Dr Paul Allen

The “Christian villain” trope is nothing new in Hollywood. From sociopathic Christian killers (The Night of the Hunter, Se7en) to prudish, sexually repressed fundamentalists (Footloose, Carrie, The Virgin Suicides) to blood-sucking vampire priests (Midnight Mass), vengeful church ladies (Mrs. Carmody in The Mist), and Bible-toting tyrants (Warden Norton in The Shawshank Redemption), loathsome Christian baddies are everywhere in Hollywood and have been for some time. We can understandably feel defensive about how Hollywood depicts Christians (heavily weighted toward the negative). But rather than simply shouting “Unfair stereotype!” we ought to consider the nature of the critiques. How are Hollywood’s narratives expressing the larger culture’s angst and grievances about Christianity? What might we learn from this about the obstacles we face in evangelism and apologetics? To that end, let’s look at three 2022 films—The Whale, The Wonder, and Women Talking—that wrestle with faith and depi...

Everybody’s been talking about Aaron Renn’s “Three Worlds of Evangelicalism” thesis as well as the various uses to which it’s been put by folks like James Wood and others.  The nutshell is that in the pre-1994 U.S., we lived in a “positive world” where being a Christian was a net social positive; post-94-2015ish, it was a “neutral world” where it was, well, a social status neutral. Now, post-2015, we live in a “negative world” where, again, obviously, it’s a social negative. I won’t rehash everything because if you’re reading this, I’m going to assume you’re up on things. In a perhaps predictable “third way” fashion, I’ve been of a both/and, or “this side has a point, but also so do they over here” mindset about it. For someone who has had the opportunity to revisit his own progressive university 16 years after having left it as a student to minister to its students as a pastor, it’s obvious that something has changed.  Whether that is simply the furtherance of a trajectory lo...