David Franke directs our attention to a New York Times article that states, “Unlike Mr. Gibson’s film, evangelical Protestantism is inherently non-visual… For this reason, I think, evangelical audiences will be shocked by what they see.”
Or maybe not. We evangelical protestants have learned to do our real work quietly without drawing the attention of the anti-Christian mass media. But since you’re an LRC reader, I’ll let you in on a not so little secret. The film that has been viewed the most times in the history of the world is a film about Jesus… by evangelical Protestants.
The Jesus Film has been viewed over 5 billion times by people from every country in their own language, (it has been translated into 812 languages so far and counting). The film, drawing nearly all of its dialogue from the gospel of Luke has sparked nearly 200 million conversions to Christianity over the last 25 years. (Full Disclosure: My family has a minor personal connection to the founder of this ministry). You’ll note that the Jesus Film Project endorses The Passion on their front page. To see the passion scenes from the Jesus Film, skip to 1:35 into the English version.
It may give you a clue as to how evangelical Protestants view the mass media to know that the kind of glaring ignorance about evangelicals demonstrated in this NYT article is viewed as typical. They don’t have a clue… And maybe it’s better they don’t.
12:46 pm on February 25, 2004
