At convention (diocesan that is) we saw a very brief clip from the film “Courageous”, a movie I have not taken the time to watch on the ridiculous basis that it will surely put me in tears and leave me feeling less than the dad that I ought to have been. I avoided it like the plague despite the fact that one of my best friends promoted this thing as widely as possible. In the brief two minutes that we saw of the film I was all choked up. My fears were confirmed. I ran across an interesting blog piece on the movie, it’s message and its impact on the wider culture which I thought had some great points. See if this little bit of that article causes you to want to read the rest of it…
The result is that Christians and their “good works” become the message, overshadowing Christ and the gospel. The LA Times calls the movie “a particularly clunky, tunnel-visioned vehicle whose overbearing, overlong script nearly smothers the movie’s quibble-free message: Fathers must be responsible.” The AV Club describes it as “essentially about fundamentally good, moral men proudly accepting the mantle of fatherhood” and feels that the film “deifies fatherhood and fathers when it would be better off treating its central striver like a flawed human being instead of a paper saint.” Slant Magazine laments “One must have the courage to ignore this self-righteous pablum’s naïve, truly offensive trivialization of social realities in this country—the complete flipside of Paul Haggis’s cynical representation of the same in Crash.” The New York Times pointedly sums everything up: “Adam is born again into the spiritual obligations of conservative family values.”
While surely produced with good intentions, Courageous is likely to further entrench the misguided culture wars and bring harm to the Christian witness in the world.
If I raised your curiosity, read the whole thing here.
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