Finding God in the Dark

AS A TEENAGER growing up in a church setting that discouraged engaging with movies, books, or music deemed a “bad influence,” I remember frequently being confused about pop culture, particularly when it came to what films I was “allowed” to watch. Was I wrong for wanting to see Taxi Driver ? For identifying with Saved? Was it a sin to watch The Last Temptation of Christ?

The answer to all these questions, of course, is “no,” but the sentiment behind them is understandable. The easiest metric for Christians to judge a film’s quality is the measure of its “objectionable” content, regardless of what that content says about the filmmaker’s intent, or the political or cultural attitudes under which it was conceived. The truth, however, is that all art—whether spiritual or secular in origin—has something to express about the world: joy in its beauty, anger at its injustice, a whole spectrum of emotions and ideas that reflect the human experience.

Blessedly, this is something that the new book Movies Are Prayers: How Films Voice Our Deepest Longings understands well. Author and film critic Josh Larsen regularly works with both faith-based audiences, as an editor for the online faith and culture magazine Think Christian, and secular ones, as the co-host of the radio show and podcast Filmspotting. This balance of experience, and Larsen’s willingness to see the value in movies of nearly every stripe, helps Movies Are Prayers function in two ways. The book works as a resource to expand faith-based readers’ understanding of cinema and also to help spiritually curious movie fans relate to faith through film.

Larsen organizes the book by topic, discussing movies that function as expressions of praise, lament, yearning, anger, obedience, and meditation, among other subjects. Each chapter is dedicated equally to scripture, theology, and film theory, exploring each theme in terms of emotional response, scriptural example, and its representation in cinematic art. Larsen’s examples cover contemporary, classic, mainstream, and art-house films with equal passion, giving readers easily identifiable film moments to relate to while also suggesting great next steps for a deeper dive.

While the book doesn’t ignore films with directly spiritual themes, Larsen is more interested in exploring movies with secular roots that speak to shared values, connecting them to spiritual life in ways you might not expect. It’s easy, for example, to find godly motifs in a film such as Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life or the Danish movie Babette’s Feast. Amy Schumer’s raunchy 2015 comedy Trainwreck, however, poses a slightly greater challenge. Yet Larsen covers them all—along with Chinatown, Star Wars, and yes, even Taxi Driver—with compassion and insight.

For Christians wary of watching violent or inappropriate films, this approach provides an opportunity to engage with sometimes-difficult art in a way that neither scolds the viewer’s curiosity nor condemns the movie’s content—moving past knee-jerk reactions and seeing the ways in which art connects us. For readers with no spiritual background, but a love of film, Larsen’s writing potentially opens doors to a new way of viewing, relating the spiritual to the everyday and revealing the spark of the divine in the flicker of the movie projector.

Movies Are Prayers is a solid encapsulation of the changing tides in faith-based cultural criticism right now, reflecting a desire for engagement over isolation. It eloquently expresses the deep emotional associations that, for some of us, make both the church and the movie house sacred spaces, recognizing that sometimes popular culture expresses our deepest feelings better than we can ourselves. I wish this book had been around years ago—maybe then I wouldn’t have taken so long to watch The Last Temptation of Christ.