Zombies meet Dante at the mall

Kim Paffenroth was 13 years old when filmmaker George A. Romero released "Dawn of the Dead," so he knew he would need parental guidance to see the gory classic about flesh-eating, undead zombies and the shopping mall from hell.

"I wasn't really a horror movie fan," he said, flashing back to 1979. "But for some reason I bugged my dad until he bought two tickets. He said, 'OK, but I'm not sitting through that thing. Meet me outside when it's over.' "

The movie was sickening, disturbing, funny and haunting – all at the same time. Paffenroth was hooked, especially by Romero's bleak, biting view of humanity's future. This wasn't just another commercial horror movie, the kind that cable-television channels play around the clock at Halloween.

Then a strange thing happened in college, when Paffenroth's work in the classics led him to St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas and, especially, the medieval poet Dante Alighieri. To his shock, he found that his doctoral work at Notre Dame University was starting to overlap with his fascination with zombie movies.

Suddenly, the word "Inferno" had new meaning. He decided that Romero's zombies – the living dead who had lost all self-control and reason – were a modernized, bumbling, cannibalistic vision of what Dante called the "suffering race of souls who lost the good of intellect."

It was also clear that, as in Dante, there were higher and lower levels in this hell.

"The zombies live in the first five circles of hell and they stand for gluttony, rage, laziness and the most basic, crude sins," said Paffenroth, a religious studies professor at Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y. "A zombie is a human being who cannot control his appetites, who simply cannot stop eating and it really doesn't matter what kind of eating or consuming we're talking about."

But what makes Romero's movies truly disturbing – at least for viewers willing to do more than revel in gory special effects – is that the zombies are not the worst sinners on the screen. While the undead cannot control their passions, it is the living who sink to the lower circles of damnation, choosing to wallow in hate, pride, deceit, viciousness, greed, cruelty and other complex, twisted forms of sin.

In these bloody morality tales, it is the living who pervert reason to attack others, argues Paffenroth, in his book, "Gospel of the Living Dead." This may be a painful message for modern Americans to hear, including those who sit in church sanctuaries more often than movie theaters.

"Anyone who says that racism, sexism, materialism, consumerism and a misguided kind of individualism do not afflict our current American society to a large extent is not being totally honest and accurate," writes Paffenroth. Moreover, Romero's movies offer a "critique that could be characterized as broadly Christian, but which many modern American Christians may now find uncomfortable or unfamiliar."

Romero was raised Roman Catholic, but his scandalous movies never move past their images of damnation to provide a real sense of hope and salvation.

Still, Paffenroth finds it significant that his films attack secular institutions as much, or even more, than they attack religious institutions. It's obvious, for example, that scientists and politicians have done a poor job creating an earthly paradise. Also, the fact that zombies are human beings who have lost their souls implies that human beings have souls that can be lost, that they are more than materialistic animals made of flesh, blood and bones.

Human beings are free to make moral choices and, like the bored zombies and selfish survivors who fight for control of a shopping mall in "Dawn of the Dead," they ultimately become what they consume and have to live with their vices for eternity.

These zombie movies contain lots of bad news, including the rather un-Hollywood message that the wages of sin is death, death and more death, said Paffenroth. And the good news?

"I guess the good news in these movies is that sin is real," he said. "That's a hard message, but it can be good news if that helps us realize that our sins are real and that we can – believers would say through God's grace – turn away from sin. ... These movies certainly show that there will be hell to pay if we don't change our ways."

Pentecostal power 2006

Church historian Vinson Synan has made 20 trips to Latin America while studying the explosive growth of Pentecostal Christianity and he believes that it's time to state the obvious.

"We've reached the point where you're not going to be able to get along very well with many believers in the Third World unless you embrace the gifts of the Holy Spirit," said Synan, who teaches at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Va.

"You just can't have a closed mind when it comes to healing and prophecy and speaking in tongues if you want to talk to people in places like Latin America, Africa and Asia. We?re talking about the whole church there – almost all of the Protestants and many of the Catholics."

Synan has been saying this for decades in books like "The Old-Time Power" and "The Century of the Holy Spirit," and he isn't alone. Now, researchers at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (www.pewforum.org) in Washington, D.C., have released a wave of data from 10 nations documenting that the diverse 100-year-old movement called Pentecostalism has touched the lives of one in four Christians around the world.

The Pew team defined "Pentecostals" as members of older bodies such as the Assemblies of God, the Church of God in Christ and the International Pentecostal Holiness Church. Then there are "charismatics" who are Catholics, Anglicans and mainline Protestants who embrace healing, prophecy and other spiritual gifts, yet remain in their own churches.

