Spotlight: The Importance of Being Honest

“Everything in your life is public. There are no secrets. Everything you say, everything you do, everyplace (sic) you go, every thought you think is going to be known by all.”

Ted Haggard—one-time pastor of Colorado Springs’ massive New Life Church, one-time president of the National Association of Evangelicals—wrote that in his book Letters from Home. Those words proved sadly prophetic: In 2006, a male prostitute came forward, alleging that he and Haggard had had sex and used methamphetamines.  Haggard—one of the most powerful men in the evangelical movement at the time—was removed from the pulpit and became a national punchline.

I covered Haggard’s fall in 2006 as a secular religion reporter for the Colorado Springs Gazette. Those words, soaked in irony, were strangely comforting as I pushed through this difficult story. And I remembered those words again as I watched Spotlight, one of the year’s best movies.

There are no secrets.

From Spotlight, courtesy Sony Pictures

Spotlight is a terrifically unsentimental story about how a team of Boston Globe journalists uncovered the pedophilic priest scandal in 2002. While the movie doesn’t yank at the heart like, say, Roomdoes, it feels utterly real. Utterly true. The detached zeal of the Globe’s reporters reminded me of the journalists I’ve worked with. The stories from abuse victims sounded very similar to what I heard during my own interviews when I covered the scandal—the reverence to which parish priests were held, and how those priests used that reverence for their own ends. “How do you say no to God, right?” one victim says. Spotlight felt spot on.

When the film begins its narrative in a pre-scandal, pre-9/11 world, the Diocese of Boston is arguably the most powerful institution in this predominantly Catholic city. Millions turn to the Catholic Church for guidance and solace. Its charities help countless people. It’s not a perfect institution: No one claims it is. But it’s inconceivable to most folks in Boston, including those who work at the Globe, that the Diocese would be hiding the darkest of secrets.

from Spotlight, courtesy Sony Pictures

But as the Globe’s team of investigative reporters (known as Spotlight) begins digging, they discover that some of the diocese’s priests have been abusing young children. When parents come forward, the diocese sends them to other parishes or dioceses, where they’re free to molest again.

The Diocese tries to quash the investigation. One of its legal advisors appeals to Spotlight editor “Robby” Robinson’s sense of community and continuity. Robby (Michael Keaton) attended Catholic schools. He sees the good the charities do in the community. Don’t rock the boat, the lawyer suggests. Don’t destroy all the good the Church does because of a few bad apples.

But the Spotlight team pushes forward, and the story becomes ever more unseemly. It takes a toll on the reporters, too: Reporter Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), a reporter who sometimes celebrated Mass with her grandmother, says she just can’t go to church anymore: It makes her too angry. Fellow reporter Michael Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) oozes fury. “They knew, and they let it happen!” he shouts. “To kids! It could’ve been you! It could’ve been me! It could’ve been any of us!”

And he had a right to be angry. Every Catholic did. It was a horrible story … and one that needed to be told.

When I was covering the Haggard scandal, many folks from his church didn’t understand my job and hated the fact that I was doing it. I was kicked out of the church one time. I got some pretty nasty e-mails. One official there once asked me, as a friend, not to print a follow-up. It’d destroy the church, he said. It’d hurt all the good work it had done.

I couldn’t do him that favor, of course. I wrote the story. But I understood the instinct to protect the church—protect an institution that means so much to so many people.

When we love something, we want to protect it. And so, when the something or someone we love does something bad, our instinct for self-preservation kicks in. We deny or rationalize or hide the sordid truth.

But if our faith means anything at all, we have to be honest about those who do terrible things in its name. It’s only through ruthless truth-telling that our earth-bound Church can better reflect its heavenly ideals. It’s only through exposing its flaws that we can fix them.

The Catholic Church is smaller than it was before the scandal, but I think a better and cleaner one now. A review via the Vatican’s radio outlet praised the movie, and lauding the reporters who inspired it.

“It was a group of professional journalists of the daily Boston Globe that made themselves examples of their most pure vocation,” said Luca Pellegrini, who often comments on pop culture for Vatican Radio, “that of finding the facts, verifying sources, and making themselves—for the good of the community and of a city—paladins of the need for justice.”

Ultimately, there are no secrets. Lots of verses make that very clear. “For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil,” we read in Ecclesiastes 12:24. And I think that goes not just for our own personal secrets, but the institutional ones, as well. As Christians, we’re not supposed to just sell a Facebook version of our faith. We’re to be honest.

Spotlight is not a movie that’ll strengthen anyone’s faith. The truths told here are too brutal for that. But it’s an important story to tell, and an important one for us to hear.

Looking for Truth at the Oscars

Gravity and American Hustle each snagged 10 Oscar nominations this morning, including for Best Picture. But they'll have to contend with seven other nominees for that top honor: 12 Years a Slave, Captain Phillips, Dallas Buyers Club, Her, Nebraska, Philomena, and The Wolf of Wall Street.

