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April 18, 2025

When Secular Reporters Watch Religious Movies

If NPR’s religion reporter comes to your church, would you perceive him as someone who will give you a fair and balanced story?

The Easter season can remind people of classic Hollywood movies with religious themes. Every year, ABC still airs “The Ten Commandments.” People might break out “The Passion of the Christ” from 2004, or head to the theater to see “The King of Kings” or “The Chosen: Last Supper,” building on that streaming TV series on the life and ministry of Jesus.

But taxpayer-funded National Public Radio is inevitably going to come at the subject from a secular perspective. On Palm Sunday, their badly named newscast “All Things Considered” included a conversation among three NPR journalists about their “favorite (and not so favorite) religious films.”

The segment ended with the NPR reporters lauding the recent movie “Conclave,” which indulged a libertine-left fantasy by having the Catholic Church tricked into electing a pope with a uterus.

Weekend host Scott Detrow began: “Even for those of us who live more secular lives, movies continue to offer a bit of a cinematic catechism with stories from the Bible and other religious traditions.” He asked NPR religion reporter Jason DeRose: “What is your general view of that genre? Does it work for you? Do you have some problems with it?”

DeRose replied: “Yeah, they just don’t really work for me. I respond badly to them. For instance, biblical epics, I find them incredibly hokey. This is where I will admit that I have never seen the film ‘The Ten Commandments.’”

It’s easy to describe this 1956 film as “hokey,” but that doesn’t mean it can’t be meaningful. NPR anchor Michel Martin took a different view: “To me, that’s not a religious film. That’s like a family film that you see with your grandma.” This is like saying “Rocky” isn’t a boxing movie.

DeRose continued his lament about religious films: “But the ones that I have seen, such as, you know, ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told,’ I’m kind of confused by who really watches them and who really loves them and finds them, like, religiously meaningful to them because I just … I focus on, like, they wouldn’t have been doing that, or, you know, Jesus didn’t have blue eyes.”

In that film, Jesus was played by blue-eyed Swedish actor Max von Sydow, but that’s a strange reason to choke on the whole movie.

But DeRose has a funny definition of a “religion movie”: “I have a very specific group of religion movies that I actually like quite a lot, and they are comedies,” he said. “They’re the Monty Python films — 'The Life Of Brian,‘ 'The Holy Grail’ … ‘The Meaning Of Life’ has one of the funniest songs I ever heard in my life — 'Every Sperm Is Sacred.‘” They played a clip, with the lyric “If a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate.”

This song is an explicit mockery of Catholic teaching against artificial contraception, but DeRose admitted, “This probably says a lot about me and my sense of humor and my approach to religion — which is, you know, approach it with a real sense of humor.”

If NPR’s religion reporter comes to your church, would you perceive him as someone who will give you a fair and balanced story?

In fact, DeRose can be quite reverent and Bible-quoting — if the cause is right. On April 1, DeRose offered a gushy “Morning Edition” story on how “dozens of houses of worship in southern California” are sheltering illegal immigrants from the Trump administration. One minister said, “Faith communities are going to be in solidarity with a very vulnerable community at this moment.”

Reverence lines up very neatly with leftist politics at NPR — always at the expense of conservative taxpayers.

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