"Saved" Only Partially Sucked
So I watched Saved the other day, and there’s a lot there to like. I think it’s a necessary antidote to the widespread acceptance of evangelical Christianity (or at least evangelical rhetoric), as evidenced by the success of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (which, ironically, came not from evangelicals but from an Orthodox Catholic), President Bush’s faith-based re-election and the Wal-Mart success of Rick Warren’s Purpose-Driven Life/Church series of books, journals, study guides, audio tapes, calendars, kids books and stuffed animals. Its criticisms are sharp and deep, even if it draws the wrong conclusions.
The movie is essentially Mean Girls with a different teen pop star in the cast and a different sense of humor. Where Mean Girls was hip, witty and poking fun at a sort of universal teen high school experience, Saved is dry, incisive and poking fun at a particular subsect of the teen high school experience, the hyper-zealous Christian high school. And it’s great.
The movie is most effective when it’s pointing out how Evangelical Christianity has largely abandoned the Gospel in favor of a new kind of Phariseeism. True Christians™ look a certain way, talk a certain way, and they certainly don’t smoke, drink, or talk about anything real. They organize prayer circles as a back-handed way of condemning their friends. They use Christian ethics to control people and maintain their status. They stick together and don’t step out of line. Faith is a lot less messy when you’re just a part of a group that takes its beliefs for granted and doesn’t ever talk about them.
My favorite scene in the movie is when Jena Malone’s character is walking home from a Planned Parenthood clinic, newly pregnant, totally disillusioned with her faith in God’s provision and about to be ostracized from the rest of her perfectly-Christian life. She stops outside a church and looks up at a huge cross engraved in concrete on the side of the building. In a shot that makes her look like the Blessed Virgin contemplating her son on the cross, she begins to curse at the cross, tentatively at first and then in despair when she realizes she means it.
Now that’s the kind of faith the rest of the world relates to. A faith that acknowledges our inability to believe all the time. A faith that is both deeply offended and deeply transfixed by what the cross represents. When you’re raised to believe that God is in the business of blessing you for wearing Christian t-shirts and not listening to rap music, you’re bound to curse God when those blessings don’t arrive. This is not Job lamenting a sovereign God’s apparent abandonment. Jena Malone’s Mary is not cursing the cross so much as she’s cursing the lie she’s been fed as to what the cross means. It doesn’t mean happiness. It doesn’t mean worldly success. It means joyful suffering. It means self-denial and humility and reverence for a just and loving God who somehow found a way to justify the most ugly, worthless and condemned people. That’s offensive to people who believe that God just wants to bless us for doing what we declare to be His will. It’s at least as offensive as Mary cursing at the cross.
The problem is that none of this is ever really shored up in the movie. That moment of brilliance is lost in a caricature of absurd cultural Christianity, which is as hilarious and on-target as it is unfocused. The popular kids’ speech drips with religious pomposity, and the only Jew in school is a cigarette-smoking, foul-mouthed outcast. It’s an exaggerated dichotomy, and for the purposes of pointing out the excesses of American evangelicalism, it works. The popular girls in school double as a Christian girl-group called The Christian Jewels, who perform with much eyes-closed hand-raising and thank Jesus after performing one of their songs. The hip principal/youth pastor plays “Whoomp! There It Is” as his entrance music, says “phat” a few times and promptly issues an alter call without even mentioning sin, atonement or the resurrection. The principal is perhaps the most complex character, because the lampooning of youth pastors and church leadership who think cultural relevancy is paramount to truth is dead on, and yet at times he exhibits a real understanding of his students’ need for the Gospel. It sounds like me.
Another thing that bothers me is that the only interesting and “real” characters in the film are the ones who reject the firmness of their faith. It seems to be telling us that the traditional Christian faith is outdated and irrelevant, and that the Gospel of the 21st century, the real Gospel, embraces moral ambiguity and the a flexible kind of truth. Jesus loved people, and post-modernity teaches us that nothing is absolutely certain, so we shouldn’t concern ourselves with truth or sound doctrine or morality, we just need tolerance and situational ethics.
The film seems to be saying that evangelical Christianity lost its way because legalism is the natural result of insistence upon Gospel truth. As I see it, the problem is that evangelical Christianity has tried to dress up the Gospel and turn it into a means of satisfying our need for control and success. The goal of the Gospel is not our happiness, success and right-living. The goal of the Gospel is our reconciliation to God, for the purpose of glorifying God.
When you misunderstand the Gospel and set up for yourself a set of rigid beliefs based on that misunderstanding, you’re bound to run head-first into a Jesus that is flat, dead, and wooden, like the billboard Jesus that functions as the film’s most poignant symbol. I just wish the filmmakers were sure what they meant that symbol to be.