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Why do we have only right-wing Bible films and Christian popular culture today? That’s the question posed by Amy Sullivan’s latest article in Washington Monthly.

This is a problem because when the only Christian-themed entertainment in the marketplace is laced with conservatism, Christianity itself will increasingly take on a conservative cast. The faith of Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr is not the faith of Tim LaHaye and Mel Gibson. Yet the more that single interpretation of Christianity dominates airwaves and bookshelves, the more people of faith are tempted to believe that the only way to be a “good” Christian is to be a conservative.

Here Sullivan is extending her frequent complaint - that liberals cede religion to the right - into the realm of popular culture. But if her general political polemic doesn’t sell me (why should I or other liberal-left types take on religion when in fact we’re not religious?), the extension of it to pop culture is not as easy as Sullivan would like.

First off, there’s the problem with the culture industry, which clearly draws on a larger cultural moment yet still has its own internal economics and sociology. Take Sullivan’s historical narrative:

And then, sometime in the 1960s, religiously-themed entertainment simply disappeared. Why that happened is anyone’s guess; a hip disdain for traditional cultural mores, perhaps, or a heightened fear of offending religious minorities. In any event, it was a major, if underappreciated, break. For nearly 2,000 years, the story of Jesus and broader biblical epics had infused the cultural environment of the average Westerner. Now those influences were suddenly nowhere to be seen.

The “infused cultural environment” is vague - why after all did the 1930s have so many fewer bible films than the 50s, she might wonder - but the real problem is the “anyone’s guess” part. There are more plausible reasons. As Matt Yglesias, in an astute post yesterday, responded,

The best way to understand this, I think, is probably not through the lense of theology but by looking at broader economic shifts in the movie industry. This strikes me less as a shift away from Jesus per se than part of the larger trend away from the idea of trying to make broadly popular films that whole families would enjoy and toward narrow demographic targeting.

The broader economic shifts are responsible. Only I would disagree with his diagnosis of what those shifts are. Targeted demographics - particularly “quality” demographics (i.e. audiences that are smaller yet have more money) - emerged only in television’s move to relevance in the early 70s. In fact, they make sense as an industrial model only when audiences are sold to advertisers. Studios certainly targeted films like teenpics to certain demographics, but only with smaller productions, not quality films.

So what was the cause of the bible epic’s emergence and decline? Here are likely reasons:

1) Competition with television. It’s not exactly true that television cause Hollywood’s decline or financial straits (Douglas Gomery has convincingly argued it was the automobile and the suburb). But by the mid-50s studios certainly felt they had to give audiences spectacle to draw crowds in.

2) Location shooting. Much as Technicolor’s emergence encouraged genres (like musicals) which exploited its capabilities, the new postwar expectations of location shooting favored genres that made use of it. More importantly, European countries had laws limiting the transfer of boxoffice receipts out of the country and back to the US. Studios responded by setting up production units in Europe. Other genres benefited, but no genres more than the bible and historical epics were suited to exotic location shooting.

3) The breakdown of vertical integration. In 1947 the Paramount decree broke up studio vertical monopolies and divested exhibition arms from studio/distributors. One of the prime effects was the eventual (by the mid 50s) decline of the A-B double feature system, a system that worked only if studios could guarantee distribution of inferior product. Increasingly, new productions had to aspire to be prestige productions. The strategies for prestige were multiple - Broadway and literary material (yes the classical period had adaptations, but can you imagine Lonelyhearts in 1935?), social relevence, ‘adult’ themes - but an appealing one was epic-ness. Epics would connote prestige without the risks that, say, a sexually suggestive William Inge script might bring.

4) Middlebrow sensibility. From the late 40s to the late 60s, cinema waded through a cultural hierarchy inbetween television’s increasing role as popular culture and highbrows’ expectations that cinema should say something, aethetically and socially. For complicated reasons, Hollywood’s product gravitated toward a middlebrow sensibility. This sensibility, of course, dovetailed nicely with the economic imperative for prestige pictures.

The decline of the biblical epic then, is not so inexplicable. It simply was a breakdown of these sustaining causes. By the late 60s, the middlebrow compromise was collapsing under the counterculture and the art cinema while increasing expenditures increased the stakes of failure. Hello Dolly!’s flop alone meant the end of the postwar-style spectacle film.

Industrial causes aside, I would venture that the other main oversight (at least as far as popular culture criticism goes) of Sullivan’s analysis is the belief in genre neutrality, that genres themselves aren’t political in some fashion or that making liberal Bible pics is as simple as having liberals decide to make them. Hopefully I can address this line of reasoning and its limitations in the next day or two.