Why Christian Movies Are Rarely Either Christian or Profitable
Remnant Review (March 17, 2012)
What I say here about Christian movies applies equally well to religious movies in general. It also applies to ideological movies that appeal to a narrow segment of the population. I focus here on Christian movies, because I have more experience in watching them, and because I am more sensitive to failures in presenting the message.
When I think about artistically successful Christian movies, I do not have very much to think about. I suppose the best one that I can recall seeing is Tender Mercies. It was a successful movie, and it won Robert Duvall an Academy award as best actor. It was written by Horton Foote. Foote was one of the greatest screenwriters of the 20th century. He is most famous for the screenplay for To Kill a Mockingbird. (Duvall's first role was in that movie.) Foote won the Academy Award for it. He was a gifted playwright who wrote for over 60 years. His screenplays were not explicitly Christian, but they very often centered on life in the South, and to the extent that Southern culture has had a strong Protestant element, his screenplays reflect this cultural setting.
Tender Mercies was about a man who had suffered from alcoholism, and who recovers because of living in the presence of a godly widow and her son. Through faith and work, he is restored to sobriety, and then he has an opportunity to achieve success in his former career, which was songwriting. He suffers a tragedy with the death of his daughter, and his faith, along with his family responsibilities, sustain him in the crisis.
The screenplay does not heavily emphasize the Christianity in his life. There is a scene in which he is baptized, and when his adopted son asks him whether he feels any different, he says: "Not yet." That was a good answer. It is clear, however, from the way that he handles the problems that come at him, that he is a truly changed man. He has made the transition from wrath to grace. But the movie does not explain the theological foundation of this transition. I don't know if Foote knew.
The movie appealed to a broad audience. It was about a man who triumphs over adversity, and does so in a believable setting. The story is about someone who has hit rock bottom, and who is restored to a productive life by means of love, faith, and hard work. There is nothing in the movie which would alienate most of the American population. It was well received.
Another movie with Christian emphasis was Chariots of Fire. It won the Academy Award in 1981. It was what is called a sleeper. It came out of nowhere, or at least Great Britain. No one had any premonition that it might win the Academy Award when it was released in 1980. It was deliberately targeted at a Christian audience. I can remember attending a special screening of the movie one mid-week afternoon. The distribution company had sent out an individual to present the movie to pastors in Tyler, Texas. This was a marketing program to encourage churches to sell blocks of the tickets in order to increase attendance. As soon as the movie won the Academy Award, this program of distribution ended.
The movie was about a group of young men who trained for the 1924 Olympics. There was a Christian, a Jew, a member of the British upper class, a commoner, and one man who got blipped out of the movie. The member of the British upper class was fictional. So was the commoner. The other three were real.
The Jew had a problem with resentment against British upper class. The Christian had a problem with his sister, which in fact did not happen in real life. She supposedly opposed his quest for fame as an athlete. His crisis took place when he discovered that he would have to run one of the heats in the 100- meter dash on a Sunday. He then switched to the 400-meter race. This really happened, although it did not happen in the way that the movie described, namely, at the last minute. He had trained for many months in the 400-meter event, having decided to avoid participation in the 100-meter event. That enabled the Jew to win the 100-meter race.
This was a sports movie that had social and religious implications. It was produced by a man who had no inclinations toward supernatural religion. As he said after the movie won the Academy Award, he thought it was a great story. He had read about Eric Liddel's decision to switch to the 400-meter race, and he thought that the story would be compelling on-screen. He was correct.
In the Hollywood of the Golden Age, from 1910 to 1960, the Jews who ran most of Hollywood, though of course not including Walt Disney, produced movies that satisfied an overwhelmingly Christian audience. These movies did not portray Protestant ministers as sexual deviants, crazy people, or corrupt. Surely they did not portray Roman Catholic priests in such a light. They knew who was paying for the tickets, and they did not assault the moral and religious commitment of their audience. This changed in 1960, and it has never gone back. Neither have their audiences. Movie attendance fell in the 1960s, and it has never recovered.
