What The 2022 Oscars Hit (And Miss) About Religion
Timothee Chalemet in “Dune.”
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(OPINION) This year’s Oscar nominees for Best Picture deal explicitly and intelligently with religion in ways that Hollywood movies rarely do. But the blind spots they reveal about Hollywood’s thinking on religion are equally as telling.
The Oscars typically give a pretty decent picture of where the country is culturally at any given year. Any movie that’s nominated has to be pitched by the filmmakers, get funding from investors, be well-received by at least some critics and, finally, be selected by the Oscars committee. Whatever you want to say about the biases of the film industry, the critics and the academy — and we’ll address those later — the multiple classes of gatekeepers whom the movies have to pass through in order to be nominated gives you a pretty clear picture of what a huge segment of society’s culture-makers are experiencing in the world.
Unlike Oscars past, where movies either ignored religion or cast it in broad negative stereotypes, this year’s crop of movies has a far more nuanced and interesting portrait of religion that reflects more accurately and challengingly how America is wrestling with religion today: from disappointment in religion leading many to deconstruction to acknowledgement of where religion is helping society to potential solutions for fixing the problems in religion.
Deconstruction
The first theme that is obvious in the Oscar nominee movies this year is deconstruction. Most of the films feature characters who are deconstructing faith to some degree or another.
Some movies, like “Belfast” or “Licorice Pizza,” follow people or feature characters who see evil done in the name of religion — or simply by evil men — and respond by turning away from faith. In “Belfast,” Buddy — based on director Kenneth Braneigh himself as a young boy — grows up in an Ireland torn apart by Protestant versus Catholic religious terrorism. His father is adamant that religion is the problem but sends him to church anyway for the sake of his mother. Barry’s impression of the priest at the church he goes to is that of a sweaty, screaming fire-and-brimstone preacher who gives Buddy a lot to think about regarding hell — but not much else. Later, Buddy asks his dad if it would be okay if he dated a girl he likes even though she’s Catholic. His father answers that it doesn’t matter, as long as she’s kind.
The protagonist in “Licorice Pizza,” Alana Kane, makes the mistake of inviting the guy she likes to her family’s place for dinner. Her father asks him to say the prayer, but he refuses because he’s an atheist, arguing politely that he can’t believe in a God who allows evil in the world. This embarrasses her and causes a fight between them.
Other films show people deconstructing their faith in religion and reconstructing it again to a version of faith they’re more comfortable with. “Don’t Look Up” is the second Oscar film to feature Timothee Chalemet as a young man who’s deconstructed his religious faith. And if you watch the movie, you can see why most of the film centers on characters who are atheists or politicians who cynically use God in their speeches to play to the crowds while pursuing their own ambition at the expense of the people they are trying to serve. Chalemet’s Yule comes in at the end and proudly says he believes in God — but not the way his parents do. “My parents raised me evangelical, and I hate them, but I found my own way to it, my own relationship,” he says. Later he leads all of the heroes in a prayer that they know is going to be their last meal.
“Dune,” meanwhile, portrays a darker path: having your faith deconstructed as a manipulative lie to gain power and then deciding to embrace the lie to gain power for yourself. “Dune” follows the story of Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalemet), a Duke’s son of an intergalactic empire in the far future who’s being groomed to be “the chosen one” by his mother and her order of Jei-like nuns called the Bene Gesserit.
During the movie, he discovers that the Bene Gesserit, supposed to merely be advisers to their empire’s leaders, are secretly manipulating them to bring about the prophecy of the chosen one — including spreading the rumor that Paul is the chosen one in order to manipulate the natives of the planet Paul’s father is ruling. This makes Paul cynical of his religious upbringing. And he becomes further darkened to it when he sees the future and realizes that he won’t be a hero but a tyrant. When his father is killed and he loses his kingdom, Paul cynically decides to use the prophecy to manipulate the natives into making him their leader anyway.
