At least it’s not “The Passion of the Christ.”

Reviews:

• From America.
• From Christianity Today: Money Quote:
  Some of the blame must be put on the screenplay, which does manage to nicely honor Bethany’s own real-life hard-won resolutions, but hits some clunky stretches getting there. Oddly, the writing seems to have fallen not only to director Sean McNamara, but to a large team of collaborators whose chief collective credits are Hawaiian Baywatch episodes. This story deserved a better brain trust.
• From Patheos.

But to secular reviewers, the movie doesn’t seem to stand up; nor do “Christian” movies in general. Andrew O’Hehir asks, “Why are Christian movies so awful?”

There’s a larger question here. O’Hehir is right to point out that:

But when we use the buzzword “Christian” in contemporary American society, we’re talking about a distinctively modern cultural and demographic phenomenon that has almost no connection to the spiritual and intellectual tradition that fueled Dante and Milton and Leonardo and Bach.

It’s also a question asked by James Davidson Hunter in To Change the World, where he argues that contemporary Christians have largely abandoned the arts.

This phenomenon struck me as I was reading an article by Alex Ross on Bach in The New Yorker. Writing about John Eliot Gardiner’s massive project to record all 200 of Bach’s sacred cantatas, he concludes:

There is no way to tell from the sound itself that “Christ lag in Todesbanden” is being played in the Georgenkirche, in Eisenach, next to the font where Bach was baptized, in 1685. Once you know it, though, you cannot forget it. A sense of occasion, of ritual time, is sustained throughout. Gardiner adds layers of significance in his spirited liner notes, which are based on a tour diary: he speaks of visiting Buchenwald, outside Weimar; of a Leipzig pastor’s resistance to East German oppression; of French soccer fans blasting their car horns moments after one performance ended; of a spooky old cleric congratulating the musicians on having administered a good beating to the Devil. Most of all, this mammoth project—an act of devotion worthy of Bach himself—lays bare what is most human in the composer’s enterprise. Listening to “Christ lag,” I pictured Bach’s parents looking on at the baptism of the infant and wondering whether he would live. They had no idea.

At one point, he says, he listened to 50 of the cantatas during a lengthy ride through Australia and says,  “far from getting too much of a good thing, I found myself regularly hitting the repeat button. Once or twice, I stopped on the side of the road in tears.”

The arts created by Christians should have the power to evoke that response in anyone.