A resurgence of Christian faith Is a commonplace of political commentary in the United States. Less noticed, but arguably more important, are green shoots in pop culture.
In music, film, and TV, there has been a shift in how Christianity and Catholicism are portrayed.
Gone are the days where religious characters were always heels, foils, or straight-up villains.
Back in 2015, Spotlight won two Oscars for its drama about clerical sexual abuse in Boston. The popular 2010 teen romcom Easy A portrayed a Christian youth group as prissy, rigid boofheads. And one of the biggest box-office successes of all time, the 2006 film The Da Vinci Code, featured a mad monk assassin.
Today, however, the hero can be a man of faith.
Hollywood was stunned by the success of The Chosen, the low-budget, crowd-funded indie series about the life of Jesus.
And major studios are catching on. The most recent example is Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Story, which was a huge critical and streaming success on Netflix. It contrasts the morally upright, caring, and manly Fr Jud Duplenticy with the vindictive Monsignor Jefferson Wicks who has formed a cult of personality with a handful of devotees, a rivalry which is complicated by the monsignor’s murder in a windowless room.
Writer/director Rian Johnson drew on his own experiences in a Protestant church-going family, telling RogerEbert.com he was “very personally Christian during my childhood, teens, and into my early 20s.”
“In a way, the entire movie is my attempt to have sort of a multifaceted conversation about faith, about this thing that I’ve carried around in me since childhood, because it never really leaves you,” he said.
As he was not Catholic yet writing a film about a Catholic parish, he spoke to young priests and other clergy to gain an authentic view of the faith.
He was struck by the notion that “they are of service, 24 hours a day as priests.” This feeds into one of the most thematically important scenes in which Fr Jud tries to get information about the murder mystery from a woman who seeks spiritual guidance.
Instead of getting to the task at hand of clearing his name and solving the crime, Fr Jud sits with the woman and speaks to her and prays with her.
“A running through-line of the whole movie is the selflessness of having a servant’s heart and the notion of bringing Christ’s love to people being an act of opening your arms, as opposed to putting your dukes up and the war footing of us against them,” Johnson said.
Wake Up Dead Man is a thorough exploration of the faith presented using fan favourite actors such as Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, and Josh Brolin to get through to viewers. And it worked, with this third of the Knives Out series becoming its most popular and critically acclaimed.
There was also 2022’s Father Stu. This told the based-on-fact story of Fr Stuart Long, a boxer who found his way to Catholicism and then the priesthood because he wanted to woo a Sunday school teacher.
The film also shares its back story with its main star Mark Wahlberg, who spent time in jail for a vicious racist attack, but later on rediscovered his faith. This one didn’t do too well critically but cleaned up at the box office, making US$21.8 million off a US$4 million budget at the height of the COVID pandemic.
Father Stu wasn’t the only priest-themed film in 2022. There were two other high-profile releases: Padre Pio, a box-office bomb about the saintly Italian miracle-worker, and The Pope’s Exorcist, a biopic about exorcist Fr Gabriel Amorth.
The half-time extravaganza in this year’s Superbowl, which was watched by 128 million viewers, gives a snapshot of the increasing visibility of Christianity in pop culture.
Singer Jelly Roll recently and publicly returned to his faith, and thanked God in his acceptance speech at the 2026 Grammys and at both musical sets at the LX Superbowl.
Halftime performer Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, and pre-show punk band Green Day each also expressed their faith in minor yet significant ways.
Bad Bunny was spotted making the sign of the cross just before the cameras rolled and his only words in English during his Spanish-language performance, were “God bless America.”
Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong, who has spoken about being drawn to Catholic imagery in the past, wore a medal of Our Lady of Guadalupe over his shirt.
Some people will handwave these gestures as unimportant or trivial. But greater acceptance of outward religious symbols and positive depictions of priests show how much the culture has changed from the atheistic, sceptical, and unabashedly hostile days of bygone decades.
This is not to say that this hostility has been totally dispelled. The fact-based historical drama Killers of the Flower Moon focusses on the methodical slaughter of Osage County Native Americans for their land and wealth by white men who are practicing Catholics. It was nominated for 10 Oscars.
There is still a long road before Christian values transform Hollywood and pop culture. But at least there is a path forward. It’s a time for cautious optimism.