The most famous and successful Christian-theme movie is Ben Hur. It won 11 Academy Awards in 1960. It was enormously successful financially. It was released in 1959. In 1960, Hollywood released Inherit the Wind and Elmer Gantry, both of which were hostile to fundamentalist Protestant Christianity. That was the turning point, according to Michael Medved, an orthodox Jew and a professional movie reviewer.
The problem with explicitly Christian movies is partially artistic and partial economic. The artistic problem exists because success in the craft is based on apprenticeship. Hollywood is a closed shop. Except for Walt Disney, who was more occult than Christian, Hollywood's founders were secular Jews. The best book on this is Neal Gabler's An Empire of Their Own. They knew what sold, and they sold it.
That was the problem on the production side. There was a bigger problem on the consumption side. For over half a century, fundamentalist Christians officially opposed attending all movies. Attending movies was considered to be in the same moral category as attending dances, other than square dances. It was on the black list, along with alcohol and tobacco. (Firearms were fine.) The result of this policy was to reduce the influence of Protestant fundamentalists at the box office. The movie producers knew that these people were not going to attend movies. They could be safely ignored. The moral watchdog "Comstock code" agency was controlled by other representatives: Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants.
Even if fundamentalists did attend, fundamentalist church members were not going to go into movie production. Therefore, they would not gain the skills needed to be successful in this industry, which was based almost entirely on a system of apprenticeship. Bob Jones University was the exception. It has long had a competent program for movie production. It is ranked with UCLA and USC -- Hollywood organs. But none of the movies produced by its graduates ever reached the silver screen.
Another problem that explicitly Christian movies face is that most of the American population is only marginally Christian. They want to be entertained, but they do not want to be preached at. Christians have regarded movies as instruments of evangelism, but they have been unable to find a market large enough to sustain box office revenues for evangelical movies.
Mel Gibson had difficulty with the distribution system for his movie on the crucifixion. It turned out that his assessment of the market was correct, and his critics wrong. He made an enormous amount of money by bucking the trend. But this was surely an exception. He had money and contacts to fund the film. He also knew how to cut costs without reducing quality.
The same problems face anyone who wants to make a politically incorrect movie. A recent example is Atlas Shrugged, Part 1. It appealed to a very small set of the population, and the box office returns were low: $4.6 million, It cost $20 million to produce. That did not include marketing. By any economically rational assessment, it was a huge flop. It took over 50 years to get the book to the theaters, and it sank without a trace in a couple of weekends. Yet the conservative Washington Times ran a glowing review about how successful the movie was economically -- based on one weekend's returns. The review began with this headline: "Atlas Shrugged" box office success stuns liberal Hollywood. The reviewer is a satirist, but the review was not satire.
Recently, I saw a movie on Netflix titled Seven Days in Utopia. It starred Robert Duvall. It was a movie about redemption, but it was mainly about golf. It was a supposedly a Christian movie. It wasn't.
Duvall had starred in an earlier Christian-theme film, The Apostle, for which he put up most of the money, did most of the screenwriting, and directed. It is was about a Pentecostal pastor. But this pastor is a deviant. He is a serial adulterer. He beats another man to death with a baseball bat. Then he flees the police, baptizes himself an apostle, goes into a Louisiana community, and becomes a spiritual leader for lower-class people. This was not a movie to warm the hearts of Pentecostals.
The fact that Netflix was making available a movie in March of 2012 which had been released in September 2011 indicates that the production company was trying to recoup its losses. Popular movies are not released to Netflix's cable program for years. The movie was a financial disaster for the people who invested in. Its total box office income was under $5 million, and this movie cost well over $6 million to make. The author admitted to $6 million as the preliminary infusion of capital it required. So, the investors lost their money.
It was a pleasant movie, and the acting was tolerable, so it was not an artistic failure. I would not call it great by any stretch of the imagination. It was wholesome family fare, as long as the family likes golf.
The movie never mentioned Jesus Christ. It never offered anything like a Christian doctrine of redemption. It was a movie about faith in something or other which can restore a person to a meaningful existence. Its slogan was "see it, feel it, trust it." This is basically New Age religion.
