I’d be hard-pressed to point to a more glaring illustration of that discrepancy than the disgraceful spectacle of Christians making movies presenting themselves as they really truly believe they are–while remaining completely (and, one increasingly suspects, willfully) oblivious to how others see them.
I’ve been doing reviews of Christian movies for a while now. And unsurprisingly, I have been uniformly unimpressed because Christian media is uniformly awful. But to hear Christians themselves talk about “their” movies, these are all masterpieces. Epics. Perhaps marginally flawed here and there, but essentially wonderful. Everyone else is left to wonder if they’re even seeing the same movies these Christians are praising. I’m not surprised at all to see this lopsided reception.
In ‘God’s Club’, we learn that Jesusing fixes everything—including serious mental illness.
That brand of Christianity makes some distinct promises to its adherents. If you do this, then you will get that. But it doesn’t actually follow through on those promises. Indeed, it really can’t. Instead it gives people something totally different. Today I want to talk about promises and Fireproof, and how this viewpoint stands up to reality.
I scared up a copy, got reading, and then went through a second time and made notes. Copious, copious, notes. (Looking back over the notes, I can see I was getting progressively more and more frustrated with the thing – my notes started getting more and more editorial and profane as I went.) I ended up with notes that are almost as long as the book itself. More even than what The Love Dare represents in and of itself, though, it doesn’t actually say anything really new at all regarding relationships or how people should conduct themselves with their romantic prospects and partners.
This movie echoes something I myself was taught as a young fundamentalist: that by doing loving things, one can create loving feelings in oneself and inspire loving feelings in a target. In other words, just like the old song by Air Supply put it, we were taught that we could make love out of nothing at all.
You can’t really talk about Fireproof without talking about the Love Dare, and vice versa. Today I found out why that is.
(This is part of our Fireproof review week–here’s the review itself and here’s where I talk about how the movie assumes that only Christians can make marriage work. Consider this, like all my movie posts, full of ALL THE SPOILERS. Also, I’m popping this into our Unequally Yoked Club series Read more
While someone might see this movie and assume–as I did repeatedly–that it was hawking a particular marriage advice manual, The Love Dare, that’s not entirely true. The characters repeatedly reference the book and laud how amazing it is and how much it’s helped their marriages, but the movie is quite clear about exactly what really saved Kirk’s marriage in the movie.
Everybody can learn new things. Why, just this morning I figured out how to get italics into my blog post titles. So I knew going into this movie that it’s about Kirk Cameron’s character saving his marriage, so who knows, maybe I’ll learn some amazing new tips and tricks to use in my own relationships!