Overall, it's a strong mix of movies (even with the sad, nay, horrible omission of Saving Mr. Banks) in a year that had more than its fair share of good ones. But that doesn't mean they're all great to sit back and watch with your sweetie and a bag of popcorn. 12 Years a Slave and its depiction of horrors is, at times, almost torture to sit through. The Wolf of Wall Street is as rough and foul a movie to be released in—well, maybe ever. American Hustle, Dallas Buyers Club, Her and Nebraska are all rated R for good reason, and many Christians won't see R-rated movies unless they have the words "passion" and "Christ" in the title.

There are lots of good reasons to skip harsh movies, of course, whatever their artistic merit. Plugged In (the ministry for which I work) exhorts people to be wary of the entertainment they consume, just like health-conscious folks might clear of trans-fats. Watching a lot of sex and violence and whatnot can be unhealthy, studies suggest. And if that's not enough rationale, we can point to Scripture—the oft-quoted Philippians 4:8:

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

But should all of that preclude us from, or make us feel guilty for, watching the movies above? Not necessarily.

Many Christians take Phil. 4:8 to mean that we shouldn't expose ourselves to unpleasantness. If a movie contains elements that rub us the wrong way or make us feel uncomfortable or run counter to our faith, we should steer clear. And maybe they're right. I'm no theologian.

But when it comes to the art of storytelling (and movies, of course, are simply powerful visual stories), it seems to me like you often need to bring in some negative elements to bring forth the true, the right, the pure. The Bible itself is certainly no gigantic Hallmark card of inoffensiveness. It challenges us and sometimes shocks us. The people who wrote it lived in a harsh, brutal, sensuous and often unforgiving world. And so when I read Phil. 4:8, my eyes are pulled again and again to the beginning of the phrase.

Whatever is true.

"God's artistic choices should govern our own," writes N.D. Wilson in a fantastic online column for Christianity Today. "More than any other type of artist, Christian artists should be truth-lovers and truth-tellers. More than any other consumer, Christian readers … should be truth-seekers."

And so, I think, should Christian movie-watchers.

The movies selected as Best Picture nominees, by and large, hide truth inside their messy folds: artistic truth, emotional truth, spiritual truth. They touch a nerve. Most of them are not made to honor God. And yet, because of the truth embedded in each, they do in spite of themselves.

Over the next several weeks, until the Oscars are announced March 2, I'm going to periodically post some mini-musings on the Best Picture nominees. I'm calling them "discussionals" (a mixture of devotionals and discussions) because, well, I like to make up words every once in a while. They'll be mainly a series of thoughts and questions and even a Bible verse or two—stuff that I found worth mulling over. As such, they'll be quite personal, written as much to work through my own thoughts as anything.

I won't promise to get through all the nominees. But hopefully, I'll get to most of them—in alphabetical order. They'll be mostly for folks who've actually seen the films already and, of course, shouldn't be taken as a reason to go see them. But I hope they'll be of some use.

Searching for Sugar Man ... Finding a Miracle

I may have grown up in the ‘80s, but I’m emotionally a child of the ‘60s and ‘70s. When all my school chums were listening to Tiffany and Rick Astley (well, some of them were, anyway), I was grooving to Carole King and Simon & Garfunkel. I know, I know. Geeky. I never even learned to moon walk. I never claimed to be cool.

But geeky or no, I think I would’ve been a big fan of Rodriguez back in high school … had I ever heard of him.

But I hadn’t. No one had. The guy released two or three albums in the early 1970s that flopped in America—more never-was than has-been. But then, a decade after the guy failed miserably, something amazing happened. He became incredibly popular in South Africa of all places. His music became one of the impetuses to overturn apartheid. He—well, why don’t you just watch the trailer?

Searching for Sugar Man won the Academy Award for Best Documentary just a couple of weeks ago. Well deserving, I think. Great story, great music. Check it out if you have a couple hours to spare. I think you’d enjoy it even if you can’t tell your Kings from your Croces or your Simons from your Garfunkels.

But the thing that makes it worth talking about on this particular blog is this:

At the very end of the trailer, you hear someone say that “these are the days of miracles and wonder,” a phrase most often used when folks would stumble across burning bushes and snack on manna and the like. And indeed, the story of Rodriguez seems almost miraculous—not only the man’s improbable success a continent and culture far, far away, but in the fact that everybody in South Africa thought he was dead.

Spoiler alert: He wasn’t—just living a quiet, below-the-poverty-line-life in Detroit. Here was a man whose music everyone knew. He was a part of their lives, their culture and, most importantly, the welcome change that took place there after ages of racism. And all his fans knew—they knew—the guy was dead and gone. And then, one day, they learn he’s doing just fine—and if they’d like to see for themselves, he’ll be playing a concert or two.

In a way, it’d be like if I’d learned that C.K. Chesterton was alive and well (and around 150 years old), tinkering with a blog somewhere in the suburbs of London. Or that Ghandi didn’t die; he was just resting up to inspire yet another generation.

