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In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy painstakingly fashions chess pieces out of rocks scrounged from prison workyards. He's told it's hopeless, but year after year he sends off letters to state legislators, requesting books and funds to improve the prison library—and I can't help thinking of the persistent hope of the young King, mailing off his stories to magazine editors. Andy teaches reading, gives free tax advice, asks the name of an anonymous prisoner who's been beaten to death. Andy bears up under terrible oppression, becoming a favorite target of "the sisters," inmates who subject him to years of painful abuse—more echoes of high school oppression. And over the years, hope grows: in Andy, in the other prisoners, and especially in Red, the character through whose eyes we view the story. Red is an institutionalized man, a lifer who knows he's guilty and who has come to accept the very walls that keep him from true freedom.

Andy and Red in the prison yard

Viewers who aren't put off by the inescapable violence of Shawshank may want to check out The Green Mile, another King prison story where the violence (and everything else, spiritual themes included) is much more explicit. Also directed by Darabont, it's not nearly the film his first one was, marred by a stylistic heavy-handedness that's glossy and smack-you-in-the-face manipulative.

As King himself suggests, The Stand is also loaded with things for Christians to chew on. It's one of those post-apocalyptic survival yarns, where the stark setting and life-and-death situations force characters to make impossible moral choices with their survival on the line. Those revealing decisions are clearly shown to have spiritual consequences, as people gradually align themselves with 108-year-old Mother Abigail or the demonic Randall Flagg. King fans say the novel is much better than the sometimes fascinating, sometimes tacky 1994 mini-series (available on DVD), but it's got its draws: watch for cameos by people like Ed Harris, Kathy Bates and even Sam "Evil Dead" Raimi.

By far the greatest film derived from a Stephen King story is Stanley Kubrick's treatment of The Shining. Die-hard fans of the novel may be bothered by Kubrick's departure from the book at key plot points, but most film buffs agree this is a great film made from a potboiler novel. The director zeroes in on the family dynamics and finds the real terror: what's it like for a boy to fear his father, a wife her husband? Isolated in the snow-bound Outlook Hotel, Jack Nicholson plays an increasingly obsessive writer whose white-knuckle sobriety doesn't look like it'll make it to spring thaw. If the film isn't clearly "spiritual," it certainly ends up supernatural, but what matters here is the autobiographical: King's life and family were very nearly destroyed by his own alcoholism, and you have to wonder whether it wasn't his recovery process that got him relying on the Higher Power who begins showing up with greater and greater frequency in his stories from then on. On Writing includes his understated account of surviving a near-fatal accident, which seems suffused with a sense that he may have been delivered from death in an almost miraculous way.

Life in maximum security is portrayed in all its harshness—but with hope

It's dodgy to try reading testimony into someone else's story—just about as dodgy as drawing assumptions about an author from the things his characters say or do, or the way his stories play out. Those who look to Stephen King for the latest celebrity conversion are likely to be disappointed: as much as hope and faith, even Christian faith, are constant themes in his books and movies, he's quite direct about the whole business when he writes, "While I believe in God, I have no use for organized religion."

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