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You wouldnt know it from the Hollywood buzz machine, but on the first weekend of the month, in a limited release, the film Christmas with the Chosen: The Messengers raked in 8.45 million viewers and came in fifth at the box office. Originally scheduled for a limited three-day release, it has now been extended through Christmas, even while being made available via streaming.

For those who dont know the work, the short film is an offshoot of one of the most successful crowdfunded streaming projects in history, The Chosen, a retelling of the Gospels that focuses on the backstories of many of the major characters. Projected for seven seasons, with two already available online and a third set to begin filming shortly, crowdfunding has supported the $10 million to $18 million cost for each season.

The success of the streaming series and the Christmas film demonstrates the ongoing market draw for shows that celebrate, rather than ignore or denigrate, traditional faith. Yet many films in this subgenre offer nothing beyond predictable, polemical plotlines.

The original Gods Not Dead, released in 2015, set the pattern, with predictable characters and story. The central conflict is between an overbearing atheist professor who is forcing students to sign a God is dead statement and a rebellious Christian student. The latest installment (Gods Not Dead: We The People) is even more polemical as it shifts, following a strain of contemporary evangelicalism, in the direction of putting faith in the service of direct political advocacy.

The Chosen is different. Accompanied by Bible study-guides and created by Dallas Jenkins, whose father penned the Left Behind book series, the series and the film might seem to be more of the same. Yet, Jenkins repudiates the notion that this is a stick-it-to-Hollywood thing, according to The Wall Street Journal. Inspired to become a film-maker after watching the Jack Nicholson film One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and who likens The Chosen to rich character-driven dramas like Friday Night Lights, Jenkins combines the best of Hollywood with the best traditional storytelling techniques.

The series and spinoff film pose the question what might it have been like to have encountered the person of Jesus in the course of ordinary daily life, to have lived, dined, traveled, laughed and mourned with him. And what might it have been like to begin to wonder about the strange capacities of knowing, healing and forgiving of this otherwise seemingly ordinary human being. The result is a captivating human drama invested with deep spiritual significance.

The Chosen series, whose episodes have been viewed more than 312 million times, is unique. It is sympathetic to faith in ways that Hollywood finds difficult. Yet in its openness to the best of Hollywood and in its avoidance of culture wars and political diatribes, it is atypical of faith-based films.

Its popularity is a good sign for our culture and for art. It reflects our exhaustion with politics and our longing for meaning that transcends ideological battles.

Especially in the faith-based audience, there is a hunger for depictions of faith that include, rather than rule out, doubt. In one episode, Peter here portrayed as a desperate fisherman with a gambling problem and mounting debts complains to God, on behalf of the Jewish people: You cant decide whether were chosen or not.

Viewers also want to see complex depictions of the struggle with evil in the depths of the human soul. While Hollywood continues with some regularity to produce fantastical and absurd stories of exorcism, the story of Mary Magdalene, in the inaugural episode of The Chosen, is a compelling and chilling account of what it might mean to be in the grip of evil. Her eventual encounter with Jesus fills her and the audience with surprise and awe.

The brilliance of The Chosen is to take the most influential story of all time and to make it fresh, not by altering it to suit contemporary fads, but by inviting us to inhabit the perspectives of Jesus contemporaries. In its use of indirection and in its focus on surprise and wonder, The Chosen adopts both the method of the Gospels and the tools of genuine art. It thus opens a fresh path, one with lessons for both faith-based and mainstream Hollywood filmmaking.

Thomas S. Hibbs is the J. Newton Rayzor Sr. professor of philosophy at Baylor University.

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How The Chosen embraced the best of Hollywood and showed it what people really want - The Dallas Morning News

Back in the 1990s, when stand-up comedy was hailed as the new rock n roll, Robert Newman and David Baddiel used to perform a sketch entitled History Today. The two comedians played elderly historians, slumped in the chairs of a dull, late-night talk show. Each time they attempted to engage in scholarly debate their discussion descended into puerile, playground insults.

It worked because Newman and Baddiel are brilliant comic performers, but also because it was then possible to portray history as the musty domain of grey-haired, grey-suited men, trapped in personal feuds and obsessed with obscure historical controversies. That history and historians could be so lampooned was, in retrospect, a luxurious state of affairs.

Two decades later historians have become unwilling conscripts in toxic culture wars, the focus of online hate and tabloid misinformation, rather than TV satire. What is, and what is not, taught in schools and universities, what appears in our childrens textbooks, how heritage organisations research and present the houses and objects under their care, have all become front-page news.

We are where we are, in large part, because historians have been doing their job. Over recent decades that has led them to turn their analytical gaze towards aspects of Britains past that had long been purposefully marginalised in particular the histories of slavery and empire. The historians now being targeted by journalists and politicians are almost exclusively engaged in those fields of study. Given that politicians, this summer, were willing to pick fights with the star players of the England football team, it is hardly surprising that historians are considered soft targets.

