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The Apostle
This film,
featuring Robert Duvall as writer and star, deals
with a pastor-evangelist. It captures much of the authentic flavor of
“holiness” Christianity in the heart of the Bible belt, Texas and Louisiana.
The film
touches a lot of “hot buttons” for Reformed Christian viewers. Clearly Duvall’s preacher is not a Calvinist. And we are rightly
appalled at the film’s light view of sin, continuing revelation, self-ordained
church leaders, churches without church discipline, superficial preaching, and
so on. Some may even object to the bouncy gospel music, but I thought that was
wonderful.
But I think
we should be grateful for small blessings. Hollywood rarely treats Protestant
Christianity with any respect at all. Bible-belt preachers in films are almost
inevitably charlatans and hypocrites. Only occasionally will there be a
positive picture of Christian faith, so occasionally that one can almost count
the recent films of this kind on one hand: Tender Mercies (also starring Duvall), Chariots of Fire, The Trip to Bountiful, Shadowlands (sort of).
Sonny, the
preacher played by Robert Duvall is, for all his
other sins, not a charlatan. He really believes in God. Toward the beginning,
he stops at a car accident and walks out in the field to find the injured
(maybe dying) driver. He rouses the driver slightly and tells him of Jesus.
This early moment establishes Sonny’s main motivation. His witness to the dying
man brings him no earthly profit, fame, or pleasure. He really believes that
the man needs Jesus.
Nevertheless,
Sonny is a sinful man. He is an adulterer, and early in the film he discovers
that his wife is also adulterous, cheating on him with the youth pastor. Then
he discovers that she and the youth minister have pulled some legal strings to take
over the church and force him, Sonny, out. (I can’t imagine any church polity
that would allow this, but the film justifies our suspension of disbelief.) He
confronts her, then confronts God. He admits he is angry with God, but also
that he loves Him. He begs for guidance. His first instinct is to go to the
church service, now being run by the adulterous couple, join in the worship,
embrace them, and go on his way, returning good for evil. But later on, when he
visits his son’s Little League game, the youth minister gets into Sonny’s
space, and Sonny first abuses him verbally, then hits him with a baseball bat.
Eventually the youth minister dies of the injury.
Rather than
face the music, Sonny takes off. As he travels, he talks to God, and he becomes
convinced that God wants him to baptize himself (literally) as an “apostle.”
His new identity: “The Apostle E. F.” The film tantalizes us about the meaning
of these initials, but if the meaning was ever given I missed it.
In a
typical Hollywood film, the plot would at this point focus on police
investigation, concluding in a car chase. But in this film, the focus turns to
church planting! Sonny makes contact in a Louisiana town with a retired black
minister, and together they fix up an old church building and gather a
congregation. The methods and dynamics of it are fascinating and feel entirely
authentic. Sonny preaches over the radio, gathers shopping bags full of food
and deposits them as a “surprise” at the homes of poor families. He fixes up a
bus and drives it around to pick up people on Sunday morning.
One
character, played by Billy Bob Thornton, is described
in the cast listing only as “troublemaker.” He appears at the service and makes
racist comments and threats. Sonny takes him out back and punches him out. But
when Troublemaker returns, to bulldoze the church building during a
congregational picnic, Sonny puts his Bible in front of the bulldozer and
challenges Troublemaker to drive over it. Well, this is the Bible belt, after
all. Troublemaker can hate blacks, but he can’t drive over the Bible.
Eventually, Sonny and Troublemaker are on their knees, praying for him to
receive Christ as his savior. A remarkable scene. I’ve never seen a serious
conversion to Christianity in a commercial Hollywood film. And the scene is
played straight, without mockery.
The end of
the film is almost a complete church service, with another significant
conversion. A friend of Sonny has found out about his legal problems. He
overhears Sonny saying that he might be taken in by the law; but he wants his
valuables sold for the benefit of the church. One has the impression that the
conversion is partly based, humanly speaking, on the friend’s perception of
Sonny’s selfless integrity.
So Sonny is
a remarkable figure indeed. He is deeply flawed, but in one sense he is always
God’s man and, yes, selfless. We ask, of course, how could God use someone like
this? But then we recall that King David was also an adulterer and, in effect,
a murderer; and Saul of Tarsus was responsible for the deaths of Christians.
Luther was an anti-Semite; Calvin condoned the killing of Servetus.
In real life, there is the worst in the best of us; that is the Bible’s
realistic teaching about man’s condition.
But I found
more in the film than Sonny. It really does seem as though the chief character
here is God. God works, through the foolishness and sin of man, to build his
church. The three conversions in the film (the dying driver, the Troublemaker,
Sonny’s friend) seemed entirely credible to me, granted the context of
Bible-belt culture. And the film clearly sees the building of the church as a
great benefit to the community.
Considering Hollywood’s track record with Christianity, it is astounding to find a film like this that is so positive about the gospel. The films I mentioned earlier (listed on one hand) present in a positive way the benefits of Christian faith to individuals. This film actually states the gospel clearly and puts it in the context of a real church community. Old movies about churches (like the 1940s Bing Crosby films, “Going My Way” and “The Bells of St. Mary’s”) tended to present church life at its best as a kind of secular fun-time for everybody, despite bad guys trying to get them to tear down the building. But “The Apostle” presents the church as it should be—as a community of believers centered around the gospel of Jesus. Certainly, then, “The Apostle” marks a long step forward in Hollywood’s understanding of Christianity.