Conservatives and Christians of all denominations always hunt for new, creative ways to reach future generations with solid, timeless values, yet for whatever reason, they always end up trailing a decade or more behind the times. Instead of scrambling to look relevant, we ought to use an ancient tool that communicates values, history, philosophy, and truth in every form: storytelling.
Jesus Christ gives us the greatest example of how storytelling teaches others. Throughout the New Testament, He teaches His disciples life lessons and the application of God’s law through parables. Stories. A story doesn’t just tell someone what they ought to do in a situation. It doesn’t sermonize. It shows them.
Stories wield power because, when told well, they let us connect emotionally with the characters, seeing ourselves on similar journeys or remembering similar experiences. We relate to the struggles our protagonists endure. Stories—especially visual ones like movies—flank the mental blocks we throw up to keep out preachy platitudes or unsolicited advice about our problems.
We need conservatives and Christians to make more movies. When I say that, I don’t mean the cheesy garbage that amounts to little more than a sermon with moving pictures—Facing the Giants, Fireproof, or God’s Not Dead. Frankly, these movies and others like them suck horribly. As kids say, they’re cringe. If you looked up that word in the dictionary, you’d probably see still photographs from these films listed as examples.
The radical left loves to preach in their films too. In fact, that kind of preachiness is killing box-office numbers far more than streaming services or bad theater experiences—though those factors play a role. Hollywood mainly drowns its movies in woke nonsense. They abandoned the art of telling good stories with interesting characters and a message woven into the subtext. Leftists insist on shoving their ideology straight down your intellectual gullet, story be damned.
Want to go to the movies to escape reality for a bit? To be entertained? Nope. Sit here for two hours while they browbeat you with their agenda—today’s lesson being why you should feel guilty for being white because slavery was all your fault. What do you mean you weren’t alive then? That doesn’t matter. Didn’t you know your ancestors’ sins supposedly pass down through DNA?
So yes, left-wingers preach too much. In fact, they often preach more obnoxiously than the folks who crank out second-rate after-school specials and try to pass them off as “films.” And that’s saying something.
What we need are true filmmakers—conservatives and Christians who understand storytelling fundamentals and know how to craft compelling narratives with characters audiences actually care about. When you focus on good, high-quality storytelling, your values naturally weave themselves into the subtext. You don’t need to shove them down people’s throats or treat the audience like idiots by overexplaining everything.
Part of the problem is that folks on the right—religious or not—struggle to connect with art. Art expresses the self. It’s emotional. But “facts don’t care about your feelings,” right? That’s why so few conservatives work in artistic fields. The logic centers in their brains tend to run much bigger than the parts that process emotions and communication. That imbalance explains why so many conservatives who finally realize the power of film end up creating hideously bad movies. They struggle to sympathize with others or relate to the plights others experience, so they imitate liberals and shove the message front and center, no matter how bad the storytelling or artistic elements turn out.
I’m not bashing conservatives—I’m conservative myself. It’s just the sad, sorry truth about our movement. The good news? It doesn’t have to stay this way. We can learn to connect with others more effectively and express our values without becoming like the left.
We absolutely must do this if we want our culture to swing back toward classic virtues and timeless values. As Andrew Breitbart rightly said, politics sits downstream from culture. Change culture, and you change politics. Stop slapping a band-aid on a wound that needs stitches—that’s what focusing on politics alone gives you. Instead, take up a long march through the institutions—art and cinema included—just as the left once did, only in the opposite direction. The right direction.