The Christians who funded this movie got their wallets picked by the producer and screenwriter. This is par for the course. This is an ancient theme in literature. It is the story of the country bumpkins who come to the big city and get taken to the cleaners by city slickers.
The author of the best-selling book that was the basis for the movie is a dedicated fundamentalist Christian. In pre-release interviews that promoted the movie, he seemed utterly oblivious to the fact that the movie is nothing but New Age religion. Hollywood sharpies took his book and gutted it. They stripped every trace of Christian orthodoxy out of it They sent everyone to church in the First Church of Utopia, Texas. This re-started a struggling young golfer to the top of his game. His game had gone to hell. Now it was redeemed.
You think I'm exaggerating? Watch the movie.
As I say, it was a pleasant movie. It got panned by critics as a Christian movie, yet it was not a Christian movie. It catered to fundamentalist Christians, who got blamed for the weakness of the script, yet it was Hollywood script writers who destroyed the book's message. Again, this is par for the course.
The naïve investors who put up their money in the name Jesus poured it down a rathole. That money was wasted. It was raised in the name of Jesus, and was squandered on New Age religion. It was a movie about salvation by works. It was more of a defense of Zen Buddhism than it was of Christianity. It was about learning lessons from physical and mental disciplines unrelated to golf. As I watched it, I thought of Mr. Myagi in the original Karate Kid, who taught his young disciple the art of Eastern martial arts. Step one: wax a yard full of old automobiles. That procedure was appropriate for a movie about Eastern martial arts, because those arts really are closely related to Zen Buddhism.
I went to the website of the man who wrote the book. He is a very successful psychological counselor to athletes who are having trouble with their game. He was the counselor to the San Antonio Spurs when they were the worst team in the NBA. Under his guidance, they won the NBA championship two years later, and he has an NBA championship ring to prove it. I have no doubt that his Christian faith helps him in dealing with athletes who are having trouble with their performance. He has a skill and it is a highly marketable skill. He has related that scale to his calling, which is Christian evangelism. I say more power to him.
The problem is, he saw God's hand in the production of the movie. Yet, from the point of view of the content of the movie, it was a complete failure. The movie was unfaithful in the broadest sense to the message in his book. The movie was not about the redeeming power of Jesus Christ; the movie was about the redeeming power of Zen Buddhist training techniques.
Not long before the movie was released, he spoke to a large Baptist church in Texas. He went into detail about how God led him to Christians who put up the money for the movie. Given the outcome of the movie, I have serious doubts that was God who led him. If God really was behind the fund-raising aspects of the movie, then it was to teach the investors about the book of Job. Job is a very depressing book. I imagine that the investors are still depressed.
At the end of his presentation, the pastor stood up and announced to the congregation that this movie was going to present the truth about God in Jesus Christ. He was wrong.
There is a naïve view toward the movies that is shared by most fundamentalist Christians. This view is schizophrenic.
On the one hand, they see that the movies are undermining morality across the boards. They therefore attribute to the movies the power of changing people's minds. They believe that if they could just get in control of the movies, they could begin to reshape the minds of millions of Americans. This view of the movies is wrong.
Movies only rarely change anybody's mind. Movies confirm existing attitudes. If they did not confirm existing attitudes, they would not make any money. A movie that comes out strongly against the prevailing opinions of the general population is going to be an economic flop. Sometimes we find that dedicated humanists are willing to take this kind of economic loss in order to push the edge of the moral envelope. They are trying to make a statement against the last remnants of Christian culture in the United States, and they know in advance that the artistic vehicle that they are using to make this statement will produce a financial loss. Michael Medved wrote over 20 years ago that this attitude was common in Hollywood. He said that the profits on the PG-rated movies are then used to fund R-rated movies that they know will not be successful, but will make a statement against the remnants of Christian morality within the general population.
