Christian cinema has been around for a long time, but over the past 20 years or so, we have seen the rise of a quasi-autonomous industry, structured around studios, producers, and specialized distribution networks, which is now sufficiently established for a dedicated term for it to emerge: Godlywood. Donald Trump’s first (2017-2021) and second (2025-2029) presidential terms have served as a springboard, facilitating the development of evangelical films on the fringes of mainstream Hollywood production, which is itself in the crosshairs of a president who wants to reform it.
Christianity and Film in the 20th Century
At the beginning of the 20th century, Christian religious institutions feared the emergence of the new medium of “cinema,” warning of the outrageous nature of movies, denouncing their immoral and often obscene character, and pointing out the risks to the health and well-being of women and children. The first American censorship laws were passed by cities (starting with Chicago in 1907) and then states (Pennsylvania in 1911, Ohio and Kansas in 1913) under pressure from conservative groups acting in the name of Christian values. However, several prominent figures recognized early on the potential of cinema for evangelizing the masses. Reverend Herbert A. Jump, for example, pastor of the South Congregational Church in New Britain, Connecticut, published a pamphlet in 1911 entitled Religious Possibilities of the Motion Pictures, in which he drew thematic parallels between the Bible and film narratives.
Several national attempts at self-regulation took place in the 1910s (e.g., the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry was established in 1916) and in the 1920s (“Thirteen Points and Standards” in 1921, “the Formula” in 1924, “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” in 1927), but it was ultimately the mobilization of Catholic bishops against talking pictures, along with the creation of the Legion of Decency, that led to the adoption in 1934 of a production code (the Motion Picture Production Code), implemented by the Production Code Administration (PCA) under the authority of Joseph Breen. Throughout the classical period, Hollywood cinema was subject to Christian values as expressed in the code.
Following the weakening of the code in the 1950s and its official abandonment in 1966 (replaced in 1968 by the current rating system), films that were further removed from Christian values appeared on screens, sparking religious mobilization around certain productions. In the 1970s and 1980s, the popularization of cable television encouraged the development of specifically Christian channels (a phenomenon that had already existed since the 1950s), which broadcast films identified by local religious leaders as compatible with Christian values. The production of officially Christian films multiplied, supported by local churches and often broadcast within evangelical megachurches, but it was not until the late 1990s that it really took off.
In 1999, The Omega Code (directed by Robert Marcarelli) was released in US theaters. This apocalyptic thriller was financed and distributed by Trinity Broadcasting Network, headed by televangelist Paul F. Crouch (his brother Matt had created an evangelical production company, Gener8Xion Entertainment, in 1993). With a budget of $7 million, the film managed to generate more than $12 million at the box office, despite disastrous reviews. This positive signal to Hollywood studios and film production investors was confirmed by the box office success of a second film in 2004, The Passion of the Christ. Directed and self-produced for less than $30 million by Catholic actor Mel Gibson, the film was a box office smash despite several controversies, grossing more than $600 million worldwide upon its release. It was particularly well received by the evangelical community, which recognized the potential of faith-based film production, not only for television or physical media (e.g., DVDs, Blu-ray), but directly for the big screen.
The Establishment of an Autonomous Evangelical Network
In the 2000s, the first specifically evangelical production companies emerged: Five & Two Pictures in 2002, Believe Pictures in 2003, Crystal Creek Media in 2005, Pure Flix and Fox Faith (under the umbrella of 20th Century Fox) in 2006, Advent and Elevating Entertainment Motion Pictures in 2007, Lightworkers Media (under Amazon MGM Studios) in 2009, and Hard Faith in 2011. The first to quickly gain notoriety was Sherwood Pictures, founded in 2003 by Baptist pastor Alex Kendrick, who was then serving at Sherwood Church (Albany, Georgia).
After a few small critical successes on DVD (Flywheel, in 2003), Sherwood Pictures produced Facing the Giants in 2006, which marked a turning point: produced for $100,000, this film about an American football coach who trains his team using the Gospels grossed over $10 million at the box office, despite limited distribution (441 screens). The pastor-filmmaker’s subsequent films (Fireproof, the highest-grossing independent film of 2008, and Courageous in 2011) confirmed the trend and helped identify Christian audiences as an important target for film producers. In 2013, Kendrick founded the Kendrick Brothers company with his two brothers, Stephen and Shannon. In 2015, it produced War Room, which topped the box office in its second week of release; shot on a budget of $3 million, the film grossed over $67 million in North America.
