"Dear 8-Pound, 6-Ounce, Newborn Infant Jesus": A History of Prayer in Hollywood

A guest post by Dr. Terry Lindvall of the C.S. Lewis Institute

Will Ferrell leads grace in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)

As a film professor of over 50 years (Duke University Divinity School, the College of William and Mary, Regent University, Wheaton College, and Virginia Wesleyan University), I joined several colleagues (director Stu Minnis, screenwriter Steve Sylvester, and producer Vickie Bronaugh) in making a documentary movie about diverse prayers in films. Based on a book on I did for New York University Press (God on the Big Screen), we started with the potent silent films of Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford and ended up with inspirational 21^st century movies like Harriet. Amazed at how many prayers populated Hollywood films, we wanted to see what they might be teaching audiences about praying.

C. S. Lewis thought the best way to reach a pagan culture was to sneak past the watchful dragons, both secularists and fundamentalist. And Hollywood, however unwittingly, accomplished the task of teaching people how to pray, sneaking prayers into mainstream cinema.

Our film, Hollywood, Teach Us to Pray, available on YouTube for those wandering the wilderness of the internet, offers a roller coaster ride of praying experiences, hypocritical, superficial, questioning, hoping, and transcendent, all ways of trying to communicate with a Father in Heaven.

The recognizable comic prayers of Meet the Parents, Talladega Nights, or Tyler Perry films elicit laughter, even as they hold up a mirror to our own selfish prayers. The desperate prayers of Ben-Hur or Hacksaw Ridge move us as they echo our own fears and pain. Embedded, even hidden, in mainstream cinema, we find films alter the narrative trajectory in unexpected ways. When Katherine Hepburn’s Rose prays that God would open His heavens to rescue her and Humphrey Bogart’s character in African Queen, the answer comes immediately, with rain lifting them out of a swamp. In fact, in a study by Fraser and Brown, God answers prayers more quickly and definitively in movies than in real life, with over 80% of cinematic petitions being answered in 90 minutes of screen time.

The gap between the secular Hollywood establishment and the potential religious market was best captured in an apocryphal tale told by biographer Bob Thomas about Columbia Studio’s legendary Cohn brothers. The two producers debated the prospect of making a religious film. Harry challenged his brother Jack, claiming that he knew nothing about religion.

“What the hell do you know about the Bible, Jack? I’ll bet you fifty bucks you don’t even know the Lord’s Prayer,” said Harry.

“Oh, yes I do,” boasted Jack.

“Well then, let’s hear it,” prodded his brother.

Jack started: “Now I lay me down to sleep…”

“Okay, okay,” conceded Harry. “You win,” and handed over the fifty bucks.

This comic anecdote in which Jack mistakes a common children’s bedtime prayer for Jesus’s instructions on prayer in the Gospels offers two insights. First, that Hollywood did not know much about praying and, second, that it nevertheless knew that religion in film mattered. Cinematic prayers would come to be significant elements of film, intentionally scripted and embedded in Hollywood narrative paradigms, almost like religious product placements.

From just calling out God’s name, the film explores how the movies have shaped our prayers (especially for those who forget their catechism). One crucial moment defines the whole film. It captures the central parable of movie prayers.

In Easy A (Will Gluck, 2010), Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone) goes into a church looking for a minister, a reverend, even a wizard. Earlier, she had gone into a bookstore to find a Bible. A bookstore clerk tells her it is in bestsellers, right next to Twilight.

She plays a reverse hypocrite, seeking to appear wicked when she remains quite wholesome. As she pretends to be Hester (from Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter), a friend admonishes her with “I hope for your sake, God has a sense of humor”.

“Oh”, she responds, “I have seventeen years worth of anecdotal proof that He does”.

The key moment, however, occurs when she sits in a confessional booth. She whispers, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I think that’s how you’re supposed to start these things. I’m only going on what I’ve seen in the movies”.

Featuring directors like David Anspaugh (Rudy, Hoosiers), Robert Benton (Places in the Heart), and Michael Schulz (Car Wash, Which Way is Up?), critics like Leonard Maltin and Los Angeles Times critic Justin Chang, and religious leaders like Father James Martin, Professor Robert Johnston, and Sister Helen Prejean, the film addresses questions about prayer, about suffering, silence, pain, and thanksgiving for meals like hot dogs.

After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake in which the city was devastated and hundreds lost their lives, a group of survivors sing “Nearer my God to Thee”, a prayer of need in San Francisco (W. S. Van Dyke, 1936). Barbary Coast’s “Paradise” saloonkeeper, the roguish Blackie Norton (Clark Gable) surveys the wreckage of the catastrophe. Having lost everything, except his beloved Mary, (Jeannette MacDonald), an opera imp, he turns to his friend, the conscientious priest Father Tim Mullen (Spencer Tracy) and asks. “I want to thank god. What do I have to say?” Father Mullin responds, “Just say what’s on your heart.”

Norton kneels and says, “Thanks, God. Thanks! I really mean it.”

The climactic scene just before the titles situates Denzel Washington (The Book of Eli, Albert and Allen Hughes, 2010) in hostile territory with a young woman sent to extract secrets from his spiritual journey, namely the possession of a sacred book. In one of the most pedagogically direct moments of teaching one how to pray, Eli tells the would-be seductress to sit down with him and share some food at table: “Give me your hands. Close your eyes. ‘Thanks for warm bed Thank you for the gift of companionship. Amen’. Now we eat.”

With prayers for Roman Catholics (The Gaucho, Silence) and for Protestants (Hell’s Hinges, Bruce Almighty), the hundreds of films (with so many other titles left on the cutting room floor) will not only resonate, but awaken one to rediscover how one can learn from fiction and enter a more authentic relation with the One Who wants to commune with us.

Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, captured a fragile and transcendent moment of “Beata Beatrix” praying. His poetry suggested that one “Give honor unto Luke Evangelist; / For he it was (the aged legends say) / Who first taught Art / To hold her hands and pray.”

So, giving honor to the One Who teaches us to pray, we made a documentary feature that we think challenges, inspires, amuses, and helps us remember how God snuck into all the great Hollywood films, when we thought He was absent. How sneaky.