Movies are a part of mass culture. They are funded in the hope of selling lots of tickets, and the main ticket buyers today are teenage boys who are taking their girlfriends to movies. The goal of these young men is not to view a movie that challenges our increasingly debauched morality, especially sexual morality, on which the young men are placing so much hope early in the evening. They do not go to movies to be spiritually uplifted.
Cultures are changed by a of handful books. They are not changed by scholarly articles in academic journals. They are not changed by articles in women's magazines. They are not changed by the mass media in general. A handful of white men, and an occasional white woman, have provided the tools of cultural transformation. They have written important books that have changed the minds of either intellectuals, or in some rare cases, large segments of the population.
Perhaps the most famous mind-changing book in American history was Uncle Tom's Cabin. It was made into a stage play, so it did have an impact through mass entertainment. But it was the book, not the stage play, that changed the minds of most people. Not that many people attended stage plays in the 1850s. The book began with a premise regarding slavery that was shared by a substantial minority in New England. There were a lot of people who had not really made up their minds, and the book did change some of these minds.
It is possible to argue that the 1915 movie, Birth of a Nation, did change people's minds. It promoted the original Ku Klux Klan in 1867. Shortly after the movie was released, a promoter in Georgia started an organization modeled after the Klan. The Klan did have a growing impact politically in the 1920s and 1930s. The movie appealed greatly to Southerners who were still deeply resentful against Reconstruction. The movie was also very careful not to link Abraham Lincoln with Reconstruction. In this sense, the movie was accurate. He was killed before the Republicans in Congress rammed through Reconstruction over Andrew Johnson's vetoes. But Lincoln had been a hated man in the South for decades in 1915, so the movie was careful to portray him as someone who would have been a friend to the South, had John Wilkes Booth not assassinated him. In this sense, the movie was very careful not to alienate people outside the South. It trimmed its sails to match the wind in the general population.
The movie reinforced anti-Reconstruction and anti-black liberation in the South. The movie was based on a trilogy of novels highly favorable to the Ku Klux Klan and hostile to Yankees. They were racist books to the core. They were not very good novels, either. I read all three of them over 50 years ago. I choose not to read any of them again.
So, while the movie did have an influence in reviving anti-Reconstruction sentiment, it did not change the opinion of most Americans. The Ku Klux Klan was always a minority movement. It was a secret society and occult as well, with wizards and dragons as officers. Secret society members may wear funny-looking hats, but they do not dress themselves in white robes or burn crosses in people's front yards. A movie could not change this.
I think the best example in American literature of the irreversibility of that lost Southern culture is Gone with the Wind. The title expresses the truth of the situation facing Southerners after Reconstruction. The antebellum society of slaves and the social hierarchy based on slavery was indeed gone with the wind by 1935. There was no possibility that such a society would ever be restored in the United States. The supreme mark of the failure of that society in the movie was Mr. O'Hara, who was mad as a hatter, and was convinced that his Confederate bonds would restore the family to wealth. There was nothing remotely like the antebellum Southern belle in Scarlett O'Hara after the war was over. She was a hard-nosed, hard-negotiating, hard-driver of men. She was, in fact, a Yankee in a dress. She had the characteristics that Southerners regarded as grasping and commercial, which they associated with the carpetbaggers who came down to prey upon them. The only trace of the old South in Scarlett O'Hara was her commitment to the land. Rhett Butler was also a functional Yankee, and he denied being a gentleman. He was a gun runner, and he did it for money. Now, that was a Yankee for you! He had no loyalty other than to money.
We should not attribute to the movies the same degree of culture-transforming power that we attribute to books. Books can challenge people's thinking in ways that force them to reconsider some of the fundamental propositions of their lives. Christians should understand the power of the Bible is far greater in changing people's minds than the power of a story, even a story like Ben Hur. Movies are story-telling tools.
The enormous waste of money associated with Seven Days in Utopia should be contrasted with the remarkable efficiency of the money expended by the author of the book that served as the basis of the movie.
The author wrote a novel with a message: you can improve your golf game and transform your life by becoming a Christian. It was an evangelical book. It was aimed at golfers, who are among the most fanatical practitioners of any hobby in history.
