'Thelma and Louise' meet the worried Baptist pastors

A classic media signal that some preachers caught, but could not address

Let’s face it. It would be strange for a 70-year-old guy like me to claim that I can tune in all kinds of spiritually important media “signals” for young people today or even, in some cases, their parents.

I’m not trying to be “hip,” here at Rational Sheep. Heavens no.

But there are two things I hope to do. I can show pastors, parents, professors and concerned believers some exceptionally good signals from the past (in some cases I will tap material from my national “On Religion” columns) offering clues as to what we’re looking for in mass culture. Also, I can help people judge the quality of new signals that we spot together and we can, especially if and when I get to teach my “Exegete the Culture” class again, discuss how believers can respond, in their daily lives and through church ministries.

With that in mind, let’s flash back to the days when the cover of Time magazine was really important — June 24, 1991, to be precise. The headline on that cover proclaimed: “Why Thelma & Louise Strikes a Nerve.”

In terms of elite media-culture chatter, the hot-button issues in this movie were all linked to feminism. This passage from a Time essay by Margaret Carlson (“Is This What Feminism Is All About?”) captures that moment in time:

… For all the pleasure the film gives women moviegoers who want to see the worst of the opposite sex get what's coming to them, it can hardly be called a woman's movie or one with a feminist sensibility. As a bulletin from the front in the battle of the sexes, Thelma & Louise sends the message that little ground has been won. For these two women, feminism never happened. Thelma and Louise are so trapped that the only way for them to get away for more than two days is to go on the lam. They become free but only wildly, self-destructively so -- free to drive off the ends of the earth.

They are also free to behave like -- well, men.

Suffice it to say, this is still the topic that matters to the scribes in elite media, as demonstrated in yet another Time magazine headline on this movie’s 25th anniversary: “How Thelma & Louise Captured a Moment in the History of American Feminism.”

However, I was hearing something different in the early 1990s when I listened to students at Denver Seminary. They were talking about why “church” women were going to see this movie and why, for some of them, it painfully hit home.

I responded by packing a file folder with press clips about this movie and reactions to it. This brings me back (see this earlier Rational Sheep post) to that book chapter that I contributed to “The Big Idea of Biblical Preaching” — a tribute to the work of one of my academic mentors, the late Haddon Robinson. He was the Denver Seminary president who brought me on board to attempt (yes, this project failed) to weave media literacy skills into some essential subjects in seminary life.

My chapter in that book opened with a highly symbolic encounter I had with some Denver-area clergy who want to discuss what they were hearing about “Thelma & Louise.” That is, they wanted to talk privately about what they were hearing “church” women saying about the movie.

There really isn’t any way to shorten this anecdote, since it is the overture to the entire book chapter. I will break in, at one key moment, with some personal information.

The Baptist preacher had a mysterious look on his face as he gestured to me across a crowded hall at Denver Seminary. He was using that discreet come here" index-finger waggle folks use when they're trying to get a specific person's attention without getting anyone else's attention. He spoke in a low voice, like an embarrassed teen in a drug store asking the person behind the counter to sell him a copy of Playboy.

“Look, Mr. Mattingly," he asked. “What did YOU think of Thelma & Louise?"

I need to set the scene. You see, this is a parable about how clergy end up on a different wavelength than the people who sit in their pews or who live in neighborhoods surrounding their churches. And it sheds light on one of the toughest tasks that Dr. Haddon Robinson has faced while teaching men and women how to preach.

It was the fall of 1991, a few months after I left my work as a religion reporter at the Rocky Mountain News to work with Dr. Robinson on a project attempting to integrate studies in popular culture and mass media into the seminary's core curriculum. On this particular day, I was the speaker in luncheon for clergy, alumni and others interested in the seminary and, in particular, its post-graduate studies.

I told them what I had been telling my students: that they live and minister in a culture built on language and symbols created by mass media. Modern media are so invasive and pervasive that church leaders simply cannot afford to ignore them.

Clergy can respond to this reality in one of two ways: No. 1: They can be so threatened by it that they remain silent. No. 2: They can learn to think like missionaries and use popular culture as a source of insights and information for ministry.

Popular culture is a warped mirror of our lives, but a mirror nonetheless. To use approach No. 1 is to be purely negative. Approach No. 2 mixes criticism of mass media's contents and social role with a sobering realization of the power that media have in modern life. It is realistic, critical and, ultimately, constructive.

At one time or another, most of the people at that luncheon had heard Dr. Robinson say that they needed to exegete their culture as well as exegete the Word of God. That was bad enough. Now here was a journalist standing at a seminary podium telling them that they needed to try to pay critical attention to magazines and movies and television and talk shows and then take what they learned with them into the pulpit.

Many of the preachers were not amused and the discussion after my lecture was lively, to say the least. One pastor bluntly said that he couldn't get up in his pulpit and talk about movies, because that would mean admitting that he had SEEN them. Another added: “If I do that, I have a couple of deacons and big givers who will kill me."

