Imagine a friend has invited you over to watch a newly released movie. “It’s a Christian movie,” he says, “but it’s actually really good.”

Maybe he’s talking about “Nefarious.” Maybe “Jesus Revolution.” Maybe he’s recently discovered “God’s Not Dead 2” or “Heaven Is for Real.” Whatever the film, it speaks volumes that your friend feels the need to explain that, although this is a Christian movie, it’s “actually really good.”

In the world of Hollywood studio executives, Christian movies belong in a category called “faith-based films.” These executives know that people watch these movies because they convey a certain message, and that they will forgive any amount of bad dialogue, uneven plotting, and unrealistic acting if the story ends with a conversion or, at the very least, a return to the faith. The movie has a purpose other than simply to be a great work of art: to strengthen faith and challenge unbelief.

In other words, a successful Christian movie doesn’t need to have any artistic merit. Its success doesn’t depend on that. This is why there are so many Christian movies that, as works of art, leave a lot to be desired. The priorities of the faith-based film market lie elsewhere.

If all that is true, how can I claim, as I do in my title, that Christians make the best art? I admit to being deliberately provocative. I don’t mean that all Christian art is good or that art made by Christians is de facto better than art made by unbelievers. I mean that only a Christian can fill the role of an artist as it is meant to be filled.

The role of any artist is to represent the world as fully and accurately as possible within the limits of a certain medium. For a photographer, that involves light, a sensor, and a frame. A poet uses words; a dancer, the movement of the human body. A work of art doesn’t have to have some kind of utilitarian value. Insofar as it accurately represents the world, it is good in itself.

The artist has two duties, then. First, he must master his own artistic medium. Second, he must be able to see the world as it truly is. A skilled composer pays close attention to the world around him – how it looks, sounds, and feels – and uses his artistic talent to represent that in sound. It may not be a physical sensation (what does “peace” sound like?), but it must be real. For example, in her poem “God’s World,” Edna St. Vincent Millay tries to communicate the huge, wild feelings created by a crisp fall day.

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists, that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart,—Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me,—let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

Millay could wield language and she could observe nature. Her best poems show where those two skills meet.

Being a Christian doesn’t magically give a person more artistic skill, nor does it make one a keen observer. I’m a Christian and I can’t write like Edna St. Vincent Millay. But being a Christian does give an artist a huge advantage over the unbeliever in that the Christian can see the world more accurately because he knows the God who made it.

The spiritual world is as real as the physical world, after all. As 20th-century novelist and short story writer Flannery O’Connor put it, “The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe.” An artist who has written off the spiritual world can’t hope to see the world as it truly is. He is a poor observer because he is walking around with his eyes half shut.

In some ways, Christian movies deserve the flak they get. Many of them are nothing but vehicles for inspiring messages that could fit inside a brochure. But there should be nothing negative about the label “Christian” when it comes to movies, books, or any other kind of art. If anything, “Christian” should be a badge of honor adorning the best movies, the truest books, the most beautiful paintings, and the poems of greatest honesty and feeling.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

Image credit: Pxhere