What Actually Cultivates the Christian Imagination, and Another Reason I Review Movies

Last month, I shared one reason I review movies is to keep the legacy of Pastor Thomas MacKenzie alive. He recorded simple and short movies from a Christian perspective every week. He had great taste in films, a robust understanding of the Christian faith, and a clear impact on my thinking.

Today, I want to offer another reason why I review movies. I'll start with a story . . .

My Dad and I had just finished The Perfect Storm (2000). A tsunami-like wave nearly smashed the Andrea Gale to pieces (with Clooney and Wahlberg and Dad and me inside it).

The theater was still dark when the movie ended and Dad turned to me and commented on how it’d feel to face that final swell in the Andrea Gail. . . without knowing God.

This brief comment was big for me.

He was just making conversation. But I had just spent that last forty-five minutes holding my breath, lost in the tumultuous sea, wondering if we’d see land again. For the last forty-five minutes, we were so close to experiencing something neither of us had experienced before. . . death.

In God’s providence, Dad’s comment hinted at a framework for approaching movies with a Christian perspective. He was putting our experience in the dark into conversation with something that means more to him than anything - the historic Christian faith.

Even though movies are fictional, the good ones allow us to experience the world as another image bearer. From the safety of a theater, we can serve on a jury, climb Everest, or navigate tumultuous seas. We can feel the pain of losing a loved one, bear the guilt of murder, or face eternity without knowing Christ.

Malcolm Guite calls this the moral imagination, defining it as the “exercise of the imagination which enables you to stand in another person’s shoes, to go out from your life and place into theirs, to imagine and even re-imagine the world from their perspective” (Lifting the Veil, 65).

In Guite’s book about the imagination and the Kingdom, he argues that through the moral imagination, art can “lift the veil” between what we see regularly and what is really going on in God’s cosmos.

It’s a little like when Elisha prayed for the eyes of a fearful servant to see the army surrounding the city. Elisha prayed he would see that the army in front of them was nothing compared to the horses and chariots of fire that surrounded Elisha (2 Kings 6:17). And when that servant saw reality with a new perspective, a deeper one, my guess is he never saw war the same way. I’m not sure he saw anything the same way again. Great movies can open our eyes to a better grasp of the fabric of reality.

Movies cultivate the imagination. But, ultimately, the Word of God cultivates the Christian imagination.

And when image bearers land in a new city, country, or world fueled by imagination and story, I don’t want them to leave until they’ve met the Word of God and had a conversation. One way to do this is for us to practice asking, How does the gospel, the Kingdom of God, our Lord and Savior, speak to what we just experienced? And then, helping others do the same.

It’s not complicated. It starts with knowing the Word of God. It continues with honest questions and conversation. Just like Dad did with me.

So, this is another reason why I spend so much time reviewing movies: I want to see the Word of God cultivate the Christian imagination in us for his glory. 

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Dane Bundy serves as President of Stage & Story and the Director of Fine Arts at Regents School of Austin. He and his wife, Megan, live in Austin, TX.