Preacher

The Butcher and I have been watching AMC’s Preacher and really enjoying it. But man, the actual business of being a preacher on that show is so weird. Like, I can accept a vampire, but accepting that a place that does full immersion baptisms has communion wine? I can’t do it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this and the other day Coble had a Facebook post about how there’s basically no market for Christian fantasy & science fiction and why that is. The gist of it is basically that Christian authors want to write grown-up fiction with Christian themes, but readers of Christian fiction don’t want to read a lot of gore or sex or the kinds of things that mark a book as grown-up.

And it strikes me that Preacher suffers from the inverse of this problem. The show would be tremendously better if it had behind the scenes someone who treated Christianity like something other than another kind of fantasy trope. If it had a sincere, knowledgeable Christian overseeing the depiction of Christians.

Which is not to say that I think Christians are in any way being disrespected by the show. I mean, that’s one of the nice things about it. It does take people’s faith and their doubts seriously. But it doesn’t seem to understand the kinds of fundamental church things that would make churched people recognize themselves in that story.

I guess it’s tough. I wouldn’t like Preacher–which, let me reiterate, I like a great deal–if it were trying to sell me on returning to the fold. So, maybe it wouldn’t be that interesting for a Christian creator to work on it if he or she couldn’t proselytize through it.

But if Hollywood struggles to reach a Christian audience with the products centered around Christianity, one of the main reasons has to be that the Hollywood projects that treat Christianity as something other than just another flavor of fantasy–oh, cool, you have fairies and trolls, I have angels and demons–are pretty rare.

Which is a shame because I think Preacher could only benefit from getting those details right.