Editor’s Note: The following was first published on November 7, 2006 and appears here as part of our “Meridian Classics” series to celebrate Meridian Magazine’s 25th anniversary. 

“Write the truth.” Robert McKee scribbled it on the inside cover of his book when he autographed a copy for me. McKee is among the top screenplay consultants in the world. His book, Story, has become the bible for screenwriters.

I spent three intense days with Bob at his exclusive screenwriting seminar. By the time we said goodbye I recognized that his idea of “truth” and mine are vastly different. I agree with his brilliant analysis of story. I disagree with him on almost everything else. For me truth is grounded in faith, God, religion and a plan of salvation. For him “religion has become an empty ritual that masks hypocrisy.” Robert McKee is a Hollywood guy.

Hollywood script consultant Robert McKee’s inscription to Kieth Merrill in McKee’s book, Story. Write the Truth, it says. What truth means to many in Hollywood is vastly different to what it means to Merrill and others like him.

Once upon a time, “Don’t talk about religion or politics” was an honored social maxim. Now it is hard to talk about anything of substance without the “truth” being tethered to political ideology or religious dogma. It is certainly impossible to talk about Hollywood and movies without tromping over tarnished social barriers between polite and political. Between wrong/right and religion.

Why? Because movies are a significant battleground in the war on traditional values – and “values” – whatever that may mean to us individually – are inextricably fused with our religious and political perspective of the world. To do what must be done I am willing to invade both. If I offend tender sensitivities, forgive me.

I love Robert McKee. His book has been a powerful influence in my professional life. I liked meeting him. I enjoyed talking to him. He enriched my life and made me a better person – and a way better screenwriter. I admire his intelligence. I esteem his accomplishments. I respect his opinions but I disagree with almost everything he thinks is “true” in the realms of politics, religion and life.

“Let us agree to disagree” is a marvelous way for people to remain connected – and respected – even when their ideas and philosophies are vastly different.  My truth is grounded in God, and all that implies. McKee’s truth is grounded in secular ideologies and all that they imply. You can be sure that there are more McKees than Merrills in Hollywood.

Hollywood is a favorite whipping boy for people who feel disenfranchised by the myriad movies that do not embrace their values or reflect their perspective of the universe. References to Hollywood however are by no means inclusive. Goodness knows there are a lot of great people who produce a steady slate of excellent praiseworthy films that somehow survive the Hollywood system.

Searching for God on the Silver Screen

My search for God on the silver screen is not intended as an attack on those who believe differently than I do. Nor do I have any illusions about changing the way they think or the nature of the movies they make.

To paraphrase a great religionist, I claim the privilege to believe in God, divine creation, and the values of the Judeo-Christian tradition according to the dictates of my own conscience and I allow all men and women the same privilege. However mightily I may disagree with them I respect their right to believe what they may and be what they will according to the dictates of their own conscience. [i]

As I respect and defend their right to do and be and say whatever they wish I claim for myself and companions the right to do likewise.

I want to write the truth. Not because Bob McKee made a note in my book but because I believe there is a God, morality is not relative and that truth is ultimately an absolute. That is why I am fascinated by the presence or absence of God and truth on the silver screen.

Kieth Merrill behind the camera on the set of Testaments. Kieth considers writing, producing and directing this large format movie about Jesus Christ one of the key landmarks of his career.

Since God is omnipresent, why is He increasingly so difficult to find in the movies?  The answer is simple. Increasingly God, and that which emanates from Him, is being replaced by a new religion based on the philosophies of men and the doctrines of moral relativism.  As always “Hollywood” is avant-garde.

The search for God in the movies accentuates the division between the mainstream motion picture industry and main street USA. Many movies from the heart of Hollywood not only tend to favor stories that are often antagonistic toward faith and/or hostile to religion but leave God out all together.

