes everything from telephones to coffee makers, is about to activate dormant microchips in every appliance he has manufactured and sold—supposedly to enable the appliances to, I don’t know, coordinate household needs or something, but apparently communication among Saber products is going to be on a larger scale. You don’t suppose this would generate any privacy concerns, do you? (Ack!I started thinking. Better nip that in the bud.)

In fact, this already alarming scheme masks an even more alarming scheme, which is to sell large quantities of plush guinea pigs with commando gear to young children—oops, sorry, I gave it away! What I meant to say was that Darwin and company suspect that the microchips in Saber’s products will be doing a lot more than putting new batteries and light bulbs on the shopping list, or whatever.

The plot is no sillier than the schemes of Bolt‘s evil Dr. Calico—except that Dr. Calico was a fictional character, and Bolt and his beloved Penny were actors on a TV show (even though Bolt didn’t know it).

In G-Force, a civilian guinea pig named Hurley (Jon Favreau) is the only one who seems to realize how silly the whole thing is. When Darwin tries to explain that they’re not circus animals, but genetically engineered animal agents, Hurley’s response is, “Oh, you’re from Hollywood!” No, that was Bolt. The guinea pigs are seriously serious.

Silliness, I can do. But even so there has to be some consistency. G-Force opens with a big set piece in which the team goes on an unauthorized op to prove they can infiltrate the bad guy’s inner sanctum and steal his encrypted files—yet when it seems they got the wrong file, the feds don’t just slap them for breaking the rules, they shut them down completely. But then it turns out (vague spoiler warning) that the G-Force program nearly destroyed the world—literally if there were no G-Force, there would have been no threat in the first place—yet instead of being seriously shut down, they all receive commendations and badges. Huh?

Director Hoyt Yeatman does one thing right: He makes the movie look interesting in 3-D, for example framing a lot of shots with transparent objects in the foreground in front of other stuff in the background. Some of the eye candy in the big action scenes is reasonably diverting. What Yeatman doesn’t do is eke any heart-tugging from the movie’s would-be big moments, like a limp “You mean it was all a lie?” scene.

Parents may be interested to know that the movie tie-in toys are equipped with sound and movement as well as gear. Will the toy Blaster say things like “Pimp my ride!” and “That was off the hizook!” like he does in the movie? Will the toy Juarez riff on the puss*cat Dolls line “Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me”? Will the toy Darwin say “Yippie kay yay, coffee-maker!”? There’s a click moment waiting to happen in another ten or fifteen years (hopefully not before that).

A plush Darwin or Juarez will set you back about $18 (with tax). You can pick up Bolton DVD for about $13. I’m just saying.

Talk About It

Discussion starters

1. Why does Ben lie to his team? Is it ever okay to lie? Is Ben’s lie okay or not okay? Does it even make sense?
2. Is there a real “bad guy” in the story? Is Saber a bad guy? Is his mystery helper? How about the ones the mystery helper has a grudge against?

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

G-Force is rated PG for mild action (explosions, car chases, robotic fight scenes and such) and rude humor (lines like “I hate it when my fly is down!”, “Get your butt out of my face!”, as well as a sort of pyrotechnic flatulence scene). There are a couple of scenes in which a kid plays rough with a guinea pig (flipping him through the air toward a snake cage; driving him around in a radio-controlled toy car). There’s also some dialogue about which of the two male guinea pigs Juarez likes or is into and which likes or is into her.

Photos © Walt Disney Pictures

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

It takes a certain amount of guts—or maybe just cluelessness—to give a movie a title like The Ugly Truth. If the movie is even remotely disappointing, critics and audiences alike are going to make obvious wisecracks along the lines of, “It’s ugly, and that’s the truth.” As it happens, such dismissals are more than appropriate here. Despite the fact that it features a couple of actors who have proven their worth as romantic leads, The Ugly Truth is a badly botched film on several levels, thanks in no small part to an awful script.

Where to begin? Well, let’s start with the uncanny coincidences that get the movie going.

Katherine Heigl, who played an up-and-coming celebrity interviewer in Knocked Up, now plays Abby Richter, an uptight TV producer whose news program has slipped in the ratings big-time. Abby also hasn’t had a boyfriend in ages, and she seems oblivious to the possibility that her control-freak ways might be scaring away the few men that she does meet. (She not only runs background checks on these guys; she discusses this with them on the first date.) One night, before going to bed, her cat steps on the remote control and Abby happens to catch the tail end of a phone-in talk show hosted by Mike Chadway (Gerard Butler), a boorish bloke who says all men are pigs and women should get used to that fact—oh, and if any female caller doesn’t have a man in her life, Mike figures she’s probably ugly.

Ticked off by these statements, Abby phones in to complain, but Mike’s confident rebuttals just make her more upset. And then, the next day, Abby goes to work and discovers that, as chance would have it, her bosses have already hired Mike to join their morning news show—because boorish men behaving badly should have just as much appeal when audience members are getting up and going to work as they do when frat boys and lonely people of all genders are staying up late into the wee hours of the morning, right?

