No Greater Love Movie (Release date: Valentine's Day 2010)

Valentine's Day 2010 will see the DVD release of Lions Gate Entertainment's No Greater Love (2009) directed by Brad Silverman. Thanks to its inclusion in Amazon.com's streaming video selection I can provide a bit of commentary having seen the film in its entirety.

I was glad to see it. While recent Christian films, such as Sherwood Pictures recent releases (Flywheel (2003), Facing the Giants (2006), and Fireproof (2008)), Five & Two Pictures' Time Changer (2002) and Advent Film Group's Come What May (2009), are not generally known for top of the line acting, No Great Love has raised the bar just a bit higher. It tells a compelling story and the actors are generally better at their trade. If you have enjoyed any of the above films, you will almost certainly enjoy No Greater Love as well.

Having seen most of the six Christian films listed above I would like to offer a critique of the genre as a whole, focusing on No Greater Love as the most recent addition and perhaps best example of that genre to date.  


SPOILER ALERT

While some may find the following unapprovably harsh, I have chosen to focus my critique on what I believe to be potentially the greatest weakness of the genre as a whole.  Therefore, if you come away from this commentary disturbed, simply know that I am writing not as one who has found nothing to appreciate in the films above, but as one who, having appreciated much about the films themselves, finds the genre itself a most disturbing manifestation of what passes for contemporary evangelical Christianity. Those who would not be disturbed need read no further.

As it happens, I write today as one who was both born and raised an evangelical Christian. However, as the following will aptly demonstrate, I am not without concern for evangelicalism. As I interact with it in films such as these I am left, at best, puzzled in my attempts to reconcile the religion displayed on the screen with the religion expressed in the Christian Bible. Perhaps you should be too.

Perhaps much of the puzzlement can be expressed in the following question to Christians:

"Which is of greater value, to be able to defend one's actions, decisions and choices based on the spirit of the law, or the letter of the law?"

In this case I am speaking merely of defending choices to oneself when one first doubts the integrity and soundness of a particular course of action. Each of us have second thoughts at times, and in that moment, as Christians, we will look in one direction or the other to find confidence and support for the choices we have made.

Regardless of how one answers the question, which way do the films above answer that question? I submit that the genre of contemporary Christian movies characterized by the films above answer the question rather pointedly in one direction over the other. Let us briefly consider the story No Greater Love.

The film opens with a young couple's argument and shows the young woman sinking into alcoholism and depression before finally abandoning her husband and infant child. She severs all ties of communication with her husband, moves to a different state, and creates a new life for herself. Ten years later, after hitting rock bottom she has become a Christian, gone through rehab, and committed herself to full-time Christian ministry.

Meanwhile, her son is now ten years old and her husband is minutes away from proposing to his girlfriend when circumstances bring them to the same church event and the former couple momentarily glimpse one another through the crowd before each going their separate ways. After this chance encounter the fundamental question of the movie becomes whether or not the couple should get back together again. They are told by the church that as the woman is now a Christian, but the man is not, they cannot be married according to the Bible.

However, even though the couple no longer wear wedding rings, the man brings up the fact that he never actually filed a certificate of divorce at the local courthouse, so they aren't technically divorced. At this the church reverses itself, responds that they are still married, and orders the wife to submit to her husband and to go and live with him.

Now the newly discovered husband, not being a Christian, thinks this is pretty bizarre (me too), and so he fills out the divorce paperwork and signs it so that his new "wife" is no longer religiously obligated to come and live with him. As her former lover, even though he is not a Christian, he cares about her and only wants her back if she actually wants to come back. He even begins to question whether or not there is actually something to this thing called Christianity and confesses that "he wants what she has". The story ends with her throwing the divorce papers away, digging out her old wedding ring which she still has, and letting herself into the man's house with a spare key he had given her shortly after their chance encounter (and before the Church had told them they could not live together).

Sound confusing?

I actually think bizarre is a better description myself.

As a very pointedly evangelistic film, is this the picture of Christianity we now present to those outside the church? Is this what Biblical Christianity has become?

