Future Doctor of the Church?

Barbara Nicolosi is posting the interview Del Torkelson conducted during her visit to Wichita. The first installment is up:

Q: What are the worst misconceptions Christians have about Hollywood and visa versa?

BRN: The worst misconception Christians have about Hollywood is that it is basically a monolithic, antireligious legion of people that hate Christians and the Church. It’s just not true. Nine out of 10 people in Hollywood may be liberal Democrats, but their agenda is not politics. It’s art - creativity and entertainment. They want you to laugh much more than they care about how you vote.

The problem is, the 10 percent left in the business - the ones who do have an anti-religious bias - tend to also be the people with the most power. Is there is a single head of a studio or network or top agency that is not a fervent secular humanist? I don’t know a single one. Certainly few of the most powerful folks in entertainment go to church or temple with any regularity. The secular humanist philosophy is very homogenous in the top levels of the business. And these are the folks who can ultimately say thumbs up or thumbs down to a project going ahead.

So, what do we do about that? We work our way up, we persevere and we get some clout and influence the way that anybody gets influence in Hollywood: money and talent. Then we will have the powerful chairs and you will start seeing a lot more of the things we want green lit–and things not being green lit that should never be made.

The misconception that people in Hollywood have about the Church is the same–that we are monolithic and fit a certain caricature as fetus-loving, Bush-supporting, homosexual hating, uncreative fascists who have no use for science or reason. Right after the re-election of George W. Bush, there was a sci-fi writer giving a talk in a bookstore in northern California and she was raging against the Christian Right that had put George Bush in office. Her speech was transcribed and got circulated to a lot of Hollywood writers. At one point in her diatribe she said, “Christians can never understand what we (literary people) are doing here because they have no sense of art or beauty. Christians could never make anything beautiful because they are so full of fear and anger.”

I was thinking to myself while reading this, “What about every Christian writer for the last 1,000 years? What about Dante, Dickens, Austen, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, just to name a few.” In fact, when I said that in another interview, a mainstream journalist said to me, “Come on, you’re not claiming Dickens was a Christian writer.” I said “Yes! I am! He was!” Anyway, it is so telling that this woman would basically castigate an entire religious tradition as being made up of people that are full of hate and fear.

Both sides have been very comfortable with caricaturing each other.

Update: the next installment is up.

*****

Via Nicolosi, this week's quiz:

You scored as D'Artagnan. You are D'Artagnan, the brash Gascon who embodies the high ideals of the Musketeer. You are sometime your own worst enemy, but your motives are pure and your character is unimpeachable. You are destined for great things and passionate (though often ill-fated) love. Aramis 65% D'Artagnan 65% Edmund Dantes 45% Porthos 45% Athos 40% Mercedes 35% Richelieu 35% Rochefort 15% Which Dumas character are you? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com

MORE...

You scored as D'Artagnan.



You are D'Artagnan, the brash Gascon who embodies the high ideals of the Musketeer. You are sometime your own worst enemy, but your motives are pure and your character is unimpeachable. You are destined for great things and passionate (though often ill-fated) love.

D'Artagnan 70%
Richelieu 45%
Athos 45%
Aramis 40%
Porthos 35%
Mercedes 30%
Rochefort 10%
Edmund Dantes 5%


I am 45% Richelieu ?! Interesting. I think I need to reread the book.