It’d be like if someone like, oh, someone like Jesus had risen from the grave.

I don’t say that to be flip or heretical. I just think that, sometimes, we folks who have been Christians for a long time can lose sight about what a big deal the whole resurrection was. Oh, we know it’s big, of course. Religions don’t set up holidays for minor happenings. But because many of us have heard about Easter from before we can remember, we take it for granted.

But Searching for Sugar Man helped me see Easter in a ever-so-slightly new light—gave me the merest of inklings of what it must’ve felt like to have seen Jesus crucified … and then three days later, have the same Jesus serve me breakfast.

If Jesus had been just a great moral teacher—a guy who was way ahead of his time and spoke up for the weak and downtrodden, a guy who helped the people around him and for millennia after—his life would’ve still been worth remembering. He would’ve been Jesus Christ Superstar; a man who through his words and deed, would’ve set the world on a new, exciting path. And his tragic, painful death would’ve been reason for the whole world to cry.

And then, one day, we learn that he’s not dead at all. He’s living. Not figuratively, but literally. And suddenly, all the thoughts we followers have of him—our ideas of how profound and how wise and how gentle and brave he was—is joined by another, wholly unexpected emotion: Incredulous, unbridled joy.

May we all feel a bit of that joy in the days and weeks to come.

Oscar Meets God

Experts say that the United States is growing ever-more secular. Studies and polls back that up. About 18 percent of us claim no religious affiliation these days, up from 15 percent in 2009.

But those numbers don't tell the whole story. Many of those non-affiliated Americans (colloquially called "nones") believe in God. They pray, sometimes daily. Evidence of a stubborn sense of faith and religion is found everywhere in our society--including in our entertainment. And when I look at the films nominated for the Academy Awards Best Picture, I have to wonder: If we Americans are growing less spiritual, why are our films growing more?

Pi, from Life of Pi, might be forced to call himself a "none" if asked--only because there's no box to check for "all." He claims to be a Hindu-Christian-Muslim, seeing God everywhere. He is, I think, a more accurate reflection of where American faith is moving. And it makes sense--if not theologically, at least culturally. We Americans like to think of ourselves as having no boundaries, no restrictions. We've been taught from the cradle we can do anything we set our minds to. So why restrict ourselves to  one religion? Why follow one path when we can follow all?

As a pretty traditional Christian, I can think of lots of reasons why one path is better ... but that's not really the point here. Pi still manages to express, I think, both the beauty and power of spirituality--something most of us feel at times, regardless of  belief. We've been born with a desire to reach for God. God gave us that desire. And Pi conveys that desire better than perhaps any movie I've ever seen.

I think that Beasts of the Southern Wild is another manifestation of "none" spirituality. Its worldview is very much secular. The main characters consider themselves--even pride themselves--on being "beasts." They're survivors in a beast-eat-beast world, in marvelous union with each other and the world around them. There's no talk of God, no consideration of heaven. Heaven for them is in the rural backwoods "bathtub" that 6-year-old Hushpuppy and the adults around her call home.

And yet, the movie is still deeply spiritual--full of cosmic portent and divine energy. This is myth on a grand scale, full of morals and monsters and universal force. It suggests that even those who don't pay homage to God, any god, still feel that spiritual tug. Says Hushpuppy:

When it all goes quiet behind my eyes, I see everything that made me lying around in invisible pieces. When I look too hard, it goes away. And when it all goes quiet, I see they are right here. I see that I'm a little piece in a big, big universe. And that makes things right. When I die, the scientists of the future, they're gonna find it all. They gonna know, once there was a Hushpuppy, and she live with her daddy in the Bathtub. 

In almost every movie nominated for a best picture Oscar this year, God is somewhere in the picture. Sometimes you can feel His presence only at the edges. But sometimes He fills the screen. In Zero Dark Thirty, our hero, Maya, seems as hardened a secularist as there is. And yet she confesses that she feels as though she was "meant' to track down Osama bin Laden--a sacred calling from an unknown source. In Lincoln, our title character believes that slavery is our nation's greatest sin and he means to expunge it once and for all--even as others suggest that keeping other people in bondage is somehow God's will. In Django Unchained, there's an implicit understanding that slavery is evil--a true evil that transcends and supersedes cultural, societal purely human-based whims.

And then we have Les Miserables--an explicitly Christian parable from beginning to end. We see the conflict between the Pharisaical Inspector Javert and the grace-filled reality of Jean Valjean--along with perhaps revolutionary France's version of the "nones" in Mr. and Madame Thénardier. As Javert and Valjean joust over what's right or true, the Thénardiers are more concerned with what's in it for them--a worldview that while not at all attractive in Les Mis, has some unapologetic adherents today.

As a Christian movie reviewer, sometimes I hear readers talk about how "godless" Hollywood is. And it's true that the entertainment industry doesn't produce many films that cater to conservative evangelical Christians. But truth be told, Hollywood is far from godless. It seems to me that filmmakers are searching--and sometimes finding--God all the time.