R rated Christian

This past weekend I had the opportunity to watch a film I've been wanting to see for about 2 years now. The film is To End All Wars featuring Kieffer Sutherland and was released back in 2001. Anyway the reason I wanted to see the movie is that I had to read the book during my Sr. year or college. In fact I have to give a lot of credit to Earnest Gordon as being the author who got me back into reading. Something strange happened as I was reading that book for my leadership class, I found myself actually enjoying it!

To quickly summarize the story is about Earnest Gordon a Scottish soldier who served the crown in the pacific during WWII. The book begins with some back story and tells about his daring attempt to escape by sea at the fall of Sumatra into Japanese hands, but in the end he was captured by the Japanese. This is where the movie, and the main story of the book, begins. Gordon is taken to a prison camp in the jungles of Asia. While in the camp he nearly dies of malaria and dysentery but is saved by the efforts of 2 other prisoners. This is a key point as at this time all the other prisoners were only looking out for themselves. The kindness shown him leads Gordon to find God in the prison camp, he then looks at the camp and decides to try and help his fellows understand that the only way any of them will survive is by looking out for one another. To do this Gordon starts a "Jungle University" where the men can study and discuss Plato, Shakespeare, Religion, and eventually even music and art. More and more prisoners in the camp come to know Christ through the experiences started by Gordon and his 2 pals, but things are not all good either. The Japanese still inflict terrible injustices and beatings on the men, and even crucify one of Gordon's friends. Also the camp is not all about studies, as the prisoners are forced to build the infamous "Railroad of Death."

So what am I talking about here? What's this got to do with the title of this post? Well as I popped the DVD into my player the other night and sat down to see the story come to life on my TV screen a familiar warning popped up... "This film is rated R and is meant for mature audiences." Now I've seen lots of R rated movies and have no problem with the idea that I'll watch more in the future. But the question that came to me on this occasion was "can a Christian make an R rated film?"

The church generally frowns upon showing any film with a rating above PG, and even that is pushing it some times. So how can a person following Jesus direct a film that will merit an R rating? All this was raised by To End All Wars and so after watching the movie I tried checking out the DVD features to see if any issues of faith were mentioned. The Director, David Cunningham, never really mentioned much about the story of Gordon's faith and in fact his faith is underplayed in the movie which focuses more on the ideals that came from it, the school, the forgiveness, and the sacrifices. This leads me to believe that Cunningham believes in the humanitarian ideals shared in the book but lacks the personal faith in Christ that Gordon found in that situation, though I pray I'm wrong and have no solid evidence either way.

So how about it, can a Christian make an R rated film? I believe they can, not every aspect of life is meant for all audiences. The realities of war, rape, and prison are things that we want to protect our children from until they are mature enough to understand. And yet they are not subjects that we as Christians should avoid all together. My favorite part of the book To End All Wars was the aspect of finding faith in the most dire of circumstances. However, even with this great aspect to the story line it is not a book for a five-year-old to read, there is a lot of death, brutal beatings, a brief mention of women who are sex slaves to the Japanese soldiers, and, as I mentioned before, even a crucifixion. If the book is not meant for a five-year-old how could the movie meet that audience?

We all know we live in a flawed world and our rating system is no exception. The MPAA is the organization that sets the ratings in the US and according to their website the requirements for an R rating are...
strong language
violence
nudity
drug abuse
or a combination of the above
Looking at the list with no context of a story we begin to ask how can we justify making a film with these elements and claiming it as kingdom work? However, if you look at stories like To End All Wars, to gain any kind of realism there is going to be strong language and violence. How about a story of the drug dealer who finds Christ through some unique circumstance? You can't possibly make a believable drug dealer with out any drug abuse. It's true that nudity is a bit harder to justify with out subbing porn star for drug dealer in my previous example , but consider the portrayal of concentration camps in Schindler's List where Jews were forced to strip down and run around to show the Nazi's how healthy they were.

My final argument came to me when I had stepped away from To End All Wars. Consider a film that was released a few years ago, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Depicting the very struggles our Lord went through to bring us the forgiveness we so desperately needed and so easily take for granted, the Passion quite deserved it's R rating due to the amount of blood spilled.

In conclusion, I think it is important to carefully consider what stories merit the high ratings and why specifically, but I think the R rating is something that we as Christians should not necessarily fear. Who cares what label the world puts on our story, the real issue is can we make an excellent picture that tells an important story?