Together, these groups form what many now call the "renewalists." According to this study, these believers – to cite four eyebrow-raising examples – make up 60 percent of the population in Guatemala, 56 percent in Kenya, 49 percent in Brazil and 44 percent in the Philippines.

"Renewalists, as a group ? tended to have a very high view of the authority of scripture. They tended to be very regular in worship attendance. They tended to uniformly believe that Jesus is the only way to salvation," said John C. Green, senior fellow at the Pew Center in religion and American politics.

"They tended to be quite conservative or traditional on moral beliefs such as sexual behavior, the consumption of alcohol, divorce and so forth. ... But even in those countries where majorities of the population hold very traditional beliefs, renewalists tend to hold those beliefs more intensely and more extensively."

Another interesting part of this study, said Synan, indicated that "glossolalia," or "speaking in tongues," may no longer be the spiritual gift that defines charismatics and even many Pentecostals. Within the Assemblies of God, for example, there has long been a gap between an "old guard" that believes this experience of ecstatic speech is always the initial sign that someone has been "baptized in the Holy Spirit" and a "third wave" of younger believers who see it as a gift that some experience and some do not.

What truly unites "renewalists" is their belief that miracles and other signs of God's power, especially acts of healing, are real and can be seen in modern life. There is no question that this emphasis on the supernatural causes tension in some churches touched by Pentecostalism, especially tensions between Protestant and Catholic leaders in America and Europe and their Third World counterparts.

Meanwhile, there are conservative Protestants – especially Calvinists and Baptists – who reject Pentecostalism and its emphasis on prophecy and "glossolalia." Leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention, for example, have decided to ban all foreign missionary candidates who confess that they practice a "private prayer language," another phrase often used to describe "speaking in unknown tongues."

Nevertheless, said Pew Forum Director Luis Lugo, "it is getting harder and harder to find non-charismatic Protestants in Latin America, Africa and many other parts of the world." Meanwhile, top Catholic leaders appear to have accepted the need for theological dialogue with the charismatics in their global flock.

At least, said Lugo, it's clear that some clerics in Rome can do the math.

"The Vatican knows that it will have to deal with this new reality and the trend there is definitely toward accommodation," he said. "The U.S. Catholic bishops have not been as open. But the growth of Catholicism in this country is among charismatic Catholics, especially among Hispanics and people moving here from Africa and overseas. There is simply no way to ignore that."

Facing some giant lessons

Like millions of other American kids, Alex Kendrick couldn't believe his eyes the first time he saw "Star Wars."

"I remember sitting in that theater, looking up at that big screen and thinking, 'I want to do that. I have to do that. If it's the last thing I ever do, I'm going to make movies,' " said Kendrick, the writer, director and actor whose low-budget "Facing the Giants" football flick has made headlines.

The evangelistic indie movie cost $100,000 to make and, showing on 418 screens in faith-friendly smaller markets, has made nearly $3 million at the box office in two weeks. It's backed by Provident Films, Sony BMG and Samuel Goldwyn films, but the critics have been merciless.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer noted: "It preaches to the converted – literally." And then there was this Richmond Times-Dispatch love letter to Kendrick: " 'Facing the Giants' may have been made with all the best intentions in the world, but it was also made by writers who can't write, directors who can't direct, editors who can't edit and actors who can't act. And they're all the same guy."

It helps, however, to understand that the Southern Baptist guy at the heart of this movie has had a tough time turning his "Star Wars" epiphany into a career reality. He is learning how to make movies and "Facing the Giants" is only his second try.

Kendrick never had a real chance to study screenwriting, editing, directing or acting. When the time came to pick a career, he did what many young media-driven believers end up doing. He entered the ministry.

It's hard to explain to outsiders how this kind of thing happens.

"I kept trying to find people who felt the same way as I did," he said in an interview just before a ratings tussle with the Motion Picture Association of America that sparked a media firestorm. "I could see that movies were shaping our culture and I couldn't understand why so many other people couldn't see that. It was hard to find people who understood what I wanted to do."

Kendrick tried a Christian college, where there were no classes linked to entertainment and filmmaking, but ended up with an all-purpose degree in communications from Kennesaw State University near Atlanta. Then he went to seminary, but it was more of the same.

Eventually, he heard that Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Ga., was seeking help with its 24-hour Christian ministry on the local cable-television system. This led to Alex and his brother Stephen being hired as "associate pastors of media" at this modern megachurch, the kind where the faithful sit in movie seats and the preacher stands between two giant video screens.

"Basically we were putting church on TV," said Kendrick. "We were filming services, concerts and special events. But my brother and I still wanted to make television shows and movies that told stories that connected with people."