The movie begins with a voiceover by Robert Duvall that speaks of golf as a game that captures the souls of men. I do not understand how any game can do this, and certainly not a game that involves trying to put a little white ball into a hole in the ground. But the fact that I regard golf as an utter waste of time is irrelevant to the fanatics who dream of lowering their handicap. The fact that I prefer to write articles or chapters of books rather than playing golf is neither here nor there in terms of the marketing strategy adopted by the author of the book.
Like pre-Internet new authors, he thought that the best way to get a book published is to write a manuscript and then send it to a publisher. This is the classic sign of an author who has never had a book published. He soon learned that nobody wanted his book. It was on golf, but it was also a book on Christian evangelism. It was a novel rather than a how-to manual. It did not fit in any of the book publishers' categories, so the manuscript was rejected by every book publisher he sent it to. Also, he did not have an agent, and that is usually the kiss of death for any manuscript. As to how anybody gets an agent, nobody seems to know. I don't know, and I have written 50 books.
So, he took advantage of the greatest tool for changing people's minds that has been invented since the printing press. He set up a website and posted the entire manuscript online. Anybody could read it for free. That was exactly the right strategy for publishing the book. It is usually the right strategy for publishing any book.
He then sent a link to his book to people he knew. He said if they wanted to read the novel, they could do so simply by clicking the link. Whether he knew that most people would print the book manuscript rather than read it online, I do not know. What I do know is what he admitted in a video interview that was shot a few weeks before the movie was released. One of the book's readers was profoundly affected by the book. He also was a printer by profession. So, he asked if he could print 1000 copies of the book, keep 10 copies for himself to send to friends, and send the other 990 copies to the author. That was the best offer that most first-time authors ever get in life. Frankly, I have never heard of anything like it before.
When the author received his copies of the book, he made a decision that was one of the best marketing decisions I can imagine. He told people they could get one copy for free, or they could buy 10 copies to give to their friends. He stumbled into a book marketing strategy that was first used in 1976 by Jeremiah Denton, who had been a POW in North Vietnam. The organization working with Denton mailed out individual copies of his book free of charge. The publisher rented these lists. It then asked for donations to make more mailings. It also offer packets of the book for sale. The buyers could give away for free. In the back of each book was an order blank for more books. That book, When Hell Was in Session, became a publishing phenomenon. It led to his election as US Senator from the state of Alabama.
It also created a short-lived marketing tool called the bookalogue.
A decade later, Arthur Robinson and I used the same strategy in promoting our book on civil defense, Fighting Chance: 10 Feet to Survival. Before the mailings ended, Robinson had mailed out over a quarter million copies. He also had a symbolic victory of persuading the 1988 Republican convention to put a civil defense plank in the party's platform. Of course, platforms mean nothing today, so nothing was done to pursue civil defense after Bush was elected. The Soviet Union committed suicide in December 1991. There was no real possibility that the U.S. government was going to build civil defense shelters even if the Soviet Union had not committed suicide, so I am grateful for the head honchos of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, who shut down the whole operation, stole the money, deposited it in their Swiss bank accounts, and sold off the infrastructure of the country to the private sector. This was the greatest single act of privatization in the history of man.
Because of the initial marketing strategy, the golf book became a bestseller. That was what made possible the production of the movie. Unfortunately, this was a case of finding lemonade and turning it into a lemon. The author got stars in his eyes. He thought it would be possible to produce a Hollywood movie based on his book. Unfortunately, he was correct. The movie is a pleasant entertainment tool, but it is a theological disaster. I have already explained why.
What should the author have done? More of the same. He should have continued to offer the book for sale for as long as he could break even on the mailings. He should have used the mailing list generated by the book to bring people to a website. The website could have been partially free, in order to help golfers understand both the game and the gospel, with a paid subscription section for those golfers who wanted more information about the combination of Christianity and their golf game, and who wanted to share a community experience with other golfers.