What does “God on the silver screen” mean anyway? It implies godliness. It implies righteousness. It implies the Judeo-Christian traditions and the teachings of the Bible. It implies the veracity of virtue and values. For me, and my truth, it implies the ministry of Jesus and the doctrines and values of Christianity.

A New Movie Maxim

God is abandoned, assaulted or ignored because many people empowered by Hollywood believe in man, not God. For all the psychobabble and evasion of truth over the issue the cause and effect of it is not complicated. I propose a new movie maxim: Movies manifest the mind and morality of the men who make them. [I mean of course “men AND women” but I had such an alluring alliteration aligning I dared to risk the wrath of the PC gods.]

Comprehending the mind and morality of man should begin with a fundamental question. WHENCE CAME WE? Did our ancestors emerge from the Garden of Eden as a divine creation in the image of a Father/God or did they slither from the sea?

If humankind evolved from the primordial mud by some inexplicable cosmic coincidence there is no God.  That changes everything. Adherents to this theory unwittingly (or wittingly) invert the logic of Lehi. [ii]

Moral Relativists reason that, “If there is no God there is no law – ‘No moral or ethical propositions that reflect absolute and universal moral truths,’ to use their banter – and if there is no law there is no sin, and if there is no sin there is no righteousness – or wrongness – and if there is no right or wrong there is no punishment or misery.

Consequently they can never experience true happiness because they’ve come to their flawed conclusion – that there is no divine creation – by the reasoning of their minds and not by the revealed word of God. Moreover they’ve put a lot of eggs in their big basket of ifs.

Not all Religious

Lamenting the absence of God on the silver screen does not suggest that every movie should be “religious.” The Passion of the Christ notwithstanding, movies are about people, not God – about adventures in mortality, not heaven. [Well there are some pretty good films whose characters cross the veil – but speaking for the most part.] Our faith and our fears help define us, and religion is a valid dimension of character.  But there are thousands of wonderful stories this side of biblical epics, religious themes, characters of faith and people who say their prayers.

What is missing is not so much more references to God or stories about religion or clergy or stories that focus on faith.  (Though it would be lovely if there were more. Remember Chariots of Fire? Great! ) What is missing is the context of divinity. What is missing in the majority of Hollywood movies is the momentousness of a fundamental belief that man is a creation of God – a perspective that mortal beings are created in His image.  What is missing in the writing, the premise, the characters and telling of the story is any evidence of an underlying understanding that morality is not relative, that life has purpose and our choices have eternal consequences.

Stories conceived in a vacuum of godlessness and characters created from the doctrines of evolution and secular humanism will forever perpetuate the flow of motion pictures that are foreign to the traditional Judeo-Christian values.

Queries from screenwriters arrive at my office every day. Very few are kept and filed in the folder marked, “to be considered.” There follows an e-mail from a writer in Los Angeles. It arrived as I was writing the article. I’m not making this up!  (I have not corrected the writer’s grammar or errors of punctuation.

Subject: Romantic comedy query – ‘Alice and Henry’

Dear Sir,

    I see your credits are well received in the industry and that you know what the public wants to see in the movies.–That is why I’m writing you, to validate your judgment and have you consider a property which may compliment your success. Alice and Henry, a romantic comedy, may just be that property.

       This show incorporates homo sexuality, lesbian ship, and criminality, into the underlying premise. While at first, those subjects may not appear romantic or comedic,–but after I reviewed the material extensively I have concluded the material is valued entertainment. However, you are certainly welcomed to review the script and decide for yourself if my observations are correct or not.

To understand why God and godliness has gone missing from so many movies we need only to understand that the people who make the movies that are offensive by any traditional standard, and way out of touch with your values, in most cases embrace “a religion” that is fundamentally opposed to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Our paths of virtues and values diverged – not recently and not in the yellow woods of Robert Frost – but in the slime of primordial mud as we slithered from the sea or in the after-glow of Cherubim and the flaming sword as we left the Garden of Eden.

