The Altar of Hollywood's Religion
Hollywood has caught religion in a bad way. It isn’t Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Jewish or Muslim; it’s a religion all of its own. The Hollywood movie religion is an unholy alliance of elements from here and there—a bit of reincarnation, a dab of spiritualism, a touch of the occult, a hint of the Bible, a good dose of Eastern mysticism, a large serving of feel-good, self-help philosophy—all combined into popular, highly emotional movie packages. And Hollywood is preaching its religion with more vigour than many churches.
It’s a strange occurrence in a postmodern society, where religion is supposed to take a back seat to bigger concerns. We’re supposed to be sweating over investment portfolios, not feeling psychic vibes. We’re supposed to be shopping, not meditating. We’re supposed to be hardheaded realists, not muddle-headed spiritual devotees. So why does Hollywood focus on the weird and wonderful, the supernatural and the occult? And why are viewers loving it?
Atheists and sceptics must shake their heads when they glance down the television listings and the box-office ratings over the past few years. Movie after movie, TV show after TV show is delving into life after death and various types of spiritual worlds with vampires, angels, demons and other nondescript beings. What’s going on?
Film reviewer David Bruce suggests the current fad for supernatural movies began with the 1990 blockbuster Ghost. “This may be the film that triggered the whole recent wave of movies dealing with the themes of angels, afterlife, God and Satan/ evil,” he writes. “Hollywood has learned that people are interested not only in carnal things, but the spiritual realm, as well.”1
In Ghost, a murdered young executive communicates with his lover through a psychic. Subsequent movies and television programs have largely been variations on the same theme: The Sixth Sense; The Blair Witch Project, Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Waking the Dead; The Haunted; Bones; Dragonfly; Early Edition; Profiler; The X Files, Stigmata; Charmed; Scream III—just to name a few.
Hollywood exploits the theme by tapping into our age-old fear of death and draining it of every drop of emotion it can get. We all want more than this life, hoping, with Emile Dickinson, that “This world is not conclusion/ A sequel stands beyond.” There seems to be a gut-wrenching hunger within us for something more. To quote Woody Allen—“Who wants to achieve immortality through fame? I want to achieve immortality through not dying.”
In recent decades many neo-Freudian psychiatrists have turned their mentor’s ideas on their head. They argue that the fear of death, not sex, is responsible for most of the anxieties, frustrations and complexes that people face in the modern world. Hollywood producers seem to know all that. The Slate’s web-site film critic, David Edelstein, writes about the movie Sixth Sense: “For all its bogeyman shenanigans, it wants to leave you with faith in a higher order—in the possibility that even after death wrongs may be avenged, innocents protected, and the loose ends of one’s life tied up.”
Supernatural movies and television shows aren’t new, even if they were a little more benign. Think of oldies, such as I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, or The Ghost and Mrs Muir. But the sheer number of new movies and the tremendous advances in special effects and production values have graphically raised the impact of today’s portrayals. Explicit sex, violence and occult themes give today’s shows a much harder edge.
Many experts believe the media plays a major role in shaping the public’s interest and beliefs regarding life after death and whether we can communicate with people who have died. “At present there is intense popular interest in these questions in the United States,” writes philosopher Paul Kurtz. “It is stimulated by the mass media, at least as measured by the number of popular books, magazine articles, movies and television and radio programs devoted to the theme.”2
Purdue University Communications professor Glenn Sparks has been conducting ongoing studies of the media’s influence on people’s beliefs about the supernatural. “Our research shows that media depictions of a paranormal event may have an impact on viewers’ paranormal beliefs,” Sparks says. “Sceptics and scholars have always said this is so, but until now there has been little scientific evidence to prove it.”3
People may have lost faith in the traditional Christian picture of God, but they still want to believe in something. Sociologist Peter Berger says the assumption that we live in a secularised world is false. “The world today, with some exceptions . . . is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever,” he says.4
As G K Chesterton said, when people stop believing in God they don’t stop believing— it’s just that they start to believe in anything. And there’s plenty of evidence around to support that view. Materialism has been found wanting, and the New Age movement, spiritualism, occultism, Hollywoodism and a host of other isms have moved in to fill the vacuum. The problem is, they’re all as ultimately bankrupt as materialism.