[See also: The England team have exposed the lie of the governments culture war]

The gradual growth in the study of slavery and colonialism, which began in the 1960s, was a small component within a far bigger revolution in the study of history. Back then a generation of historians that included EP Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Dorothy Thompson and Christopher Hill expanded the fields of social history and working class history, which they very often examined from a Marxist standpoint. Their aim was to recover the lives of the poor from what EP Thompson called the enormous condescension of posterity.

Twenty-first-century historians seeking to rescue the millions who laboured on the plantations, or who resisted British imperialrule, from similar condescension find themselves in a radically different environment. The study of those specialisms is increasingly portrayed not as an expansion of our national history but as a politicised assault upon it.

Yet rather than challenge the history of the favoured culture-war topic, the tactic is to discredit the historians themselves, the intellectual equivalent to playing the player, not the ball. As the facts of phenomena such as the transatlantic slave trade cannot be refuted, the motives of those who study them are instead called into question. While the historians of the 1960s were denounced for their Marxism, the abuse levelled at todays historians is of a different order. The aim is not to engage in historical debate but to delegitimise opponents.

Corinne Fowler, a professor at the University of Leicester, who co-edited a report on the links between National Trust properties and historical slavery and colonialism, has rightly compared these campaigns against historians to the methods used by those who work to delegitimise the scholarship of climate scientists. Another tactic is to rebrand historians as activists, and claim that their scholarly detachment has been surrendered to woke ideology. I myself have been denounced as an ideological historian despite being, in truth, a rather old-fashioned empirical historian.

[See also: The Little Britain affair is a reminder of the UKs long and toxic love affair with blacking up]

Historians who regard the study of slavery and empire as valid now face a difficult task. They must stand up for the study and the public dissemination of history as it really is messy, contradictory and often far from glorious or heroic while at the same time standing up for one another. To do this they must accept that culture wars appeal to emotion they involve calculated distortions that aim to convince people their history and thus their identity is under attack, and cannot be defeated with mere facts.

Historians can and should point out that while culture wars are toxic they are also confected. The articles attacking historians and heritage organisations are often peppered with inaccuracies. There never was, for example, a mass cancelling of memberships at the National Trust, in response to the research into links between the Trusts properties and slavery. And the project in question was not a woke reaction to Black Lives Matter but a peer-reviewed work of scholarship conceived before both the murder of George Floyd and the protests of 2020.

[See also: Africas forgotten empires]

Historians should repeatedly point out that the rewriting of history is not some act of professional misconduct but literally the job of professional historians. The phoney arguments at the heart of this phoney war have too often been allowed to define the debate. Historians, so skilled at reframing discussions and problematising debates, need to bring those skills to bear on those who would reduce public history to what Donald Trumps infamous 1776 Commission termed patriotic education something as far away from history as an academic discipline as can be imagined.

David Olusogas books include Black and British: A Forgotten History (Pan Macmillan)

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Historians have become soft targets in the culture wars. We should fight back - The New Statesman

CULTURE wars and woke attacks on Britain are a gift to our enemies, Liz Truss will declare.

Endless bickering over how bad the UK is makes us a laughing stock to adversaries and gives hostile states like China and Russia an advantage, the Foreign Secretary will add.

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She will tell the most senior diplomats that the UK has been too naval gazing since the Berlin Wall fell and it is time to step forward, be proud of who we are and what we stand for, ready to shape the world anew.

It comes as tensions with Russia mount over Ukraine.

Ms Truss will tell the Chatham House think tank today: In recent years the free world took its eyes off the ball.

After the collapse of communism, many were convinced it was the end of history, confident that freedom and democracy would go global.

People turned inwards. Its time to wake up. The age of introspection must end now.

We need to believe in Britain and project the best of Britain to the world.

"I want us to be confident, outward-looking, patriotic and positive and to be proud of our great country.

She plans to closer partnerships with allies like Japan, Australia, Canada, Indonesia and India across trade, tech and security.

An ally said: "Liz thinks we need to spend less time quarrelling among ourselves and more on promoting freedom and winning the battle for global influence against bad guys."

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Foreign Secretary Liz Truss says culture wars and woke attacks on Britain are a gift to our enemies... - The US Sun

The journalist, author and filmmaker picks his five best books about the culture wars, which form the subject of his new eight-part series, Things FellApart, available now on BBC Sounds and Radio 4.

One of the pleasures of makingThings Fell Apartwere long walks listening out for buried treasure in audiobook memoirs. This extraordinary life story gave me episode one. A boy in an alpine evangelical commune, dreaming of making avant-garde movies, inadvertently kickstarts a campaign of murders in the 1990s.

Da Capo Press 11.95

In his exhaustive culture wars history, Hartman includes fascinating conflicts I couldnt fit in like Piss Christ, an artwork of a crucifix dipped in urine that caused wild ructions in the 1980s but is now largely forgotten, as many of the conflicts that overwhelm us today will surely soon be.

