Sex, violence and disturbing images. Those are the three categories that most Christians don’t want to see in their movies.
However, “Redeeming Love” is a Christian romance film that refuses to shy away from explicit content. Instead of fearing the enraged Christian moms who shield their teenagers’ eyes because of implied intercourse scenes, the producer and author behind the movie embraced the God-given gift of romantic love and used the pure darkness of the world to make God’s love that much brighter.
When Christian media self-righteously refuses to consider adding these three categories of content into their own faith-based movies, the question we might be asking is “How did ‘Redeeming Love’ do it?”
What became a movie was once a book.
Thirty years ago, a steamy romance writer re-dedicated her life to Christ. After evaluating her own books, Francine Rivers ripped them from the market, proclaiming, “I want to write for God.” In redirecting her writing skills, Rivers wrote the world-wide phenomenon “Redeeming Love.” In Christian fiction fashion, the book is about an upright man obeying God’s instructions to marry a prostitute. Although Rivers intended to base her novel around the Book of Hosea in the Bible, she embraced her authorly creative liberties and gave her protagonist a backstory darker than most backstories in the Bible.
Many can imagine such a torturing history behind a main character without knowing every rich detail; however, her “Christian” book never withheld content that one would find in the normal YA romance novel. The book carefully and rather tastefully tells the reader the darkness of rape, abuse, abortion and trafficking and the pleasure of marital intercourse without using explicit words to conjure damaging images in the reader’s brain. Rivers uses the darkness of the prostitute’s past to show how powerful God’s love can redeem a human being.
After falling in love with the book myself, I wondered how well the book would translate to the screen. The trailer was greatly disturbing as the words “Choose the life you want” was blatantly written on the screen in white letters. There was no mention of God in the trailer except for a Bible briefly shown.
For a year after the release of the movie in 2021, I was verbally against it because I had heard that the director with a secular movie-making background turned the God-glorifying book into straight romance. After learning that Francine Rivers herself produced the movie, I decided to watch it myself before I continued to warn people against watching the movie. I was impressed and internally shocked when I discovered the movie not only was almost word for word dialogue from the book but also highlighted the same message from the book.
Reviewers of the movie split between three sides of the critique. The Christian audience shun the explicit scenes shown in the movie for being too “Hollywood” and “straying from the Christian message.” The secular audience scorned the God-centered part of the message and claimed it was the upright man’s love who saved the prostitute from the demons in herself. The devoted readers of the books claimed it was a great adaptation from print to screen, but the movie showing the explicit parts of the book that Rivers has carefully constructed in diction and syntax took away from the central theme. It left the viewer walking away thinking deeply about the wrong parts of the movie. In their opinion, the overstepping of the darker and sexualized scenes of the movie made the impact of God’s love seem overshadowed and a “magical Christian solution to all the world’s problems.”
To these three responses, I agree with them all.
Christian media constantly gets a bad reputation for being too censored about the disturbing parts of the world. Francine Rivers’ “Redeeming Love” is a classic work of Christian fiction that is realistic and raw which appeals to people because it is far from a feel good Christian movie. However, when we see those same darkened scenes put to an art form that is seen visually as opposed to mentally, it can have a greater effect on the human consciousness which can make the audience member walk away with a different message.
Overall, I think scenes shouldn’t be the reason why one doesn’t see “Redeeming Love,” but if one is aware that the God-centered message is the central theme of the book, I think the movie can have the biggest impact on the Christian movie-making world.