The author probably could have become a millionaire off that website. If he did not want the money, he could have used all the subscription money generated by the website to do more mailings for the book. The website would either have supported him in his old age, or served as a source of capital for selling more copies of the book, or both.
The author then made the second mistake. He let a Christian publishing house take over. He got the usual 10% or 15% royalty. The book company got most of the money. It got a sure thing.
On Amazon, he would have kept 70% of the Kindle edition money. With self-publishing a physical book, he would have gotten the names and addresses for a mailing list. Once again, the babe in the woods got skinned by the professionals.
That was just the beginning. The author had stars in his eyes. He dreamed that making a Hollywood movie could change the minds of people. He was wrong. So, he missed the greatest opportunity that any author ever has: the ability to use his book as a way to generate a constant stream of income non-book, and also to help people achieve their goals.
Instead of going to rich Christians with a dream of making a Hollywood movie, he should have used the book to generate a separate stream of income that would continue to subsidize his ministry. Of course, he could also have gone to Christians to ask them to donate a comparable amount of money to increase the promotion of his book. That would have been a very good use of the money, but he would not have had any positive responses to the offer.
Rich Christians will not fund anything that really might change the world. This is a basic rule of life. They will put large amounts of money down rat holes, but nothing else. They want the big time. They want to make it big on a big all-or-nothing deal. (They always get nothing.) They want some reflected glory from being associated with a big deal. A Hollywood movie is considered a big deal.
If he had raised $10 million (or whatever the movie cost) to promote the book, he would have achieved far more in terms of evangelism than anything he could have done on his own. But, as I have said, there was no way that rich Christians were going to put up their money to promote something as conventional as sending out a paperback book. There is no excitement in that. There is no fame in that. There is no reflected glory in that. Therefore, it is not the sort of thing that rich Christians are willing to invest in.
I have learned this from experience over the last 45 years. I have seen Christians pour money down a constant stream of ratholes. There is almost nothing that they will put up their money to fund that is not wasted. They will not take a small-scale proposition that is working, and put their money into continuing that small-scale investment until it is a medium-scale operation. That is not the way they think.
Yes, there are sugar daddies. Sugar daddies are specialists in making large amounts of money by serving the free market, and then wasting virtually all the money that they give away out of the profits. The classic example in Christian circles was J. Howard Pew. He was the head of Sun Oil (Sunoco). He was immensely wealthy. He created the Pew Charitable Trusts. He died in 1973. By 1976, all the money that he left behind was being used to fund humanist causes unrelated to his two causes in life: restoring orthodoxy to the northern Presbyterian Church (hopeless) and promoting free-market economics.
We see the same ideological waste in the famous billionaire Koch brothers. They are libertarians. They have probably poured $100 million down various ratholes that they said were designed to promote free-market economic ideas. If any of those projects has been as successful as Lew Rockwell's website and the Mises Institute's website, I have never heard about it. Yet Rockwell built the Mises Institute with relatively small donations. His LewRockwell.com site for the last four years has been funded by non-deductible donations. LewRockwell.com's Alexa ranking is 5,500 worldwide, 1,850 in the USA. Mises.org is 12,500/5,00. The Kochs' Cato.org is 45,000/10,000.
I have had more influence in the libertarian movement than the Kochs have had. That is because about 90 of my articles are published on LewRockwell.com each year. This has been true since 2000. The traffic that LRC gets has made me a household name in these circles. The Cato Institute is known today mainly because of a public cat fight between the Kochs and Ed Crane, their hand-picked man, who finally decided to tell them to kiss off.
My friend John Schaub has become a multimillionaire with his real estate investing strategy. He calls the strategy making it big on little deals. It is the right strategy for a new business, and it is the right strategy for virtually everything else in our lives.
We learn on a small scale. We make mistakes on a small scale. We take our profits and reinvest in those aspects of our business or ministry that seem to be working. We cut our losses and let our profits run. We abandon the things that do not work, and we use whatever net gains that we have earned to capitalize those aspects of our businesses or ministry that seem to be working.
