The Line

In case you didn’t know, there is a controversy regarding Lifeway Christian bookstores and the movie, “The Blindside” which came out a few years ago. 

“The Blindside” was a movie that starred Sandra Bullock in which a wealthy white Southern Christian family takes in a poor African-American teenager that happens to be big as a barn and a good football player. The movie is unusual because it was not based on a comic book or toy. It was base of the true story that had a happy ending. The teenager earns a scholarship to Ole Miss (well, ok, maybe it wasn’t that happy) and he becomes a number one draft pick in the NFL.

It was also unusual because it portrayed wealthy white Southerners in a positive light. In most movies, white Southerners are portrayed as people that just want to shoot things and eat more possum. “The Blindside” showed white Southerners as, now get this, nice people who wanted to help somebody.

“The Blindside” had no nudity in it. Nobody’s head was shot off. Nobody was blown up. Nobody had an alien pop out of their stomach. However there were some cuss words.

Lifeway Christian Bookstores are the bookstores owned and operated by the Southern Baptist Convention, Amen. It used to be known as “The Baptist Bookstore” (the tag line for their radio commercials in 1969 created by the famous New York advertising agency Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Pryce, Stevenson, and Kefauver: “The Baptist Bookstore...where Baptists buy their books”). Lifeway Christian Bookstores sold “The Blindside” DVD. You usually do not find DVDs with cuss words in Christian Bookstores.

Well, a Southern Baptist pastor in Florida saw “The Blindside” at his local Lifeway Christian Bookstore. I’m not sure if he bought the DVD without knowing there were cuss words in it or he saw at the theater and it just cheesed him to think that the same place where he buys offering plates is selling a movie that had cuss words in it. He decided to take it to the floor of The Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting and proposed a resolution for Lifeway to pull “The Blindside” and any other products that contain “explicit profanity”. Lifeway decided to pull “The Blindside” from its shelves and will no longer sell it.

Eric Metaxas, an incredibly smart Evangelical, criticized the decision. He said, “I’m kind of upset. A great movie was pulled from the shelves of a Christian bookstore chain. Look, I'm as concerned about cultural messages as anyone. I'm a father. But there's a right way and a wrong way to do this – and the wrong way definitely includes the permanent state of umbrage that many Christians seem to exhibit. They seem to have confused being salt and light with being curmudgeons."

He has a very good point.You have to remember “The Blindside” was not made by Evangelical Christians and sometimes, at least when it comes to movies, you have to take what you can get out of Hollywood.

Rachel Held Evans, another Christian writer said, "Christian bookstores have developed a reputation for producing a highly sanitized customer experience, purging from their shelves any language, content, or theology that doesn’t meet their uber-conservative standards. Walk into your local LifeWay and you will find plenty of Precious Moments statues, specialty Bibles, Veggie Tale movies (Metaxas has done several Veggie Tales), and Thomas Kinkade prints...but little trace of art or literature that intrigues, agitates, and inspires—as true art should!”

Ms. Evans seems to forget that Christian bookstores are a business, not an art gallery. Its customers want an “uber-conservative standard” because they are “uber-conservatives”, whatever Ms Evans means by that. Nothing is stopping Ms Evans from opening her own Christian bookstore that sells art and literature that intrigues, agitates and inspires.

Let’s think of it like this: twenty years ago there was a secular Hollywood movie called “The Rapture” that starred Mrs. First Tom Cruise (Mimi Rogers). In it, Ms Rogers played a person who becomes a Born Again Christian and in the end of the movie, witnesses the Second Coming of Christ. This movie portrays Christians in a very sympathetic light.

However, the movie was a hard R with explicit Mimi Rogers sex (before the character’s conversion, she was very popular with the boys, if you catch my drift). I don’t think Lifeway or any other Christian bookstore would carry that film. However, you can buy it at Amazon as you can “The Blindside”.

Lifeway made a business decision: it listened to its market. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.