I grew up a Christian all my life. I’m no stranger to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and while I’m no Biblical expert, I know enough to be dangerous.
Yet, despite my Christianity, I’ve always lamented how badly Christian media has fallen short. I’ve made it no mystery how much I detest a lot of modern Christian music and movies. For me, it always felt like sub-par writing and acting pardoned by the fact that it was being sold and shipped to a built-in audience that had no other examples to pull from.
(READ: Christian Film is Garbage and We Have to Take a Different Approach)
Christian media has suffered from the exact same problem leftist media has. They’re far more interested in the message than they are in the story. The acting in these movies is so wooden for the same reason. Solid cinema is secondary to the end goal of getting the message of Christ across, and while it’s absolutely important that Christ’s message be delivered, making bad cinema just to do it is putting the cart before the horse.
Moreover, I can’t help but feel that every bad Christian television show or movie made, harms the overall message and drives away audiences who may wander away and never come back.
But let’s take a look at something that does it correctly.
“The Chosen” is something you may have heard of before, but if not, it’s a show that centers around Jesus and his apostles. Cinema around the life and times of Jesus are a dime a dozen, but this one is different.
“The Chosen” takes time to flesh out characters and do so with such care that by the time the first season is done, you feel emotionally invested in them. The focus isn’t just put on Jesus (Jonathan Roumie) either. Two of His apostles, in particular, truly stand out in my opinion. The first is Simon (Shahar Isaac), Jesus’s first apostle, and the other is Matthew (Paras Patel).
The story takes quite a bit of time focusing on these two men. Simon is a married man on the verge of losing everything. He’s impetuous and willing to break the rules. Matthew is a much-despised tax collector, portrayed as a man on the spectrum, who obsessively wants to do his job, even if it means betraying his own people. You get to know these two men relatively well before Jesus even arrives on the scene.
When Jesus finally does become a central figure in the story, it still cuts to various people and their lives in order to keep world-building. Too often in Christian media, Jesus becomes such a focused on figure that He towers too tall over the story. The world fades away, and this actually does a disservice to Him and His story.
“The Chosen” takes time for you to get to know the people and the place. The Pharisee Nicodemas (Erick Avari) and his struggles in keeping his order from seeing itself as more holy than God are masterfully intercut between time spent with the apostles. We’re also given time with the Centurian Gaius (Kirk B.R. Woller), a man who clearly has a prejudice against Jews but can’t help but care about Matthew.
Audiences often don’t understand the times Jesus lived in but “The Chosen” puts that setting into focus so you understand the importance and audacity of what Jesus and the apostles were doing at the time.
Is the message still there? Absolutely, but “The Chosen” does something that other Christian stories fail to. It shows, but it doesn’t tell. Like Christ, who told stories to get his point across, the story is enough.
As I said, I’ve been a Christian all my life, but I never saw the apostles like this. They were always important names but “The Chosen” makes them into important people. Their relationship to Christ has never been more human and personal. It really does shed new light on an old story, and the most important story in the world to boot.
It makes you wonder what kind of world we would be living in today if Christians had told stories in this manner ages ago.