We broke for lunch and that was when the Baptist preachers began pulling me aside. One after another, three different pastors found a way to raise the same question: What did I think of Thelma & Louise, referring to director Ridley Scott's explosive feminist manifesto that had been making headlines all summer. Eventually, actresses Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis ended up on the June 24, 1991, cover of Time, with the confrontational headline, “Why Thelma & Louise Strikes A Nerve."

I gave the preachers an honest answer. I hadn't seen the movie.

That’s right. I hadn’t seen the movie.

Why? Let me be candid. I have trouble watching violent movies. This is especially true when it comes to R-rated movies that include depictions of violence against women and children. This is a personal thing for me. I wanted to err on the side of caution.

However, what I soon learned was that I knew more factual material about this movie — remember my “Thelma & Louise” research folder, including many interviews with the artists themselves — than some of the people who had seen it.

With that in mind, let’s return to the chapter overture:

I was aware it had served as the latest spark igniting the gasoline of our culture's ongoing debates over sex roles. I was planning to wait and see if the movie would have a lasting impact. Then I would rent it on videocassette and, with pen and notepad in hand, sit down in a responsible and controlled environment — perhaps with seminary colleagues — and take careful notes.

But clearly, I needed to turn this question around. I didn't have a pulpit. They did. They were pastors, with the responsibility of guiding pilgrims in the modern world. They were experienced preachers. Plus, it was these preachers — not me — who had on this occasion ventured into the risky environment of a multiplex sanctuary.

By the time the third Baptist cornered me, I was ready to ask the questions that needed to be answered: What did HE think of Thelma & Louise? Why had HE chosen to go see it?

Well, yes, he saw the Time cover. And, yes, he had heard about the movie from his wife, who heard some of her friends talking about it. And then he overheard a conversation in the church office. He knew that some women in the church had seen the movie and were still talking about it. His instincts told him this was something worth pursuing.

So far, so good, I said. What nerve did he think the movie struck?

Now he was on uncertain ground. Clearly, he said, it had something to do with female anger.

To put this in Rational Sheep terms, what was the “big-button subject” in the movie, the topic that transcended a single moment in a single culture? What was the “signal” here that the church could not afford to ignore?

OK, I asked, what were Thelma and Louise angry about?

Well, he said, husbands and lovers had abused them, or abandoned them, or both. Other men tricked them, or attacked them, or failed to make or honor commitments. Even good men who were sympathetic managed, in subtle ways, to keep a safe distance. Thelma and Louise felt stranded. Then they got mad. Then they tried to get even.

This is very interesting, I said. Why did he think this message appealed to more than a few women in his conservative Christian flock? Why were they forming packs, or slipping off solo, to sit in the dark and watch this movie? And, come to think of it, did he have any angry women in his church?

Now he was very uncomfortable. Sure, he said, some women in his church were angry for some of the same reasons. His congregation contained its share of divorces and some had been messy. There was emotional abuse and one or two cases of physical abuse. A few husbands had vanished and there were times when he wished some other men would take a hike, too. Behind the scenes, many wives complained that their husbands were workaholics and emotionally distant. Some of them felt like single moms.

Yes, he said, there were angry and grieving women in his church.

Are some of them, I asked, the women who were going to see Thelma & Louise?

He nodded – yes.

Well, to me this sounded like this might be worth a sermon.

Yes it did, the pastor said. But he knew that there was no way he could preach it. For one thing, he wasn't sure he could afford to preach about such an emotional, volatile topic. He also knew that many in his congregation would be upset if he quoted an R-rated movie, let alone suggested that it raised questions relevant to the church. Even some who had seen Thelma & Louise, and identified with it, might be upset if their pastor said that the film asked valid questions, but offered dangerous answers.

It would just be too risky. He could go and see the movie, but he couldn't admit that he had done so. The insights and feelings inspired by the movie couldn't be applied, at least directly, to the lives of his people. He was caught in a painful dilemma, a wrenching separation of church and life. Trouble was, this signal was coming from a sector of life that his church had declared out of bounds.

I asked one final question. So, his people went to the mall and the movie multiplex to find sermons on these kinds of life-wrenching issues?

Once again he nodded — yes.

These pastors sensed that they were seeing and hearing something important. They tuned in the “signal.” But they were convinced that there was nothing that they could do about it.

Once again, I am not an advocate of hanging giant video screens in sanctuaries and using bytes of entertainment to spice up sermons. I am interested in helping religious believers wrestle with the principalities and powers in their own lives.

Stories matter, especially when they become myths.

What was that classic quote from the great director Frank “It’s a Wonderful Life” Capra?

No saint, no pope, no general, no sultan, has ever had the power that a filmmaker has; the power to talk to hundreds of millions of people for two hours in the dark.

Talk to the masses? In many cases, it would be more accurate to say “preach.”