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October 3, 2008
Exclusive: Values-Driven ‘Fireproof’ is Unusual Hollywood Fare
Colonel Kenneth Allard (US Army, ret.)
Question: What’s the one thing most Americans are least likely to learn from today’s credit crunch?
Answer: Faith.
Or at least not right away. But try waiting a week or two. We live in a just-in-time economy so it takes about ten days before the first effects of the financial crisis start showing up. Either through pink slips, a grim conversation with the boss whose own job is threatened or even the kinds of locks on Main Street businesses that once seemed limited to bankrupt Wall Street firms.
And then, after it’s already too late, the grim truth may begin to sink in. That the Smartest Guys in the Room turned out to be the Dumbest People on the Planet. That the same folks who recently dismissed any suggestion that Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac were in trouble are exactly the same ones now promising that the trillion-dollar bailout can’t fail. That both Washington and Wall Street were equally stupid. And that the expertise of the usual media suspects, as well as their make-up and hair pieces, did little to disguise that they were every bit as confused as the rest of us.
So where do you turn in such moments? Unlike those media experts who once numbered me among their ranks, let me explain my viewpoint right up front. Forgive this latest re-telling of a very old story: but having nearly lost everything before recovering my faith, I had my own Jesus-take-the-wheel moment three years ago (ask Carrie Underwood to sing it for you though).
Because our just-in-time, mall-driven society is also profoundly secular, it was nothing less than shocking to find myself (in late 2006) watching Facing the Giants in a first-run San Antonio movie theater. Giants was supposed to be a football movie with a message; its motivational scenes have since become a staple of corporate training seminars. But it was so much more: a stunning dramatization of the impact of faith and core Christian values.
I naturally wondered when the lights would come on, the manager called forward to apologize for having had the temerity to show a movie with an overtly spiritual message. When the movie played through its conclusion, it was hard not to wonder how the Hollywood Thought Police had let this one slip by.
There, as well as in New York and Washington, public discourse is usually dominated by two core beliefs: All We Are Is Dust in The Wind or, alternatively, Like Apes on Treadmills, We Are All Headed Basically in the Same Direction. (After 9/11, this second belief system admittedly lost some traction). But it is not so much that people are agnostic or even avowed atheists. They are either too self-sufficient or simply too busy to stop long enough to ask where they’re heading – much less where their head is. As I constantly remind my business students, there is a huge difference between efficient (how well you’re doing) and effective (where you wind up).
Speaking of which, you may have been too swept up in headlines or plummeting balance sheets to have noticed that Fireproof, the sequel to Giants, opened nationwide last weekend. (And you think God doesn’t have a sense of humor?) Hollywood accounting may be every bit as notorious as the worst of Wall Street: but the movie-making capital clearly respects that other kind of capital. This time, areligious movieattracted major-league partners – Sony Home Entertainment and Samuel Goldwyn Pictures. The result: Fireproof finished its opening weekend as the number three movie in the country, despite appearing on only 850 screens nation-wide.
Any way you look at it, that’s not half bad for an acting company based out of the Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia. Set around a rural fire-house, Fireproof is a straight-up treatment of divorce, a plague in any society letting its values get so seriously out of whack that God’s unconditional love is dismissed or even dissed.
Which brings me to the best part. Beginning this weekend, audiences can choose between Fireproof and a movie starring Bill Maher called Religulous. Maher’s movie is merely the latest of the Dust-in-the-Wind genre, poking fun at anything as backward, as hopelessly retro and as horribly un-hip as spiritual values. So by all means take your choice this weekend, but remember that this is well-worn path.
Under similar circumstances, Moses once offered ancient Israel a timeless choice: between life and death, between prosperity and disaster. Might I be so bold as to suggest that Moses was right and that life might be the right choice?
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Col. (Ret) Kenneth Allard, formerly of NBC News and other media outlets, is an executive-in-residence at the University of Texas, San Antonio, CEO of the newly founded Business Battle Lab, and author of Business as War. He is also a military analyst and the author of Warheads. E-mail him at Warheads6@aol.com.
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