In the non-profit world, the big deals never work. The thing that works is the small-scale operation run by a self-sacrificing individual who has a clear vision of what he wants to achieve. Society is transformed by lots of these people, who invest in small-scale operations over a long period of time, and then leave the operation to be run by a successor who shares their visions.
The model for this is the church. The megachurch model does not change the hearts and minds of large numbers of people. The small church of 100 adult members that perseveres over time is the kind of church that most Christians belong to, and the better small churches survive. The megachurch is the model that most Protestant pastors would like for their own careers. Yet it is the wrong model. It is comparable to the bishop's Cathedral in medieval Catholicism. It is at best symbolic. The heart of the ministry of the church has always been the local parish.
Let me give an example from the life of the author. He was the spiritual counselor for the San Antonio Spurs basketball team. That is the equivalent of a pastor of a megachurch. Where the real social changes are made is at the local level. The somewhat skilled ex-athlete who becomes a coach for a local sports team for teenagers, when multiplied 1000 or 10,000 times across the nation, is the proper model. An NBA championship team is merely a symbol of what can be done. This symbol is useless for the kingdom of God unless it motivates men in their local communities to do the same thing with teenage boys in local competition. The big deal is a legitimate symbol for a multitude of little deals. It is a mirage on its own.
Christians say they believe this, but the donors with big money never support their words with deeds. They want to put their money in big deals, yet their money does not get leverage when they do this. One reason is because the big deals are always watered-down deals. (Example: the script of Seven Days in Utopia) The second reason is that their money is diluted by donations from other big donors. Any donor's contribution is marginal.
If the donor would just put his money in some small-scale operation that has demonstrated that it is strategy is working in a particular area, he would get enormous leverage for his contribution. He would take a small ministry and turn it into a large ministry. He would take a small deal and turn it into a medium-size deal, whereupon other donors would help build the medium deal and a large deal.
Once it is a large deal, big-money donors are easy to find. They are perfectly willing to donate to something that is considered respectable. The problem is, whatever is respectable is gaining only marginal returns. The great period of growth is behind it. The donor who really wants to make a difference should find a ministry that has the capacity to become a big deal, and he should start donating to it and getting advice on growing it to the founder.
What I have found over the years is the big donors are dangerous. Anything that they give their money to is likely to turn into a flop as a direct result of their money. The super rich man is like a bull in a china shop. He is going to break a lot of pottery. He can afford to pay for it, but it is still broken.
I have offered this example before, but it is always worth repeating. In the 1970s, I worked with a skilled economist and marvelous public speaker named Ben Rogge. He was an advisor to a multimillionaire named Pierre Goodrich. Goodrich ran a small operation called the Liberty Fund. Rogge once told me that he had one goal in the advice they gave: to keep Goodrich from doing too much harm with the money. He said this: rich men know how to make money, but they do not know how to give it away. He was correct. His advice was good. The Liberty Fund has something in the range of $250 million to spend, plus $125 million in annual income, and it spends it on extremely narrow projects, as mandated by its bylaws. It prints books that promote the free market or promote a society based on limited civil government. The books are beautifully produced, and they are priced to sell. The only other thing the liberty fund does is to promote academic conferences. They do no harm.
The founder of any organization should understand that the worst thing that can happen to his organization is for it to become dependent on donations from a sugar daddy. It is all right take to the money, as long as the money is not used to create programs that will require equal quantities of money in the future. The money should be used to fund projects that will be self-sustaining if the donor ever stops donating. The donor's money is used a way that is analogous to the first-stage rocket that is used in launching a satellite. The first-stage rocket is designed to fall away once the second-stage rocket is in a position to take the satellite to its final orbit. The satellite continues to do productive work over its lifespan, but it should not have to be repaired by launching more rockets.
I enjoyed the movie. I am not going to read the book. But I was not the target of either the book or the movie. I am already Christian, and I do not play golf. There was no reason for me to buy the book, and the only reason for me to see the movie was to be entertained. The movie did entertain me, and I am getting an article out of it, but beyond that, whatever money the donors put into the movie was wasted.
