Do you remember the first movie you ever saw–in a theatre? My big sister says since we were a “frugal family,” we Fullers hardly ever went to a movie. I think my first time ever was at a friend’s birthday party, when we went to see 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. My sister’s first memory of a movie theatre was standing in line with another family to see Walt Disney’s Bambi, but they couldn’t get in because the theatre was full. My other sister vaguely remembers a movie with a covered wagon and a snake—it must have been a western.¹ I do know that my father took all of us to see Lawrence of Arabia (release date 1963 in Canada), probably when I was 9 and it was a big deal.

Motion pictures—cinema—movies—films—whatever you name them, have become a dominant form of entertainment, whether delivered on the big screen, on TV or a little screen in our hands.

Christianity has had a love it and hate it history with film. This mirrors the relationship of Christians with entertainment in general since the days of the Apostles.² The Bible promises and expects the Church’s members will experience joy, and enjoy God’s world.³ I will bypass almost all of that story and jump to references from the early Evangelical Missionary Church of Canada, but I will footnote some sources for anyone who wants to go further.⁴ My son Thomas, who follows his interests in movies, has helped me immensely.

Film is a massive, lucrative, controversy-producing cultural product in most of the world today. It is a US$77 billion per year industry.⁵ India and Nigeria make more feature movies than Hollywood, though the USA spends on production, and makes, the most money.⁶ From its start, the Mennonite and Wesleyan holiness theology of the early EMCC warned against the vile worldliness of popular entertainments, the theatre, the ballroom, the saloon, even agricultural fairs and strawberry socials at the local villages and churches.⁷ The Mennonite Brethren in Christ Church proclaimed in “General Rules of Our Society,” Section XII, Conformity to the World: “As regards conformity to the world in participating in festivals, socials, picnics, fairs and similar gatherings, the object of which is to merely gratify the carnal mind, or will of the flesh, trifling conduct and conversation, and the needless waste of time in idle games, these shall be strictly prohibited.”⁸ How do you suppose they would react when commercial moving pictures started showing up in North America at the end of the 19th-century?

It’s not OK. They did not like it. An American Episcopal clergyman invented a system of producing celluloid strips with gradually changing action captured on the flexible “film” and projected onto a screen in the 1880s, and hoped to use it for the kingdom of God.⁹ The early EMCC leaders taught that consecrated followers of Jesus would not even enter a theatre of any kind. This was entirely in line with other “conservative” Christian teaching, shared by a wide range of Christians through to sometime in the second half of the 20^th century.¹⁰

Or It’s OK. So, my family was not spending money on Saturday matinees in the local cinemas nor were we regular movie-goers. But we could go. We were United Church of Canada people until the mid-1960s. My father, with nothing much to do when not on duty as a radio operator for the Department of National Defence in the 1940s, went to movies. It was a dominant form of mass entertainment in the 1930s and 1940s. When back on the family’s farm, he took an occasional girlfriend to Sarnia, the nearest town with a movie theatre. My mother, an Anglican in those days, recounted to us children funny scenes from war-time movies that she saw before marrying my father. We were from another stream of Christianity, one that warned against immorality in films, but also tried to use movies for Christian instruction, “uplift” and “good clean entertainment.” This tradition had a long engagement with film.¹¹

When my family became Christian converts in the United Missionary Church in the mid-1960s, we maybe did not realize the long-standing teaching against the cinema in the church we joined.¹² I certainly did not. I cheerfully planned with a friend to see 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) which we had heard was in production, because we both liked science and science fiction. I even took a high school girlfriend to a movie or two, though I don’t remember which ones now. Nobody told me I shouldn’t go.

History supplied by Thomas: By 1947, Hollywood and independent film companies in the USA and Britain had produced numerous films with religious subjects including Bible-based stories. There were many made before sound was added to movies in the 1920s, and before the influential Motion Picture Production Code (the American “Hays Code”) spread its force. Profitable but controversial, The Sign of the Cross by Cecil B DeMille (1932) was a big hit, the first movie the Legion of Decency targeted. The Last Days of Pompeii (1935), made by the people who made King Kong, distorted chronology to have a person who had seen Jesus, encounter the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in AD 79. A British “Life of St Paul” series of 12 half-hour shorts, funded by a Methodist film producer, commenced in 1938. The US-based Cathedral Films, founded by an Episcopal priest, produced a different series on the life of St Paul and then the life of Jesus for church (not theatre) use. Moody Science films released their first sermon based on science in 1946.¹³ Years later, I remember seeing City of the Bees, Red River of Life (about blood), and Signposts Aloft (about flight and airplanes).