University of Chicago Press 17;The Week Bookshop 13.99

Walkers father was a Jewish lawyer; her mother was Alice Walker, author ofThe Color Purple. Her beautiful memoir tells how, after their split, her childhood was spent moving between universes that never overlap. The experience inspired her to invent a new movement third-wave feminism in the 1990s.

Out of print

Tammy Faye Bakker was an ostentatious 1980s televangelist. While undeniably fraud-adjacent her husband Jim was imprisoned for misusing viewer donations Tammy was a wonderful oasis of curiosity among her deeply homophobic peers.

Tarcher 10.99

Dick Gregory was a hugely successful comedian before he quit it all for civil rights activism in the 1960s. His memoir does not asterisk the n-word. Its spelt out. As a result, it was banned by Christian conservatives in the 1970s. And now it has been banned again this time by progressives on college campuses. Illiberalism mutates.

Plume 13.99

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Jon Ronson: my five best books about the culture wars - The Week UK

The last time I wrote for The Spectators diary slot, over the summer, theatres were tentatively beginning to turn their lights on again, following the historically long closures at the height of the pandemic. On Monday night the West End went dark once more, but thankfully only briefly. Theatres along Shaftesbury Avenue and beyond dimmed their lights at 7 p.m. to mark the legacy of Stephen Sondheim, who died last week. I came to Sondheims work quite late myself, and Im sure a new audience will be found following the affection generated at his passing. Sondheims impact is felt as much on the theatre scene here as it is in America, but he didnt write about British politics, of course or did he? This song from A Little Night Music is in reference to the theatrical tactic, deployed when a show isnt going well, of bringing on a clownish figure to offer some distracting jokes: Where are the clowns?/ Send in the clowns./ Dont bother, theyre here.

Im in the final days of rehearsals for my own new play, which opens at Londons Young Vic theatre this week. Best of Enemies covers the 1968 US television debates between the father of modern American conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr, and the liberal playwright Gore Vidal. These exchanges the first real example of the modern cultural phenomenon of pitting opposing pundits against one another to create debate only came about because ABC, the lowest-rated and poorest of the television networks, needed a cheap innovation to their coverage of the Republican and Democratic conventions that year. What occurred, by accident or design, was a ratings winner that pretty much transformed political coverage for ever.

Buckley and Vidal loathed one another and saw the others ideology as immoral and reckless. Their clash was a gladiatorial match of minds for the soul of a nation. And yet even though it could be seen as a moment when mainstream political discourse became overtly petty, personal and adversarial the origins of the culture wars being played out across our more modern media platforms today it also was the kind of serious discussion its hard to imagine existing any more: 15 minutes of uninterrupted, primetime conversation, each night, between two public intellectuals speaking in philosophical terms about the nature of society and governance, tax systems and racial divides, foreign policy and the role of the state. They spoke in poetry, but they were also precise about the problems facing the West. Buckley proclaimed that Vidals hobgoblinisation of Marxism would lead to a spiritual world of stagnation. Vidal believed that these were revolutionary times when radical changes were needed, otherwise to be perfectly bleak and to be perfectly blunt, I think were headed toward total disaster, this empire.

There was drama on BBC Radio 4 this week too, but not in its Afternoon Play spot. I, like millions of others, felt a pang of existential dread when the Today programme was taken off air for a full 30 minutes on Monday as an errant alarm caused the presenters and technicians to be evacuated. Nick Robinson and Martha Kearney tweeted photos of themselves outside in the cold to reassure listeners all was fine, but perhaps also to avoid unleashing nuclear catastrophe, as the failure to broadcast Today remains on the countrys doomsday protocols. So unconscionable is the programmes absence that its disappearance remains an official measure that Royal Navy captains use to determine if the nation has been obliterated with atomic weapons, and must therefore retaliate. Thankfully, a documentary about the history of the T-shirt was broadcast to fill the dead air until the presenters could re-enter the building.

Despite the fears I have over the pointlessness and nastiness of conversations on social media, Twitter can be a great place for a writer to discover absurd moments in history that might inspire new work. I read that Switzerland has accidentally invaded Liechtenstein on quite a few occasions in history, most recently in 2007 when the marching Swiss soldiers took a wrong turn over the border and quickly apologised. I went down an internet rabbit hole of research that dragged up the time the UK accidentally invaded Spain in 2002, when some Royal Marines misjudged a training-exercise landing meant for Gibraltar, storming a beach some yards away in neighbouring Spain instead. A Ministry of Defence spokesman at the time said: They were informed of their error by local policeman and only spent about five minutes on the beach. The Ministry reiterated that we were not trying to take Spain and have no plans to do so. Although taps nose we would say that, wouldnt we?

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The birth of the culture wars - Spectator.co.uk