Hollywood hermeneutics: A religion-and-film genre for the 21st century

In this undoubted age of Hollywood, popular films are the lingua franca of the video generation, but their utilisation as a legitimate extra-ecclesiastical resource within Religious Education, Theology and Religion Studies programs is either ignored, unappreciated or grossly under-utilised. This is regrettable. If the profession wishes to remain relevant and exciting in the post-Millennial, postmodern and increasingly post-Christian period, it needs to proactively integrate movies into the classroom, home and pulpit. A large cause of this pedagogic problem is the general lack of awareness of how religious themes can permeate popular films. This deficiency urgently needs to be corrected. One useful introductory approach is consciousness raising via thematic surveys of the field. Using textually based humanist film criticism as the analytical lens, the critical religion and film literature was reviewed and the popular cinema scanned to illustrate three taxonomic categories of the phenomenon. Namely: (1) Bible-quoting and explicit scriptural references, (2) Christ-figures, and (3) sub-textual biblical characters, props and references. It was concluded that the Hollywood hermeneutic has immense value for scholarship aimed at the proverbial children-of-the-media. Further research into the emerging and exciting interdisciplinary field of religion-and-film was recommended.