Then they saw some research that helped the leaders of their church understand what they were saying about media.

In their book "Boiling Point," evangelical pollster George Barna and e-commerce professional Mark Hatch put it this way: "The world of entertainment and mass communications – through television, radio, contemporary music, movies, magazines, art, video games and pop literature – is indisputably the most extensive and influential theological training system in the world."

That clicked.

Before long, Alex and Stephen Kendrick and their supporters had "prayed in" $25,000 to create a movie called "Flywheel" about a morally confused used-car salesman. It did surprisingly well in a few local multiplexes and on DVD, considering that it was made with volunteer actors and technicians, using store-bought cameras, lights from Home Depot and the video-editing software in desk-top computers.

This led to "Facing the Giants," where a slightly larger budget let the church hire five professionals to run a movie "boot camp" for church members, as well as to film some of the football scenes. It was a strange place to study filmmaking.

The folks at Sherwood Pictures team have learned many lessons, but are well aware that they're just getting started – at last.

"So many miraculous things have happened to make all this possible," said Kendrick. "We're doing the best that we can and we're learning ... I truly believe that I'm doing exactly what I'm supposed to be doing."

Hellish grudges can kill

The helicopters kept making circles in the air so that the cameramen could keep showing the dairy farms and country roads, the bonnets and wide-brimmed straw hats, the horse-drawn buggies and the one-room schoolhouse framed in yellow police tape.

Soon the facts started going in circles as police recited a litany about 600 rounds of ammunition, a shotgun, a semiautomatic pistol, a stun gun, explosives and, later, the killer's sick collection of chains, clamps, hardware and sexual aids. Witnesses said Charles Carl Roberts IV was angry with God, angry with himself, haunted by guilt, fed up with life and driven by a hellish grudge.

Then journalists began asking questions that went in circles, the questions that nag clergy as well as state troopers. Why? Why the Amish? How could God let this happen? How can justice be done now that the killer is dead?

"Like everyone else, I could not believe what I was seeing on my television," said Johann Christoph Arnold, senior elder of the Bruderhof communes. While sharing many beliefs with the Amish and Mennonites, the Bruderhof ("place of the brothers") embrace some modern technology. Still, these movements share European roots in pacifism, simple living and an emphasis on the sanctity of human life.

"The Amish are our cousins so I know some of what they must be feeling," said Arnold, in his thick German accent. "I know these parents are hurting, I know they are asking questions, but I know that they know the answer is forgiveness. ... Tragedy and pain can soften our hearts until they break. But if we trust God this will help us to feel compassion."

The gunman's stunned wife released a media statement that showed her understanding of her Amish neighbors and their beliefs. She knew she could appeal for prayers and forgiveness, even though outsiders might find her words hard to fathom.

"Our hearts are broken, our lives are shattered, and we grieve for the innocence and lives that were lost today," said Marie Roberts. "Above all, please, pray for the families who lost children and, please, pray, too, for our family and children."

Some of the Amish went even further. One woman told the Los Angeles Times: "I am very thankful that I was raised to believe you don't fight back. You should forgive."

To grasp the Amish point of view, it's crucial to understand that they truly believe God desires justice, but also shows mercy and "they believe that these are not contradictory things," said Arnold. "They know that God said, 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay.' The Amish certainly believe that this killer will not go without punishment, but they also believe that his punishment is in God's hands."

These are hard words in an age when many Americans hold one of two competing beliefs about eternity and God's judgment.

Millions of believers – lukewarm and fervent alike – assume that the really bad sinners are the people who commit the really bad sins, those spectacular sins tied to violence, drugs and sex. These really bad people are easy to condemn to hell.

Meanwhile, many other people believe that all people are automatically going to heaven, no matter what they believe or what they do. According to this point of view, the massacre inside the West Nickel Mines Amish School will have no impact on the eternal destiny of Charles Carl Roberts IV.

Once again, the Amish believe that God knows all and that God, and only God, can judge. What the Amish emphasize, stressed Arnold, is that forgiveness is the only way that humans can break a cycle of violence and sin.

In this case, the gunman left suicide notes that showed that he was driven by guilt and a grudge that he would not surrender. It appears that Roberts could not forgive God and could not forgive himself.

In the end, this killed him and through him this grudge killed others.

"If you hold a grudge, it will live on in your heart until it leads to violence of some kind," said Arnold. "If you do not forgive, then you cannot be healed. Forgiveness can heal the forgiver as well as the one who is forgiven. This is what the Amish believe. It will be hard and it will take time, but this is what they now must strive to live out for all the world to see."