Coming from the UK I still have a fondness for UK TV shows. In fact some of my favorite shows are British – Doctor Who, Only Fools and Horses, Robin Hood, to name but a few. So every now and again I place an order to an online British DVD supplier (in the UK) and buy some of the more recent British shows to be made. One such show was Bonekickers . I wasn’t intending to buy this show, but it was being offered for less than $6 (3 UKpounds) for the entire series, a bargain by any standard.

Last evening I began to watch this show. It follows the adventures of a team of archeologists in Britain. Sounds riveting eh? Well, it’s more interesting than you may think as it’s more like a low budget British version of National Treasure, albeit with a tad more violence.

In the opening episode the team of archeologists find a site where it seems that a skirmish went down in the 13th century between The Knights Templar and a bunch of Saracens on British soil. As the mystery unfolds it turns out that The Knights Templar were on a mission to return to an abbey in England with a very special cargo… the actual cross on which Jesus was crucified.

As the story plays out a bunch of religious zealots, scratch that, religious nutters are also searching for this site as they want to lay claim to the cross of Christ to start a holy war in Britain. It was quite an interesting story and, save for one extremely graphic moment, it was very enjoyable to watch.

What struck me more than anything though was how they showed the difference between religious fundamentalism at it’s worst and real faith. I was surprised to see this as most of the time Christians are depicted simply as nutters. However, one of the main characters, portrayed as a level headed member of the archeological team, is a Christian!

I have noticed that lately Christians have been fairing a little better in the movies and on TV. Most of us remember the Wife Swap episode in which a totally whacked out “Christian” mother ranted and raved her way through an entire episode giving Christians a bad name for months after. And we’ve all probably seen movies and shows in which Christians are depicted as insane fruit loop types. More recently, however, things have been looking up for portrayals of Christians in movies and shows.

Denzel Washington in the Christian post-apocalyptic movie The Book of Eli

In the new movie The Book of Eli Denzel Washington plays a Christian man on a mission to save the last known Bible. In the show Boomtown a man with a terrible past tells one of his victims that he had found forgiveness at the feet of the Savior even though he didn’t deserve it. In the latest Rambo movie a bunch of missionaries are shown as being good, though slightly ignorant people who want nothing more than to help people in Jesus’ name. The priest in The Exorcism of Emily Rose was portrayed as a humble man of faith. And apparently in the Spanish movie [Rec] 2, an all out horror movie about demonic possession which I will probably give a miss, one of the characters is a Christian whom the demons cannot touch because of his faith; in fact there are growing number of horror movies being made in which Christians and faith are being shown in a positive light – Bless the Child, I Am Legend, House, The Reaping, etc.

I find it encouraging that Christian are now being shown as real people who have faith. Hopefully gone are the days of the stereotypical portrayal of Christians as religious hypocrites and nutters. Maybe a new day has dawned in Hollywood… let’s hope so.

Christian St John M.Div, BChM, ACS
January, 2010

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