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The Fighting Temptations is either a big-screen story about God's grace, or an example of Hollywood's anti-Christian agenda. It depends on which Christian film critic is arguing the case.

Pastor Mike Furches, a regular reviewer at Hollywood Jesus, couldn't wait to take his congregation to see The Fighting Temptations. Furches's inner-city church in Wichita, Kansas, has attracted many former gang members, drug addicts, and prostitutes. He wanted his congregation to see The Fighting Temptations because it was, in his view, a redeeming depiction of God's love. And where the movie showed Christians as hypocritical and judgmental, he used the portrayal as a teaching opportunity for his congregation to change those perceptions. The film also featured rousing music that fused hip-hop with gospel, something Furches says could be effective at his church.

But according to Ted Baehr, the movie's Gospel music soundtrack wasn't enough to outweigh its demeaning portrayal of Christians. And when Baehr considered that The Fighting Temptations was part of a wave of movies marketed directly to Christians, he burned with righteous indignation.

"They are now going to market borderline material and even anti-Christian material in the marketplace by buying airtime on Christian radio stations and finding susceptible Christians to promote this stuff," Baehr wrote on his Movieguide website. "The issue here is control. Hollywood wants to control the church audience."

These diverse Christian reactions to The Fighting Temptations signal the confluence of two trends. Movie producers are making more family-oriented films and often target church audiences in their promotions, and evangelicals are more engaged with movies than ever before.

Christians once wielded a lot of power in Hollywood. In Hollywood's Golden Age, when Bible-based films such as The Ten Commandments were produced, the Protestant Film Commission and the Catholic League of Decency policed the Motion Picture Code. The Code prohibited filmmakers from justifying evil or glorifying crime, lest they corrupt viewers. In 1966, a rating system replaced Christian oversight. That's when Hollywood started to become, well, Hollyweird, or whatever critics like to call it now. The first X-rated movie was made that year, and some films began to glorify evil and mock religion.

Yet after decades in which movies grew worse on this score, it seems studio executives have found religion again—or at least some semblance of morality.

According to Baehr's 2002 Movieguide analysis, there was only one movie with "positive Christian content" in 1985, compared with 135 in 2002. Additionally, Baehr says, the overall share of R-rated films fell from 81 percent in 1978 to 42 percent last year. The morally positive films are generally more successful than R-rated fare, Baehr says. Movies with a very strong Christian worldview (in Baehr's judgment) averaged $50.3 million at the box office in 2002. The same year, movies with what Baehr considers a very strong non-Christian worldview averaged $15.9 million at the box office.

Besides making fewer offensive films, producers are also spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to shepherd the churchgoing flock to the multiplex. For the past three years, for example, major studios have hired Jonathan Bock—a committed Christian and former sitcom writer—to bridge the gap between religious people and Hollywood. Bock, president of Grace Hill Media in Studio City, California, has contacts with more than 1,000 Christian media outlets, including everything from Christian television channels to church newsletters. In years past, Bock says, such outlets would hardly have mentioned The Fighting Temptations. But through his efforts, 237 media channels and many church newsletters covered the movie, which grossed $30 million at the box office.

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March 2004, Vol. 48, No. 3