According to reports, Disney has done it again and removed the heart and soul from a story because that heart and soul happens to be the Christian faith. This time it is no less than the life story of Lord of the Rings creator J.R.R. Tolkien.
Last May it was Disney’s disastrous adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, a monumental flop that lost the studio upwards of $100 million. Rather than stick to the Christian themes that make up the foundation of the beloved children’s story, woke director Ana DuVernay’s critical and box office catastrophe — starring no less than Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Chris Pine — chose instead to embrace identity-politics and all that narcissistic New Age nonsense.
In 2013, Warner Bros. ripped the Christian guts out of civil rights icon Jackie Robinson. Although Robinson and Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey were both men of profound faith, the movie seemed embarrassed by this.
Rickey’s Christianity was a guiding force in his momentous decision to change baseball forever by signing a black player to the major leagues, and it was Robinson’s faith that gave him the strength to live through years of racial taunts and hatred until his skills on the field and personal character won the day.
Nevertheless, the biopic 42 was hardly interested.
In 2005, other than a shot of him entering a church, the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line whitewashed the Christian faith of both of its subjects: Cash and his wife June Carter Cash. Yes, for a time he was a troubled man, “the biggest sinner of them all,” he once declared, and this is the era the movie covers, but it does so without ever once acknowledging how important Cash’s faith was in pulling him out of his death spiral.
Cash was a serious and accredited biblical scholar, a personal friend to Billy Graham. Cash also wrote a Christian novel, Man in White; recorded a spoken recording of the New Testament and countless gospel albums.
Even so, stripping J.R. R. Tolkien of his Christian faith is even more outrageous. His most famous works are primarily driven by his faith. And for Disney (which owns Fox Searchlight, which produced Tolkien) to pretend otherwise, to completely ignore his religious upbringing as though it was not formative, is a deliberate act of deception.
The Catholic Herald’s pan of Tolkien explains it this way:
For the record, Shadowlands is a lovely film that doesn’t shy away from Lewis’s faith, it just misleads us into believing Lewis, a reformed atheist and Christian apologist, never managed to fully embrace his faith again after the untimely death of his wife, when the exact opposite is true.
Shadowlands practically turns God into the movie’s villain, and while it quotes Lewis’s heart-wrenching examination of his grief in A Grief Observed, it ignores the overall point of that magnificent confessional, one that concludes that grief is God’s way of bringing us closer to Him.
Of Tolkien’s faith and the biopic, Pajamas Media’s Tyler O’Neil writes:
O’Neil also spoke to Joseph Loconte, Ph.D., who recently wrote a Tolkien biography and felt a huge hole in the biopic:
More proof that Hollywood hates us; hates Christians, hates Christianity — even Disney, for crying out loud.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
Click Here: liverpool mens jersey