Since Abby had phoned Mike’s show anonymously, she lets him know that it was she who called in the night before, and so the head-butting between them resumes. But then, miracle of miracles, no sooner has Mike joined her workplace, full of lessons on what men and women are “really” like, than Abby meets her hunky new neighbor Colin (Eric Winter), and she dangles him in front of Mike as an example of how female fantasies really can come true. There’s just one slight problem: Abby hasn’t actually dated the guy yet. So she and Mike make a deal: He will teach her how to behave the way he thinks a woman ought to behave, and if this helps her to hook up with Colin, then he, Mike, will quit his job.

That’s all contrived enough as it is. But if it were only the first half-hour that were this phony—if the set-up created a space in which genuinely funny character moments could take place—the movie would at least be somewhat bearable. As it is, the film is simply never even remotely believable, and you never get the sense that anyone involved has tried to think through the characters and how they would behave if they were real people.

You see this, for example, in the way Mike perpetually charges through his TV appearances in ways that catch his producers off-guard, whether he’s diagnosing the problem with his married co-hosts’ sex life or walking outside the studio where—surprise!—a couple of women are wrestling in a pool full of Jell-O right outside the door. (Did no one at the station notice this before the show went live? Does no one there ever think to keep an eye on Mike and whatever stunts he might be setting up?) You also see it in the way that Abby never even thinks to tell Colin where she is staying, after she cancels their big weekend date to go out of town on assignment. By this point, the film has established that Abby is desperate for sex—she and Colin were planning to do it for the first time that weekend—and the film has also established that Colin doesn’t mind tagging along when last-minute changes of plan at work interfere with their dating life. So why wouldn’t Abby at least stay in touch with him?

Well, there is a reason for that last little lapse, but it has nothing to do with the characters and everything to do with the screenwriters moving bits of plot around so that they can crank out another highly predictable, highly formulaic “romantic comedy.” And that, in turn, requires both Abby and Mike to undergo changes of heart that come out of nowhere and ring very false the moment they transpire. (The script is credited to Nicole Eastman, Karen McCullah Lutz, and Kirsten Smith, the latter two of whom had much more success with 10 Things I Hate about You and the original Legally Blonde. Heck, even their script for The House Bunny was more inspired than this—and that’s saying something.)

To their credit, the writers do come up with the occasional good idea; they just don’t do anything interesting with them. Case in point: Mike lives with his sister and her son, and he calls himself “the only father figure” the boy has. This is an intriguing bit of character development, and it would be interesting to know what Mike’s sister makes of his coarse, sexist rants on TV—let alone what she makes of the idea that he is some sort of role model for her son. But the movie never follows up on this; instead, the writers seems to have introduced these characters simply because being “good with kids” will make Mike more attractive to Abby, no matter how crude his behavior is in other ways.

As if the contrived premise and the unbelievable characters weren’t enough, the movie is also saddled with consistently coarse dialogue. Not coarse in the sense of four-letter words, though there are a handful of those, but coarse in the sense that the conversations frequently turn to certain body parts and the things that are done with them. This may not be the most extreme film in the world, as far as that goes, but the prominence of such below-the-belt humor—combined with the complete absence of wit or nuance—is quite striking in a genre that is supposed to be all about falling in love. Audiences, like people, need to be seduced, but this film goes the caveman route and clubs us over the head.

In a way, the film is, itself, a perfect embodiment of Mike’s philosophy, albeit translated to a different forum. One of the first things Mike tells us is, “Men are simple.” In other words, he would have us believe that men just want sex, and that they want it as animalistically as possible. (No candlelight dinners, please!) Likewise, the makers of The Ugly Truth seem to think that audiences are simple. They would have us believe that audiences just want jokes and hints of sexuality, and that they want those things as dumb and crass as possible. Mike’s message to women is that men just want to get into their pants, and the studio’s message to the ticket-buying audience is that it just wants to get into their wallets. Don’t let them.

Talk About It

Discussion starters

1. Mike justifies all the coarse things he says by saying that he is telling “the truth.” Is he right? Even if he is, would that justify the things he says or the way he says them?
2. Abby has a “checklist” of things that she is looking for in a lover. Is it wise to have such a list before you have met someone? How flexible should such “checklists” be? What would God have us look for in a potential mate?
3. Are men and women necessarily as different as Mike says, and as the opening titles suggest? Are men never motivated by their hearts, or women by their bodies?
4. Why do you think the stereotypes advocated by Mike persist? Does the film ever challenge them in the end? Who “wins” the argument in the end: Mike or Abby? Both? Neither?

The Family Corner

For parents to consider

The Ugly Truth is rated R for sexual content (a man’s naked rear end, a woman experiences an org*sm in public when a boy finds the remote control for her vibrating underwear, a man and woman are shown in bed together) and language (about a dozen four-letter words, and much discussion of male and female body parts and what people do with them).

Photos © Columbia Pictures

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