“The Power of The Dog” references deconstruction of religion more implicitly than explicitly. The film barely features religion in it at all except for the title, which is a reference to Psalm 22:20 — “Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog” — and one scene in which the lead character reads the psalm to himself at the end of the film. The whole film, however, is largely interpreted as a deconstruction of traditional masculinity as represented in the myth of the cowboy, which is highly tied to conservative Christianity in the cultural conversation at present, a la books like Kristen Kobes Du Mez’s “Jesus and John Wayne.”
Not all movies on the Best Picture Nominee list are deconstructive of religion. “Coda” doesn’t feature religion at all except for some jokes that the star’s family make among themselves. “King Richard” and “West Side Story” both portray religion as a normal, even positive, part of the characters’ lives. “West Side Story” is notable on this list because it is a remake of a movie that featured basically no religion at all, yet the remake has a solid amount of religion in it.
Although it’s not on the Best Picture nominee list, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” for which Jessica Chastain is nominated for Best Actress. This film — which we reviewed here — centers on the true-life story of celebrity evangelical televangelists Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye, who were the face of prosperity gospel Christianity in the ‘70s and ‘80s until scandals involving fraud and sex tore down their empire. Tammy Faye is portrayed as a true-believer Christian who is swept up in her husband’s toxic ambition and then has to reconstruct her faith in the wake of the scandal.
This focus on deconstruction isn’t surprising. “Deconstruction” has been the buzzword of the moment in religious circles, with numerous public scandals of abuse by Christian leaders and the large-scale support by conservative evangelicals of the less-than-Christian President Donald Trump and his policies causing many to question their faith. In these communities, books like “Jesus and John Wayne,” which attempt to deconstruct the toxic culture of evangelical communities while reconstructing a more positive faith, have become best sellers. All these movies reflect the way people of faith in the modern world wrestle with the ways that religion can be toxic and decide for themselves whether they’re going to abandon their faith (“Belfast,” “Licorice Pizza”), reconstruct a healthier version of their faith (“Don’t Look Up,” “The Eyes of Tammy Faye”) or join the toxic religion to benefit themselves (“Dune”).
The good side of religion
One of the unusual things at the Oscars this year is how interested it is in showcasing and exploring the positive influence of religion. Oscar nominees this year, while they show the ways religion can go bad, also often showcase religion’s ability to inspire positive action within people and communities.
Often, this manifests in ministries of reconciliation or protection of the weak or necessary political change. In “West Side Story,” the women are the religious ones, and they are also the ones working to keep the men away from violence. In “The Power of The Dog,” the son reads Psalm 22:20 after killing his uncle in defense of his mom. He appears to gain comfort from this that he did the right thing. In “Dune,” the religious order of the Bene Gesserit, while they may be cynical and manipulative and lie to get people to do what they want, are powerful. And their influence can be positive as well as negative. Paul, although he is cynical about the Bene Gesserit’s manipulation of his life and the beliefs of the Fremen when he arrives on their planet, eventually embraces his powers for good.
Religion is also given credit for the comfort that it brings people. In “Drive My Car,” Oto Kafuku, the wife of protagonist Yusuke Kafuku, tells a story with reincarnation at the center that helps bring catharsis to her own feelings and is a happy bonding experience for them. Later, the actors in the play of “Uncle Vanya” that Yusuke is directing recite a scene in which one character asks what the point of what they’re doing is if people will forget them when they’re gone. Another character says to them, “They may forget you, but God won’t.” This gives them comfort.
In “Don’t Look Up,” Yule is portrayed as one of the most positive and genuine characters in the story. At the end, he leads a prayer of gratitude to God, which brings comfort and closure to everyone as they prepare to die. It is both profound and poignant. “King Richard” also shows Richard and his family sharing grace together.
What’s most fascinating about these portrayals is how well they line up with recent data on the benefits of religion: comfort and social bonding. Many studies have shown how belief in God is good for your mental health. But a recent study showed that while most Americans’ mental health deeply declined during the pandemic, the only people whose mental health actually improved were those who regularly attended in-person church services. On social bonding, people who regularly attend in-person church services are far less likely to get divorced, and those who identify as religious conservatives report having the highest relationship satisfaction in marriage.
