I saw the movie Kingdom of Heaven last night and thought I would share a few reactions to it. There are several issues I will touch on briefly but I want to end up with a focus on some of the Christian reactions to the movie that I have heard.
To start with I would encourage everyone to read the following articles from Christianity Today to get some historical understanding.
I mention those because I think it is a given that when Hollywood does a historical epic you can't always count on it getting the history right. I have mixed emotions about this. There is no law that says a filmmaker must get the hitorical details right, after all, these guys are doing movies, not documentaries. Still, I lament the results of this artistic license. In a day when never have so many known so little about history, they'll take Hollywood's take as historically factual.
In this case, as the CT articles show, the filmmakers got a lot of the details wrong, and that's too bad. I'll only go into one of those details because it is central to the story, and that is the movie's depiction of Balian, played by Orlando Bloom.
It should be said first of all that "Kingdom of Heaven" is Balian's story, not a story of the Crusades. The Crusades are merely the historical backdrop to the story. The subject of the Crusades is just too big of a subject to cover in a movie, as they lasted several centuries and had many different casts of characters and many different issues involved. That is why it is unwise to make sweeping statements about the Crusades. There were many different factors involved in the Crusades, not the least of which is that they began as a defensive campaign by the "Christian" forces. Over time they certainly became something else at many times, but this is something that is left out of most of the popular statements on them.
Be that as it may, as I said, this is the story of Balian, not the story of the Crusades. In this version Balian is the son of Godfrey (the real Balian was the son "Balian the Old" and was raised in the Holy Land, not France as the movie portrays) who embarks on the crusade as part of religious quest, but ends up taking Godfrey's place as a key defender of Jerusalem.
The story of the movie centers on this religious quest of Balian. This is a quest to find forgiveness of sin and to find God. Thus, these are the key themes by which we can evaluate the movie. In the end Balian doesn't find God in the Holy Land, in fact he finds that there is nothing Holy about the Holy Land. It is the people who are holy (both Christian and Muslim), not the city of Jerusalem. He doesn't find God and I am not sure if he found forgiveness of sins. By the end of the movie he is pretty much an agnostic, so I think the issue of finding forgiveness of sin becomes kind of a moot point.
And that leads to the "moral of the story." In my mind, there is a theefold "moral of the story."
- God, if He exists, is a God of pluralism. The way to peace is to tone down religious conviction.
- God does not reward those who earnestly seek Him, at least not those who seek Him via crusading.
- There is a certain nobility in agnosticism.
Again, since Balian is the central character, he communicates the message of the story. He fights to save the people of Jerusalem, not to save the city itself. And all of the people, be they Christian or Muslim, are holy in a sense. Thus, we have the God of pluralism.
This doesn't sit well with evangelical Christians and I am not sure how well it would sit with Muslims. This kind of pluralism is standard Hollywood fare, but in portraying it this way the filmmakers don't do justice to the exclusive claims of either the Christian or the Muslim faith. What is portrayed here is the notion that peace can only come by toning down one's faith.
I would argue that its a good thought with an errant solution. The movie closes with a line that talks about how difficult the struggle for peace has been for the last thousand years and this is true, as we know all too well in our post 9/11 world. This desire for peace is a good sentiment to voice, but it won't come through abandoning our convictions.
Christians have two convictions which can lead to peace and those are the convictions that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves and to acknowledge that all men bear the image of God. There are no ethnic or religious stipulations on who bears the image of God or is our neighbor, thus we can love our Muslim neighbors as ourselves while holding to our convictions. I will grant you that this doesn't address all of the political issues we confront today, I am simply stating that to say that Christianity offers a solution to the dilemma.
The other two morals - that God doesn't reward those who earnestly seek Him and that there is a certain nobility in agnosticism are a little more difficult to critique.
Balian is portrayed sympathetically here, thus his agnosticism is portrayed sympathetically. This is where I think the filmmakers have done us a disservice from a historical standpoint. According to the CT article the real Balian was certainly not an agnostic. He was no saint either, but he wasn't an agnostic. Again I understand they weren't trying to make a documentary, but they leave us with the impression that the proper outcome of the crusaders quest was this agnosticism, when this is far from the real historical outcomes.
It is at this point that I have heard evangelicals give the film some well deserved flack. Like many movies, those with the most Christian zeal are also the most imbalanced and evil in the movie. The film doesn't do justice to those who had immense zeal for Christ and were very noble in their prosecution of the crusades.
On the other hand I would encourage my Christian brothers to temper their reactions by remembering that it is not always bad to portray misguided Christians in a bad light. The fault is in the filmmakers leaving us the impression that all of the "zealous" Christians were misguided. But as I say, I think it is obvious that the movie is criticizing an aberration of the Christian faith, not the Christian faith itself. I am all for criticizing aberrations of the Christian faith.
It will be a tragedy if people came out and assumed that all zealous Christians were like the rapacious templars in the movie, but I think most folks are able to recognize that these folks represented an aberration of Christianity, not the real thing.
But in speaking of the critical portrayal of aberrant Christianity I think it is helpful to remind us that there is another place we are all familiar with where aberrations of the Christian faith are portrayed in stark reality and with withering criticism, and that is the Bible itself.
I very often remind myself and those with whom I interact that the Bible is not a story of what great men and women did for God, its a story of what a great God did for a pretty sorry lot of His people. If you simply read through the historical portions of the Scriptures the harsh and negative portrayals of His people are rampant.
In the Bible the people of God are portrayed as immoral, wandering, and bickering and the leaders of God's people are often portrayed as the worst of them (think of the stories of the kings in the historical books of the O.T. or the scathing denunciations given by Jeremiah and Jesus of the leaders of God's people).
So when Hollywood portrays the people of God in a negative light, it has some uncomfortable similarities to Scripture. At least here in America Christians are on a quest for moral authority, and that explains some of our adverse reactions to the way Hollywood portrays us. That has some validity because there is much good within Christianity that rarely makes it to the big screen.
But we have to remember that it is not our moral authority that sets us apart, it is God's grace to us. The people of God have been sinning since the creation and it shouldn't surprise us if the world around us recognizes this. This doesn't justify lies about the people of God, but at the same time, we've been sinning for a long time and God has been calling us on the carpet for a long time.
The real problem with Hollywood is not that it portrays Christians as sinners, it is that it rarely offers redemption for sinners. The bible portrays the worst there is to know about Christian but it portrays our God as a God who forgives even the worst of sinners. Unfortunately, in Hollywood, the Christian sinners are often given judgment rather than redemption. To be sure, redemption can be had, but it is often given to those who oppose Christianity. When Christians are redeemed, Hollywood style, this redemption often comes through repentance (a biblical concept) but the repentance is a repentance from and abandonment of their Christian faith, when it should be a repentance from their aberrant practices that were mistakenly called Christianity.
That is what is missing in this movie. In this movie the hero Balian didn't merely confess and repudiate the sins of the templars, he seemed to repudiate the very faith in Christ that could bring healing from their crimes.
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