Rebecca Grace

AFA Journal staff writer

3rd in a series about Christians in Hollywood

July 2005 – What do Jeff Bridges, Michael Douglas, Michael Reagan and Ted Baehr all have in common? These men were born heirs to the Hollywood hall of fame. All sons of movie stars, each man is staking a claim for himself somewhere on or between Pennsylvania Avenue and Sunset Boulevard. 

For Ted Baehr, chairman of The Christian Film & Television Commission and publisher of MovieGuide, this meant making the most of his family legacy by becoming an award-winning producer, writer, director, media personality and scholar. He is the son of the late actor known as Bob “Tex” Allen.

Today Hollywood is his home and the entertainment industry is his passion. This passion is rooted in something much deeper than the royalty of the red carpet. His work is grounded in his personal relationship with Jesus Christ who transformed his life years ago and revealed to him Hollywood’s need of redemption. 

“The knowledge of Christ opens your eyes consistently to the truth that will set you free from the confusions of our age,” Baehr explained. “At the time when I came to Christ, I said there has to be something done to redeem the film industry.”

And Baehr was just the man to do it.

After being challenged by a friend to read the Bible in an attempt to disprove it, Baehr “came to the realization that this was a true story.” Four months later, in 1975, he asked Christ into his life and immediately went to seminary. Then in 1979, Baehr was elected president of the Episcopal Radio & Television Foundation and began to envision the creation of what now exists as The Christian Film & Television Commission. 

Today, the Commission functions “to change and transform the values of the media to create a Biblical worldview,” Baehr explained.

The Commission does so by conducting an annual in-depth economic analysis of the box office that goes beyond simply tallying the number or profanities and obscenities in a movie. 

“We look at films in terms of 24 different criteria – the worldview, the semantics, the syntax, all the different relevant criteria that can help us understand what does well at the box office [and] what doesn’t do well at the box office,” Baehr said. 

The findings are collected through and published in MovieGuide, a monthly magazine providing detailed reviews of recently released movies. The data is then compiled into the yearly “Report To the Entertainment Industry” presented at The Annual MovieGuide Awards Gala held in the heart of Hollywood. 

Baehr’s efforts to redeem the entertainment industry are tri-fold in that the report helps the studios become more effective in maximizing their profits, encourages the production of movies aimed at the Christian audience, and, hopefully, provides Christians with more family-friendly entertainment.

Baehr offers further insight into understanding the entertainment industry in the following Q&A section:

AFAJ: Although you say that movies with moral and Christian content bring better returns at the box office, why does it appear that Hollywood is caught in a spiral of corruption?
Baehr: That’s mainly because they make films for different audiences. They make films for a whole different group of people. They’re just not making it for one group. We’d love them to do that – [to make them] for just the Christian audience. [But] they’re marketing to as broad a group as they can. 

AFAJ: With that in mind, some filmmakers justify the inclusion of profanity, obscenity and gratuitous violence in their work as a reflection of human reality. Do you think this is a Biblical perspective?
Baehr: The fact of the matter is film and television is not reality. If it showed reality, it would spend a lot of time with people sitting on the toilet. What Hollywood produces is an artifact. It’s a completely specious argument that this is reality. 

AFAJ: So how should we understand film makers who claim to be Christian, but include objectionable material in their work?
Baehr: Really what we have here is a dumbing down of the church. The mainline church has been watered down. As C. S. Lewis said, “Christianity plus water is nothing .” 

AFAJ: In an effort to prevent watered-down Christianity, what are your thoughts on creating movies that have an overt Christian and evangelistic message? 
Baehr: The more redemption, the more faith, the more values you put into a movie, the better the movie usually does at the box office. Now in terms of [an] evangelistic [message], the movie industry is a story-telling media. Jesus spent most of His time telling stories. That’s exactly what He did. He only gave one sermon that was didactic, which was the Sermon on the Mount. The rest of the time, He was telling parables. So, the movie industry is a perfect parabolic medium, and it’s a perfect medium for expressing the truth of the Gospel and that truth will help people get on fire for understanding the good, the true and the beautiful. We’ll just be pre-evangelistic. We’ll plant the seed and later on somebody will then watch the harvest come in. 

AFAJ: Your Web site shows that “the number of movies with worthwhile redemptive content has doubled in the last few years.” Why do you think there has been such an increase?
Baehr: I asked a couple of studio heads that. They said, “Well, it’s because you’ve shown us there’s a big marketplace.” The most compelling reason is that this market exists. It was an under-served market, an under-utilized market, and we now have convinced the entertainment industry that they need to explore that market.

AFAJ: Despite this new audience, you claim in some of your writings that parts of Hollywood are still attempting to normalize perversion. What exactly do you mean by the normalization of perversion? 
Baehr: Hollywood is made up of many different people. [You’ve got studio heads giving their testimonies] and then you’ve got people on the other side like Oliver Stone and Michael Moore who are set on destroying faith and values. You’ve got Liam Neeson and Bill Condon who just did [the movie] Kinsey and who are set on corrupting kids with a pedophile message. The difficulty is you’re dealing with a medium that is extremely powerful in its communicative abilities. The media is extremely influential, and when people are pushing an anti-American agenda like Michael Moore or a pro-pedophile agenda like Bill Condon that agenda becomes a major influence on our society. 

AFAJ: Based on almost two decades of research evaluating the impact of the media on both children and adults, what has been your most startling finding?
Baehr: None of it startles me. [But] the key in understanding all of this – the impact – is to understand that different people are susceptible to different types of influences. Seven to eleven percent, according to many of the studies that have been done, want to copy the violence in a film. They walk out of a macho Terminator film feeling like they want to be the Terminator. Thirty-one percent want to do the sex and often do copy the sex they see in the films. Then about 60% want to copy the things like occultism and the witchcraft. Everybody has a different level of susceptibility. What’s startling is that people are insensitive and uncaring of people who are susceptible to sexual manipulation or violent manipulation or gambling manipulation [in entertainment]. 

AFAJ: What should audiences be aware of when it comes to understanding and combating the influence of perversion on society by Hollywood? 
Baehr: This is a solvable problem [and] you have a choice. The choice you make makes a tremendous difference. If you support the good, there are going to be more good movies. If you support the bad, there are going to be more bad [movies]. You’re voting at the box office just like you vote at the ballot box. 

AFAJ: How do parents teach their children media wisdom?
Baehr: It’s a simple five-step process: Number one, you have to show them the influence on their lives. Number two, you have to show them how the media influences at different stages of development. Number three, you have to understand how the media works. Next, you need to understand what your beliefs are so you can apply them. Finally, you have to understand what the solutions are. So the key to solving this problem is help kids be media wise so they can support the good and reject the bad. 

AFAJ: What do you think is the key to being a Christian in Hollywood?
Baehr: Being a Christian in Hollywood is just like being a Christian everywhere. If people believe in the Gospel that they say they profess, then they’re going to change their actions entirely. They’re going to live in a completely different way. They’re going to live in a way that is honoring to God and a blessing to their fellow man.  

Ted Baehr is the author of So You Want to Be in Pictures? A Christian Resource for ‘Making It’ in Hollywood. (Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2005). For more about The Christian Film & Television Commission:

Internet: www.movieguide.org
E-mail: customerservice@movieguide.org

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Christians in Hollywood series
Take 1: Patricia Heaton
Take 2: Kirk Cameron
Take 4: Karen Covell
Take5: Sam Haskell III