How religion can be fixed
Building on the point that religion is good when it focuses on comfort and community bonding, Oscar 2022 films hint that religion can be fixed if the people who are more naturally good at comfort and community bonding are in charge of it: women.
As previously noted, the women in “West Side Story” are both the most religious and the most driven to push the men toward reconciliation. Throughout the story, the women are the moral consciences and the better angels that the men either listen to or ignore — and when they do ignore them, they stand in judgment over them to condemn them.
In “Drive My Car,” women tend to be the centers of spiritual influence and the people who facilitate social bonding and personal healing. Oto tells Yusuke the story about reincarnation as a way to help them bond, and it’s a woman in the “Uncle Vanya” play who speaks words of comfort about God. In Yusuke’s arc, it is his wife Oto whose actions initiate and support the rituals that maintain their bond, while it is her absence that breaks her husband emotionally and the presence of a new woman — Misaki Watari, his driver — that helps him heal from his debilitating grief.
In Belfast, Buddy’s grandmother is the only deeply religious person who is portrayed positively in the story. While the religious young men spend the time tearing apart the city to kill the religious people on the other side, she spends her time comforting and caring for her family the best she can.
In “The Power of The Dog,” much of the conflict centers around whether or not Peter will embrace the influence of his mother Rose (Kirsten Dunst) or the influence of his stepdad’s brother Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch). The mother’s influence can be seen in the way she encourages Peter to be like her in prioritizing care and service and being sensitive and artistic. Phil mocks these qualities in him publicly and encourages him to follow his own example in embracing the more traditional masculine ideals of rugged toughness and disagreeable assertiveness — or aggressiveness. Peter seems torn between the two, partly due to his potential growing mutual infatuation with Phil, until it becomes clear to him that Phil’s aggression makes him a threat to his mother. As a result, he disposes of Phil in a more traditionally feminine, sneaky way. Religion doesn’t come explicitly into play in these themes until the very end, when Peter reads Psalm 22:20, seemingly affirming his choice to kill his uncle to save his mother. Also, in current cultural conversations, the deconstruction of the masculine cowboy archetype and the deconstruction of Christianity and its replacement with a more feminine religion are closely related — more on that later.
“The Eyes of Tammy Faye” portrays Tammy Faye as the shining example of true Christianity whose only goal is to love people and make them feel loved — through comfort and community bonding. But she is led astray, and her message is corrupted by her husband and her male friends’ corruption of Christianity into one built around ambition for wealth and political power, until their inevitable fall and her return to her original authentic faith.
The idea that the problem with religion is its hypermasculinity, and its potential redemption in restoring Christianity’s true femininity, is one with a lot of traction in cultural conversations right now. Articles that expose the abuse of women by Christians in power — like the recent reporting from Christianity Today that exposed sexual harrassment went unchecked in the organization — imply that sexism in evangelical culture is pervasive. Recent books like “Jesus and John Wayne,” “The Making of Biblical Womanhood” and “Recovering From Biblical Manhood and Womanhood” have won over a great many people in the Christian and secular spaces with their arguments that evangelicals have corrupted Christianity with hypermasculinity and sexism, both of which need to be purged in order to restore an authentic, nontoxic Christianity.
Despair
Despite this potential hope of a nontoxic religion through greater feminine influence, there is an underlying despair in the Oscar nominees that even a healthy religion is not enough to defeat the evils that threaten our world.
All the love and compassion and pleas for peace of the women in “West Side Story” don’t stop the men from killing each other. The religion of Yule comforts the heroes in “Don’t Look Up” as they’re about to die but is powerless to stop it. Buddy’s grandmother’s love and care for her family in “Belfast” can’t stop the terrorism in their country that threatens them and can’t stop them from needing to leave the country in order to find a job to allow the family to stay together. In “The Power of The Dog,” violence — even if it’s more feminine violence — is the only way ultimately to save the mother from the man who threatens her. In “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” Faye’s authentic Christianity isn’t enough to stop her husband and his friends from pulling the wool over her eyes and destroying the legacy she is building for a potentially better version of Christianity. Paul Atrades sees the future and can see that he will eventually become just as much of a mass-murdering imperial tyrant as any of his enemies are.