I'm left scratching my head. The moral decision that the film centers around is whether or not a man and a woman should live together and sleep together. Fine. Of course there are other important moral choices we face in daily life, but this certainly qualifies as one and I'm glad to see a film take up the challenge of tackling it. Next we are told that the Bible is to be our guide in answering the question of whether or not the decision is right or wrong. Again fine. I think the Bible is the right place to go in questions of moral turpitude.

So far no bizarreness.

But how are we told to apply what we find in the Bible to life today? It is here where the Christian producers of this film (and others like it) present a way of life to the world that is not only strange, different, and unique, but is in fact incoherent to the Christian and non-Christian mind alike. In valuing the "strange, different, and unique" qualities of Christianity, we sometimes fail to draw the distinction between these things, which can be good, and incoherence, which is neither admirable nor worthy of emulation. Think Christians. Think.

At the beginning of the film we are not given any reason for why the couple should not get back together, only that a Christian and a non-Christian should not live together "because the Bible says no".

Then we are not given any reasons for why the couple should get back together (other than because the man wants to and the woman's job is to do what he wants) except, again, "The Bible says to".

Absent reasons, the entire moral of the film, and the question that the film is dedicated to answering, devolves simply to opening a magic holy book, finding a magic holy formula for morality, and following it without asking any questions.

Is this what Christianity has become?

Is this what the great writers and expositors of the Christian faith over four millennia now culminate in? "Open the book, find the answer, and blindly follow it"?

Perhaps this recipe, and the God who wrote it, would not come off looking quite so capricious if marriage itself were not reduced to nothing more than a piece of paper at the county clerk's office. Yet consider whether this is not exactly the effect of taking this film to its logical conclusion.

Consider the pertinent moments in the film:

First, we are told that they are not married.
Then we are told that they are married because he technically never signed the divorce papers.
They we are told that they are married because he signed the divorce papers but she threw them away.

With this film as our guide, let us consider the question of whether or not the couple is married:

1. In the story a couple gets married and has a child. According to the pastor in the film, they are married. ✔

2. In the story a married couple gets in a fight. According to the film, they are still married. ✔

But then the story takes a turn.

3. The wedding rings go away when the woman runs away to start a new life. (Yet, we are told in the end that even though the rings went away, the couple was still married).

4. Ten years pass without the woman talking or interacting with the man and boy in any way.

5. Unknown to the man, the woman becomes a Christian (the man assumes she is dead).

6. The man gets a girlfriend and they have a long-term relationship (Still, we are told that the couple is still married because he didn't sign the papers).

7. The man decides he wants to marry the girlfriend. (Still married)

8. The man asks the son if he approves and would like the girlfriend to become his mom. The son says "go for it." (Still married)

9. The man buys a ring. (Still married)

10. The man shows the ring to others and says he's gonna marry the girlfriend. (Still married)

11. The man takes the girlfriend out to dinner so he can propose. (Still married....because he didn't sign the papers)

Is this not sounding just a wee bit bizarre?

The man is living his life entirely independent of the woman, and the woman is living her life entirely independent of the man. When she left to start her own life, he packed up her things and started his own life as well, moved to another state, and decided to marry another woman.

But simply because he did not file the divorce papers at the county clerk's office....the marriage exists.

Is this sort of technicality the true linchpin upon which questions of morality should turn? The answer to the question of whether or not a couple are married? Sufficient evidence that it is right, ethical, moral, and Christian for them to sleep together? Live together? Raise a child together?

If that is truly the linchpin upon which the question (and therefore the movie) turns, I have a question.

What if the clerk at the courthouse lost the marriage paperwork?

[In the movie, the court lost contact information for the man and boy. The story tells us that because the court did not keep track of that information the woman had no way to contact them.]

What if when the pastor went down to the courthouse to check their file, there was no marriage license on file because the court had lost or misplaced it? What if there was a fire and that paper got burned up?

What moral wisdom should we give our couple in that case? Is the man then free to marry his girlfriend in such a case?

I have only one word for this modern depiction of Christian morality. Bizarre.