Protestants on Screen Religion, Politics and Aesthetics in European and American Movies

Protestants on Screen explores the Protestant contributions to American and European film from the silent era to the present day. The authors analyze how Protestant filmmakers, beliefs, theology, symbols, sensibilities, and cultural patterns have shaped the history of film. Challenging the stereotype of Protestants as world-denouncing-and-defying puritans and iconoclasts who stood in the way of film's maturation as an art, the authors contend that Protestants were among the key catalysts in the origins and development of film, bringing an identifiably Protestant aesthetic to the medium. The essays in this volume track key Protestant themes like faith and doubt, sin and depravity, biblical literalism, personal conversion and personal redemption, holiness and sanctification, moralism and pietism, Providence and secularism, apocalypticism, righteousness and justice, religion and race, the priesthood of all believers and its offshoots-democratization and individualism. Protestants, the essays in this volume demonstrate, helped birth and shape the film industry and harness the power of motion pictures for spiritual instruction, edification, and cultural influence.

Gastón Espinosa is Department Chair and the Arthur V. Stoughton Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College. Erik Redling is Professor of American Literature and Culture and Managing Director of the Muhlenberg Center for American Studies at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. Jason Stevens has taught at Harvard University and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and he has been a fellow of the National Humanities Center (Durham, NC) and the University of Pittsburgh, (Humanities Center).