As with radio from 1922, when Paul Rader recognized the potential of radio and started broadcasting Moody Church’s services,¹⁴ Billy Graham’s Evangelistic Association saw potential to use films for preaching and evangelistic purposes. The BGEA began with Mr Texas in 1951, the first feature-length film of a long “conversion story with Billy Graham (as himself)” series.

Churches had long used “magic lanterns”–a device similar to slide projectors–for religious purposes, such as telling the life of Jesus Christ by A W Banfield in Nigeria in the 1920s,¹⁵ or projecting the words of hymns where hymnbooks were unavailable.¹⁶ At some point, glass slides were replaced by celluloid filmstrips for the same purposes. When audio-cassette sound tracks were added, filmstrips almost acted as films, and were widely used in Sunday School classes and by missionaries.¹⁷

The instructional power of magic lanterns and filmstrips could not offset the Puritan and then the Wesleyan and Mennonite rejection of the stage, which narrative film immediately extended.

In the next blog I will look at the Missionary Church response to and eventual use of film.

Banner: Bambi poster used in Britain 1942. Credit: Posteritati.

1Personal communications of February 13 and February 15 2024.

2Gerald L Borchert, “Amusements,” in Richard S Taylor, ed, Beacon Dictionary of Theology (Kansas City, MO: Beacon Hill of Kansas City Press, 1983) p 19 or Adrian Hastings, “Play,” Oxford Companion to Christian Thought (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000) p 544-545.

3A F Harper, “Joy,” Beacon Dictionary of Theology, p 294.

4Starting with a Bibliography in J Ryan Parker, Cinema as Pulpit: Sherwood Pictures and the Church Film Movement (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2012) p 198-205.

5Barry Elad, “Film Industry Statistics 2024…,” internet website. I don’t know how reliable these sort of statistics are.

6Various internet websites. Claim: “Nollywood” (Nigeria): 2500 films/year, “Bollywood” (India) 1500-2000/yr, “Hollywood” (USA): 504 in 2023 (down from 792 in 2019, up from 333 (2020) (Statista).

7See EMCC History blog series on “Non-conformity to the World,” beginning August 3^rd 2024.

8As printed in the 1924 ed of the MBiC’s The Doctrines and Disciplines, p 37.

9Hannibal Goodwin, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Goodwin. Eastman Kodak lost a patent dispute to Goodwin, but won the economic stakes by continually improving design.

10Shanny Luft, “The Devil’s Church: Conservative Protestantism and the Movies 1915-1955.” PhD dissertation at University of Northern Carolina, 2009, collects numerous quotes from literature of the community of the title.

11Parker, p 29-33; Andrew Quicke, “Independent Protestant Film, from the Silent Era to Its Resurgence,” In: Protestants on Screen, edited by Gaston Espinosa, Erik Redling and Jason Stevens (Oxford University Press, 2023) p 71-81.

12Booklets in church libraries might include John R Rice, What is Wrong with the Movies? (1938), or Paul S Rees (a Missionary Church favourite author), Movies and the Conscientious Christian (nd). From Mennonites: Irving E Burkhardt, The Menace of the Movies (1940s), and the Brethren in Christ, C M Washington, Should Christians Support the Movies? (EV Publishing).

13Marsha Orgeron and Skip Elsheimer, “Something Different in Science Films: The Moody Institute of Science and the Canned Missionary Movement,” The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (January 2007) 1-26.

14See my blog on “Gospel Radio, Showtime Radio,” February 2025. Also Luft, p 2.

15Clare Fuller, Banfield, Nupe and the UMCA (Ilorin, Nigeria: World Partners, 2001) p 89.

16The magic lantern has a long history, but the basic design was settled in the 1650s by many people including Christiaan Hugyens; https://adcs.home.xs4all.nl/Huygens/13/compl-v.html. The box of glass song texts in the MCHT is very heavy.

17The standard audio-cassette was invented in 1962; https://legacybox.com/blogs/analog/the-history-of-the-audio-cassette-a-timeline. My sister Lois, a Missionary Church missionary, used a number of filmstrips to teach missionary principles still in the 1980s and 90s in Nigeria. Powered by a car battery, the projectors were adaptable for use in remote places.