As evidence of much the money was wasted. consider this. The movie ends without resolving the issue of victory. Instead, it announces, "to see if he made the putt, go to www.didhemaketheputt.com
First, it should have been listed as www.DidHeMakeThePutt.com. Second, it failed to draw visitors.
I went to www.Alexa.com to rank it. It is at 510,000. The larger the number, the lower the ranking.
By comparison, my new site, TeaPartyEconomist.com, was 1,000,000 in December 2011. Today, it is 82,000. I did this with minimal advertising money: a few thousand dollars. The advertising revenue provided this capital.
What if he had put $10,000,000 into advertising his site?
Here is the lesson. When you have a success based on what you have personally done, do more of the same. Stick to your knitting. Do not attempt to launch a satellite with a slingshot. Be content with the slingshot. Keep using the slingshot. Buy more slingshots. Let the ministry grow, step-by-step, by using the same sorts of techniques that were successful in launching the first stage of the ministry. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
If somebody comes and says that he can show you a way to go from a slingshot to a satellite in outer space, be polite. Thank him for his interest, but do not listen to him. Do not let him tell you that your ministry or project is ready for prime time. Especially do not let him tell you this when he says that you are going to have to raise the money to get it aired in prime time. You are seeing the creation of a rathole. There are people who specialize in extracting large quantities of money from dedicated rich people who know how to make money, but do not know how to give it away.
Think of these promoters as you would think of a specialist who has run several senatorial campaigns, but who has never had one of his candidates elected to the Senate. These people make money by going to county commissioners with a lot of money, or who have friends with a lot of money, and verbally painting an image of how much good the county commissioner will do after he is elected to the U.S. Senate. He preys upon the dreams of the county commissioner for relevance, power, and legacy.
There is no better target than some rich entrepreneur who thinks he is going to be elected to high political office. He will waste millions of dollars in the effort. Occasionally, some of them may be elected. Jon Corzine was elected, but how much good did that do him? Usually, however, the millionaire just pours money down the campaign's rathole. When the campaign is over, he is poorer but no wiser. He thinks that the problem was that he just did not put in enough money. The problem was, he had no skills in the field, and he was a sucker for a promoter who was able to spin dreams in front of him, deposit his checks, take his percentage off the top, and move on to the next sucker.
If Steven Spielberg had come to the author, the author would have known better. You do not expect a secular Jew to promote a Christian movie at his expense.
The best Christian movie Hollywood's in Golden Age was A Man Called Peter, the story of Peter Marshall, who had become the chaplain of the United States Senate. The actor who played Marshall spent hours listening to Marshall's sermons on audiotape. I have heard some of Marshall's sermons, and I have heard the sermons in the movie. The actor did a credible job of presenting those sermons in the way that Marshall preached them. Yet even here, the gospel was never quite presented. The message of Jesus Christ as the substitute for the sinner never came across in the otherwise accurate renderings of the sermons of Peter Marshall. They gutted the sermons. The moralism came through, but the substitutionary atonement did not. That was the best that Christianity ever got out of Hollywood. That era of Hollywood has been gone with the wind since 1960.
I do not expect that this article will do any good for a Christian ministry that is being pitched by a Hollywood promoter. I do hope readers will understand the basic principles I have presented here apply at all levels, and in every ministry or business. Do not expect to hit home runs. What you are after is a series of stand-up singles with a few doubles. It would be nice to hit .359, even though you never hit a home run. If every member of the team hit .359, nobody on the team would have to hit a home run. The stand-up singles, plus occasional doubles, will win the World Series.
The reason why the team needs home runs is because the whole team cannot hit .359. Life has home runs, but players should not train to hit them or expect them often. Better to get your batting average from .247 to .301.
The trouble is, individual dreamers believe that God or the cosmos or fate or chance or something is on their side, and that they have been born into this world in order to hit a lot of home runs. They listen to anyone who says that, if they would just write a check, he can guarantee them the first big home run. He cannot, but he can certainly cash the check. And he will. And then he will come back for another check.
Do not write the first check.