The essence of the great divide between the values of Hollywood and the values of main street USA begins with the question of where we came from – the primordial slime or the afterglow of Cherubim and the flaming sword as we left the Garden of Eden.

A survey conducted by the Christian Science Monitor a few years ago reported that 45% of Hollywood “movers and shakers” claimed no religious affiliation and that 95% never attended religious services. But even as they honestly reject “organized religion,” these same folks embrace a religion of their own based on humanism and secular beliefs that govern their lives and define their films.

The absence of God in the movies is a natural extension of the doctrines of the “anti-religion religion” of Hollywood. The tenets of this religion without God are revealing.  They can be seen any day of the week “at a theater near you.”  

No wonder we who see “truth” as related to our divine origins, feel discomfort with stories, characters, images and ideas based on beliefs:

That deny the Judeo-Christian belief in man’s immortal soul. That hold there is nothing sacred about human consciousness. That swoon in pagan admiration of Mother Earth. That believe Darwinism is a fact, that people are born gay and that recycling is a virtue and chastity is not. That are more upset when a tree is chopped down than when a child is aborted. That believe taxpayers should be forced to subsidize “artistic” exhibits of aborted fetuses, crucifixes in urine and gay pornography while demanding it is unconstitutional to display the Nativity scene at Christmas or the Ten Commandments on government buildings. That support a Supreme Court where references to God in public are being abolished. That vigorously promote the idea that, sex must be disassociated from the idea of raising children, liberated from the transmission of humanity and treated as a natural function that should carry no more moral consequence than drinking a glass of water. [iii]

Outspoken film critic, Michael Medved, focused on the anti-religious prejudice of Hollywood more than ten years ago in his marvelous book, Hollywood vs. America:

For many of the most powerful people in the entertainment business, hostility to organized religion goes so deep and burns so intensely that they insist on expressing that hostility, even at the risk of financial disaster. When otherwise savvy producers are willing to defy logic, past experience and commercial self-interest in order to create movies that promote antireligious stereotypes and messages, then it is clear that a powerful prejudice is at work. [iv]

Some in the Hollywood community who embrace the tenets of the anti-religion religion politically, concurrently espouse belief in a divine being, and a certain number even see themselves as embracing the traditional Jesus of Christianity. I pass no judgment, but the contradiction is curious if not astounding. We might find it fascinating to have these people to dinner but we would never want them talking to our children.

But they are talking to our children. All the time! Two hours in the dark at the Cineplex Down Town or on the big screen big TV at home while we’re not paying attention.

I believe that at the infected root of what’s gone wrong with so many of the movies coming out of Hollywood is the cancerous influence of this factitious religion that celebrates the absence of all things godly and rejects the divine origins and eternal destiny of man.

Does infusing a story with God – think virtues and values implicit in accepting man as a child of God – depreciate the importance of a story or the power in its telling? Quite the contrary. The essence of drama is conflict. There is no greater conflict than the raging struggle for the souls of men in all its subtle manifestations. It is the ongoing struggle between good and evil, darkness and light and ultimately it is the last decisive battle in what is in fact the great god war between Lucifer and Jehovah. Curiously, many in Hollywood seem fixated on the putrid underbelly of the beast without grasping what it is they think they have discovered nor the grand context of the myriad little tales they tell.

Stories that tell the truth are immersed in conflict and drama, and are eminently more stirring than the ones contrived or based on lies. The same great stories – when conceived in shafts of light from a Garden in Eden rather than the dusky twilight of a primordial swamp – can be told without offensive scenes with characters who embrace ennobling virtues and heroic values.

Is it really possible to infuse great stories with the virtues and values of Godliness? Absolutely. Contrast the ambiguity of anti-heroes with the clarity of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. That is only the beginning. The paradigm shift from evolution and man as a beast to creation and man as God in embryo is revolutionary at one level but subtle, sufficient and remarkably liberating at another.