Whew! There are too many things to even discuss. Check Colson recently wrote a similar article about art + agenda:http://www.breakpoint.org/commentaries/13897-art-for-governments-sake

The thing is that I think every artist has a definitely world view and this is conveyed through their art forms, its not always a blatant agenda per se.. but it is there if we look for it.

I read this and I hear a person making a movie who’s making the movie she and her backers and production company want to make. They’re not as interested in pleasing any one segment of the audience (which is all critics are) as they are in making their movie and saying what they want to say with it. Great art and literature does not always raise questions. Sometimes it offers possible answers as well.

“Facing the Giants,” “Fireproof,” and such aren’t great or even very good movies; they’re maybe average at some of their high spots.. Their message is delivered with little, if any subtlety. They’re not raising questions, they’re not even following Emily Dickinson’s advice to “tell all the truth, but tell it slant.” I haven’t seen “Letters to God,” so I can’t say if it follows this path or another one. We can be upset with movies that lack subtlety or are smack-you-over-the-head blunt with their message, but *every* movie makes some statement. Even the ones that raise questions make the statement “Well, we don’t know what the answer is to X, but we think trying to figure it out is worth the journey.” It may be much more nuanced and reflective than other statements, but the difference is in degree, rather than kind.

I wouldn’t put words in Ms. Dawson’s mouth, but I wonder if one of the reasons she and people like her “aren’t concerned with film critics” is because once too often, they’ve been greeted with sneers and snark like “tried to remain calm, tried to avoid R-rated language” being used by people who discuss their work, even by people of their own faith.

Not a direct quote, I know, but this makes it sound like you think these movies might somehow become good if they we shown in church. I don’t suppose that’s what you were going for. It also gives the impression that a good sermon doesn’t have to aspire to anything more than these movies do.

Are sermons and art really two totally separate categories? Such a dichotomy (sermons have a viewpoint and deliver a message/art has depth and a sense of mystery) could be one reason why there are so many bad sermons in the world. It seems your complaint is not about movies that want to be sermons, but about preachy moralizing in general. Preachiness is just as bad in church as it is in the theater.

But sermons, at their best, can be works of art, just as a profound movie can be a type of sermon. You refer to great Christian art of the past, much of which embodied the Church’s message. (e.g. iconography became a visual sermon to those who couldn’t read. Is it then bad art?) Unfortunately, many parts of the church have lost a sense of the mysterious, and a sense of artfulness in its mission. These losses came well before the marketing ploy of “Christian” movies was ever hatched.