The Kinks once sang: “Woke up this morning, what do I see?/ Robbery, violence, insanity. . . / Superman, Superman . . . / I want to fly like Superman.” Movies give people the chance to fly like Superman for a couple of hours. They provide a time to suspend normal rational thought, where viewers can bask in the lure of something more than just what they can see, touch, hear and smell. Where they can dwell in a spiritual realm that offers some kind of meaning—as illogical or nonsensical as the movies’ assumptions may be.
But then the lights come on, and reality hits—the Hollywood religions are just make-believe, their hope is ephemeral, their emotion packaged. There’s no rigorous theology with centuries of tradition behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example. It’s all based on a fictitious premise out of the creative mind of scriptwriter Josh Wheddon: “In every generation, there is a chosen one. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the slayer.”
Rolling Stone commends the director of the 2002 blockbuster, supernatural movie Signs for “the faith in things beyond the tangible” that he brings “to the battle beyond good and evil.” But again it’s an empty faith—no Holy Scripture or divine revelation to back it up, it’s just the imagination of the movie’s creators.
The recent spate of Hollywood creations is not just logically and theologically bankrupt—they’re potentially dangerous. Hollywood is taking the occult seriously, and making contact with the dead is a key theme in its movie religion. In Haunted, private investigator Matthew Taylor acquires the ability to communicate with dead people. In the supernatural thriller Dragonfly, Kevin Costner plays a doctor who starts getting mysterious messages from beyond the grave after his wife is killed in an accident. In The Sixth Sense a young boy has the ability to see dead people. Even going back to the 1991 film The Butcher’s Wife, its credits list Hollywood psychic Maria Papapetros as a special consultant.5
Trying to communicate with the dead is something specifically forbidden in the Judeo–Christian tradition. For example, Leviticus says: “Do not turn to mediums or seek out spiritists, for you will be defiled by them. I am the Lord your God” (19:31).
The spiritual world is not an arena to take lightly. John the Revelator warns against “spirits of demons performing miraculous signs” (see Revelation 16:12-14) and the apostle Paul says, “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). The Bible predicts that spiritualism will be a pervasive and dangerous deception toward the end of time (see 2 Thessalonians 2:9; 1 Timothy 4:1).
The problem with the Hollywood religion is that it’s based on a totally false premise. The Bible clearly teaches that the dead are just that—dead. That they know absolutely nothing. And they will remain that way until an end-time resurrection (see, for example, 1 Thessalonians 4:16, 17; 1 Corinthians 15:51, 52; Ecclesiastes 9:5).
So when we’re faced with popular television programs such as Crossing Over, where the host John Edwards purports to communicate with the dead, one thing we can know for sure—he’s not communicating with the dead. There are only two alternatives: either he is a master magician and psychologist, fooling the audience, or he’s communicating with something in the spiritual world other than dead human beings.
The good news is that our Creator God is the most powerful Player in the spiritual world, and will finally defeat all evil forces. And because of His wonderful love for us, He has prepared a way for us to soar like Superman. The startling claim of Christianity is that the death and resurrection of Jesus guarantees us the reality of life beyond death (see 1 Corinthians 15:20-22). His resurrection is the most powerful symbol of God’s control over a realm beyond our three dimensions—“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen,” says Paul. “For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18).
Jesus overcame the restrictions of this life and offers us the power to do the same. The apostle Paul wrote, “I stand on trial because of my hope in the resurrection of the dead” (Acts 23:6). God holds the only solution to our anxieties about death: “Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope,” the apostle Paul writes. “We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him” (1 Thessalonians 4:13, 14).
We can look into tarot cards and crystal balls, but ultimately we’ll see only our empty selves reflected. We can look at astrology charts, but we’ll be looking into a black hole. We can get a fix of Hollywood hope for a couple of hours, but we’re looking at either a myth or a lie. There’s only one answer—only one way to break free into the spiritual realm—and that is found in the old, old story, the greatest story ever told, not in Hollywood’s old, old lies.
Sources:
1. David Bruce, http://www.hollywoodjesus.com/ Ghost.htm
2. Paul Kurtz, “The New Paranatural Paradigm: Claims of Communicating with the Dead,” Vol 24, 2000, The Skeptical Inquirer.
3. Purdue News, June 1995.
4. Peter Berger, “The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview,” www.stetson.edu/depart
ments/polsci/Berger/20Desecularization.pdf
5. Body, Mind and Spirit, Nov-Dec 1991, page 46.
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