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RELIGION AND THE POPULAR ARTS

The Christian Arts

With the growth of the Pentecostal and Evangelical movements a new segment of commercial entertainment appeared. In 1979 people could order directly from the Born Again Christian Catalogue or learn the latest in the music world from Contemporary Christian Music. New Christian music carved out a body of listeners that overlapped but did not cover those who listened to traditional gospel music. Christian artists like Bill Gaither won not only the commercial industry's Grammy Award year after year but also the Gospel Music Association's Dove Award. Maranantha! Music, established in 1972 in Costa Mesa, California, developed a small empire in providing products for the expanding number of Christian-music buyers.

Fiction

There were Christian romance novels for women interested in that genre of fiction, which was popular in the decade. The religious publishing house, Thomas Nelson, joined like-minded publishers with a line called "Promise Romance" that not only reassured readers of the possibility of true love and happiness but also of God's redeeming love for them. Some of the romantic novels were of respectable quality, such as Shirley Nelson's The Last Year of the War (1978) or Janette Oke's Love Comes Softly (1979).

Commercial Appeal

The commercial world also recognized the potential of religious themes. The youth culture of the 1960s merged with the story of Jesus in two popular musicals in the early 1970s. In 1971 Stephen Schwartz wrote Godspell, based on the Gospel of Matthew. The simple music and the affecting story made this a success not only on the professional stage but for youth groups from various churches. More commercial was Jesus Christ Superstar (1971) featuring music composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber, which had a successful run in London and on Broadway. Both productions were made into films and released two years later with modest box-office success.

Television

A more successful film was the six-and-a-half-hour production of Jesus of Nazareth, directed by Franco Zeffirelli for NBC television. Before the film was shown, Fundamentalists protested its portrayal of Jesus as an ordinary man, and General Motors withdrew its sponsorship. But critics and an estimated ninety million viewers responded enthusiastically to the miniseries when it was broadcast in 1977.

Controversy

Conservative Christians were even more offended by the film Life of Brian (1979), made by the satiric British group Monty Python. This account of a Jewish man whose life paralleled Jesus' was criticized by the New York archdiocese as well as Jewish groups such as the Union of Orthodox Rabbis in the United States and Canada and the Rabbinical Alliance. Protesters secured a brief injunction against showing the movie in Valdosta, Georgia, and one large theater chain cut its showings of the film, especially in the South.

Biographical Film

Two interesting biographies of religious figures were filmed during the decade. In 1972 Marjoe Gortner starred in Marjoe, an Academy Award-winning documentary of his life as a child evangelist. This exposé of fakery in the Evangelical circuit attracted attention and confirmed the prejudices of many people about the revival movement. Less successful was a film version of Charles Colson's widely read autobiography Born Again (1978). This account of a Watergate conspirator's fall from power and imprisonment attracted only a limited audience. Watergate was too close for many to concern themselves with the conversion and reform of those men who brought disgrace on the presidency.

Satan

Far more people came to see a film that dealt with the devil's work in the world. Inspired by the 1968 success of Rosemary's Baby, in which a coven of witches in New York conspires to have a young woman impregnated by Satan, moviemakers were attracted to the themes of demonic possession and the appearance of the Antichrist. William Peter Blatty won an Academy Award for the 1973 screenplay of his best-selling novel The Exorcist. Audiences were horrified by the special effects and intrigued by the account of the devil's possession of a young girl, played by Linda Blair. Four years later a turgid sequel, Exorcist 2: The Heretic, was released, but it was only modestly successful. The second sequel, Exorcist 3 (1990), had even less success at the box office.

The Antichrist

In 1976 Gregory Peck starred in a film relating the childhood of the Antichrist. The Omen was given an R rating for its violence. Two years later a sequel, Damien—Omen II, was released. While it still had high production values, this and the 1981 sequel, The Final Conflict, followed predictable paths, relating stories of evil personified.

World Out of Control

The success of these films was linked to people's deepening sense of the world's being out of control, as seen in the increase of inexplicable violence, such as the Manson family murders of 1969. The trial of Charles Manson and his followers for the deaths of Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of Roman Polanski (who directed Rosemary's Baby), and her friends in 1971 attracted a nation that struggled to comprehend their actions. When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the death penalty as it stood in 1972, the death sentences of the Manson family were reduced to life imprisonment, reinforcing a sense that old values no longer applied. The mass suicide of Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple followers at the end of the decade at their retreat in Guyana, South America, was for many a confirmation that even religion had become somehow perverted.

Apocalypse

Cultural confusions and personal tensions contributed to the growing sense that the end of the world was at hand, as reflected in the popularity of Hal Lindsey's apocalyptic book The Late, Great Planet Earth (1970). Inspired by the Israeli capture of Jerusalem in the 1967 war, Lindsey worked out most of the ideas of his book in the sermons he gave to students for the parachurch organization the Campus Crusade for Christ. Lindsey's study of the signs of the times forecasting Jesus' Second Coming sold more than ten million copies during the decade after its publication. Many Christians were convinced that the Jews' return to Jerusalem and the creation of the European Common Market fulfilled biblical prophecies prefiguring the Apocalypse.