This despair reflects with depressing accuracy what we see in the real world. The same study that showed that those who are religious tend to be happier and have stronger bonds with family and friends also showed that being religious made zero difference in rates of domestic abuse. And those who hope things will change in the church if women gain more power keep getting bad news that brings that hope into doubt. The Times Up organization, a completely women-led nonprofit created to help women who have been sexually assaulted or harassed, has been rocked by multiple scandals since its inception in 2018 — including its leader having to step down due to allegations of perpetuating abuse. This skepticism that elevating women will curb sexual assault is born out among teachers, who are almost 70% women and also 100 times more likely to commit sexual assault against their students than Catholic priests. Those who hope elevating women in the church will reverse the tide of religious decline often find themselves disappointed that the church denominations that elevate women to leadership find themselves losing members, while the denominations that ban female leadership retain their membership proportional to the population — even if they can’t brag that they are growing.
What the Oscars miss and where we go from here
The Oscars this year do a great job of surveying much of the culture’s struggles with religion and culture generally now. It captures the deconstruction of religion, masculinity and democracy that much of our culture is feeling, the hope that “the future is female” can save us and the despair that this future is unfounded.
There’s much that watching these movies can deeply teach us and challenge us about the world we live in. I still remember when depictions of religion in Hollywood movies — let alone the Oscars — were almost nonexistent and uniformly negative. So the fact that Hollywood has evolved to a place where it can show the nuances to religion in our culture in ways that are shockingly well backed up by data is deeply refreshing.
But it would be foolish to think that if we watched the Oscar nominees we would be getting anywhere near a complete picture of the religious conversation in America at present. Most obviously, there is an entire half of the country that isn’t disillusioned about religion due to Christians’ embrace of conservative politics because they also embrace those politics. They see the number of fallen evangelicals as a reflection of general fallen human nature rather than something wrong with their theology — after all, there’s at least as many sex abuse scandals among secular liberals in Hollywood and politics — and a sign that the country further needs the religious values they support, such as banning critical race theory in schools or launching conservative entertainment to compete with Hollywood, like The Daily Wire.
Likewise, there is deep disagreement over the solution to whatever problems that do exist. There is a growing “Christian manosphere” that believes — in opposition to those who think the hope of the church in women — that the problems of the church come from the way it’s emphasis on feminine values of comfort and community over male-appealing virtues, like godly ambition and competition, have alienated and stunted the growth of men. This view is represented by Aaron Renn’s “The Masculinist,” Michael Foster’s “It’s Good To Be A Man” or “The Church Impotent, and Leon Podles’ “Losing The Good Portion.” You can also put Dr. Jordan Peterson generally in this camp. Although he’s not a Christian per se, he makes the same general argument. And a growing number of writers and thinkers are pushing back against the narrative that the modern world gives us cause to despair. And that’s only what they miss in predominantly White and Christian religious conversations happening in America.
The danger of Hollywood's blind spots on these religious topics is that people who primarily engage with religious issues through the art that Hollywood makes and the Academy elevates will have their thinking narrowed to exclude more than half of the American religious experience. Art is how we engage our hearts as well as our minds on topics of importance. If our imagination is too narrow to understand the experience of our neighbors, we lose the ability to empathize with, be challenged by, or engage with them — whether or not we ultimately agree with them.
Then again, blind spots are a part of life. Hollywood has always had massive blind spots to some degree — whether it’s with religion, race, politics or sex and gender. And Hollywood is not alone in that. To some degree, it’s inevitable in any organization or community you find yourself in.
But if you do keep in mind the blind spots, the movies highlighted at the Oscars show remarkable progress in creating art that constructively helps us engage with the challenges, problems, virtues and solutions in navigating a world where religion matters in our lives. And that is something to be deeply grateful for.
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.com, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers.