There is a large minority, despised by the cultural barons of Hollywood and New York, largely left out of popular culture unless portrayed as ignorant, deviant or malevolent.
Despite their central role in building America, they lack film roles, save as villains or hypocritical comic foils. It came as no surprise when this year, like most years, the Oscars failed to recognize any film, actor or actress from this large segment of the population.
Yet unlike African Americans, who were similarly shutout of the Oscars, the tens of millions from this group did not protest, boycott or even complain. I’m speaking of traditional people of faith, whose stories, the positive ones anyway, end up on the cutting room floor of the American story.
Granted, this year’s Oscar nominees include one movie about a traditional religious denomination. “Spotlight” tells the appalling story of how Boston’s Catholic Archdiocese covered up child sexual abuse by priests. That’s some kind of representation! Imagine the outcry if Hollywood recognized only one African American nominee, a film giving support to racist stereotypes.
It’s not that Hollywood avoids stories outside of “the mainstream,” whatever that even means. This year’s best actor, best actress and best picture nominees include fine films about predatory investors (“The Big Short”), unhinged entrepreneurs (“Steve Jobs”), abused women and children (“Room”), sympathetic Communist sympathizers (“Trumbo”), along with pioneering astronauts (“The Martian”), immigrants (“Brooklyn”), lesbians (“Carol”), the transgendered (“The Danish Girl”) and even actual pioneers (T”he Revenant”).
These are all important stories that should be told. Yet to leave out non-hostile portrayals of the faithful is to snub the estimated 25 percent of Americans who are evangelicals, not to mention tens of millions of Fundamentalist Protestants and traditional Catholics, Jews and Muslims. Filmmakers refuse to tell their stories, even when those stories offer incredible drama.
Consider how Oscar winners treated human decency during the Holocaust. “Schindler’s List” quite properly lionized a hedonist who saved 1,000 Jews from the Nazis. Yet another award winning movie adaptation of a true story, “The Pianist,” censored out the Christian motives of the title character’s protector, German Capt. Wilm Hosenfeld, instead portraying Hosenfeld as acting out of love of music — behavior filmmakers found acceptable.
This is to say nothing of the stories that Hollywood refuses to tell at all. Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes disobeyed orders to issue thousands of visas to Jews and other refugees, possibly saving more people from Hitler’s death camps than any other single rescuer. Impoverished by his defiance of his own government, de Sousa Mendes declared “I would stand with God against man, rather than with man against God.” It is inconceivable that today’s Hollywood film his story; indeed no one has.
In his posthumously published The End of the Experiment, prominent political scientist Stanley Rothman argues that the late 20th Century rejection of religion by cultural and educational elites was part of the broader countercultural movement questioning American beliefs in limited government, individual responsibility and American exceptionalism. (Full disclosure: I helped edit Stanley’s manuscript.)
And there’s the rub. In a free society we should want artists and intellectuals to play the role of gadfly. Yet as Rothman shows, when our national storytellers feel a visceral contempt for their country and millions of their countrymen, the American experiment in self-government is nearing its end.
America needs artists and intellectuals willing to tell all the nation’s stories, diversifying Hollywood and academia. Where are they?
Robert Maranto ([email protected]) is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
