I watched the 2012 Christian movie, The Last Ounce of Courage.
Some people in my Bible study group were recommending it, and, after
coming home and reading what it was about, I was expecting not to like
it. Well, I recently watched it, and I didn’t like it.
The movie is about a crusty mayor and pharmacist named Bob Revere.
Bob’s son has recently died in battle, and the family is recovering from
that tragedy. But the movie is largely about Bob’s fight against an
ACLU-type lawyer for the right of his town to celebrate Christmas, a
crusade that Bob believes is faithful to the freedom that his son fought
to protect. Bob wants to display Christmas objects in public places,
and the cigar-smoking ACLU-type lawyer believes this violates civil
liberties and the separation of church and state. Meanwhile, some
Christian kids at the local public school are conspiring to convert the
school’s secular, sci-fi Christmas play into an actual Christmas
pageant, nativity scene and all.
Did the movie display any grasp of nuance? Well, on some level, it
did. When Bob’s grandson is threatened with suspension for bringing a
Bible to school, the school’s janitor remarks that bringing a Bible to
school is not against the law, in response to Bob’s comment that “When
they took prayer out of the schools, they also took out the Bible.” The
principal was banning the Bible from schools not because of any law,
but rather out of a desire to maintain peace on the campus. Bob
himself, when he is launching his crusade to bring back Christmas to his
town, says that the law allows him to put Christmas objects in public
places, so long as other faiths are allowed to have tokens of their
religion there, as well.
A lot of this regard for legal nuance got muddled in Bob’s crusade
for Christmas, however. The footage of Bill O’Reilly attacking the
alleged war on Christmas did not exactly help matters. Although the
ACLU-type attorney was expressing his opinion in the movie, he came
across as a bully, rather than as someone with legitimate arguments and
concerns. While Bob and others were acting as if there was a ban on
Christmas in the town, the fact is that the ACLU supports nothing of the
sort. People can put nativity scenes in their own lawns, or in their
churches’ lawns. But the government is required to be neutral and not
to prefer one religion over the other. Moreover, stores, in their
desire to be inclusive to all people, opt to say “Happy Holidays” rather
than “Merry Christmas.”
I can understand the sentiments of conservative Christians who wonder
why a cross should be removed out of a public place just because an
atheist gets offended: Shouldn’t the atheist exercise tolerance, in that
case? But I don’t want to go back to the days when my Mom was a child
and her public school put on an actual Easter pageant, to the discomfort
of some of the Jewish students. I don’t want to go back to the time
when those who didn’t want to say the school’s prayer were sent into the
hall, like they were criminals, and sometimes even put up with bullying
from their classmates because they were different. I can’t expect too
much from a conservative Christian movie, but the movie would have been
much more powerful had it gone into different perspectives, seeking to
understand why people feel the way that they do.
A conservative Christian story about church-state issues that I liked much better was an episode of Adventures in Odyssey,
which is produced by Focus on the Family. It was called “The
Graduate.” In this episode, Connie is graduating from school, and she
is to be the valedictorian. Her principal forbids her to say a prayer
at the ceremony, but Connie’s teachers and others are organizing to back
Connie up if she decides to say a prayer. Connie ultimately decides to
say no prayer, out of respect for the authorities and for the sacred
nature of prayer itself. This particular episode did not display a
grasp of the nuances of church-state debates, and yet I liked it because
it went beyond the usual rhetoric of the culture wars. Out of respect
for God and the authorities, Connie decided that losing a battle in the
culture war was the right thing to do.