Evangelical cinema is the product of an entire network that helps, as a starting point, with the training of young evangelical filmmakers: Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, a private institution known as the most conservative university in the United States, has a film department where students are encouraged to make proselytizing films using state-of-the-art equipment, funded by the university’s generous donors. Grand Canyon University, a private Christian institution located in Phoenix, Arizona, which also has a film department, even coproduces films (such as The Last Supper in 2025, from Pinnacle Peak Pictures, the new name of Pure Flix after 2021).
Evangelical cinema is the product of an entire network that helps, as a starting point, with the training of young evangelical filmmakers.
The evangelical network also relies on influential media outlets, such as Movieguide, created in 1985 by Ted Baer (who also founded the Christian Film & Television Commission), which has been handing out its own awards to films celebrating Christian values since 1993, the Movieguide Awards, broadcast on the Hallmark channel for several years. To accompany the distribution of Christian films, dedicated festivals have sprung up: in 1993, the Merrimack Valley Christian Film Festival was inaugurated in Salem, New Hampshire (it ceased in 2017); in 2011, the International Christian Film & Music Festival in Orlando, Florida; and in 2014, the Christian Worldview Film Festival, launched by Alex Kendrick, in Sherwood, Oregon.
There is an entire evangelical film ecosystem, from film production to distribution, especially since streaming platforms now make it possible to easily distribute content online.
There is an entire evangelical film ecosystem, from film production to distribution, especially since streaming platforms now make it possible to easily distribute content online, particularly to younger generations, which was previously reserved for DVD and television. Pure Flix, founded in 2006 by David A. R. White (son of a Mennonite pastor), launched its streaming service in 2015 (since acquired by Affirm Films, the evangelical division of Sony Pictures). In 2019, the company Vision Video (founded in 1969 as Gateway Films to distribute Christian films) also launched its streaming service, Redeem TV. VidAngel, founded in 2014 in Utah as a film content censorship service (automatically cutting explicit language and scenes from films and series streamed online), changed its strategy in 2021: under a new name (Angel Studios), the founders are launching an online platform for Christian films, partly funded through crowdfunding campaigns and aimed at young audiences, such as Tuttle Twins in 2021, which was announced in July 2025 for distribution in Argentine schools as an educational tool.
VidAngel was responsible, for example, for the distribution of the series The Chosen (2017- ), produced by the Christian company Out of Order Studios (OOS). Winner of several Movieguide Awards, it has been broadcast since 2021 on generalist platforms such as Amazon Prime Video and Netflix. In a way, Evangelicals succeed where Mormons in part fail: while there is a Mormon film industry, it remains confined to Utah (around the LDS Motion Picture Studios in Salt Lake City) and entirely under the control of the LDS Church, with few exceptions of managing to distribute films outside specialized circuits (one is the series Granite Flats, produced by BYUtv and broadcast on Netflix).
In Trump We Trust
The emergence of a Christian film industry, mainly Evangelical, and its evolution is not only the result of the growth of this community worldwide (665 million people today compared to 100 million in the 1970s) and in the United States (although the proportion of Americans declaring themselves to be Christian has fallen, Evangelicals are growing and now represent almost 91 million people in the US, or about 1 in 4 Americans). It also owes much to a prominent supporter: Republican President Donald Trump, for whom the American evangelical community votes at a rate of over 80%. Trump even benefited from the production of a propaganda film promoting his election and casting him as America’s savior in 2018 (for the midterms): Stephen Schultze’s The Trump Prophecy, co-produced by ReelWorks Studios and Liberty University and adapted from the book by Mark Taylor and Mary Colbert, published a year earlier.
The emergence of a Christian film industry, mainly Evangelical, and its evolution is not only the result of the growth of this community. It also owes much to a prominent supporter: Republican President Donald Trump.
The current head of Liberty University, Jerry Falwell Jr., has joined a faith advisory commission at the White House called the Evangelical Advisory Board, which lobbied the appointment of three judges to the Supreme Court, who eventually, in June 2022, helped un-constitutionalize the right to abortion (on the collusion between Trump and Evangelicals, see the 2018 documentary In God We Trump by Christopher Alan Maloney). Important to Evangelicals is the fight against people’s right to control their own bodies and reproduction, forming the narrative thread of many Godlywood films. One example is Unplanned (Cary Solomon and Chuck Konzelman, produced by Pure Flix in 2019), promoted as the “true story” of a family planning manager who changed her mind about abortion.
Long limited to sports movies (especially American football) set in the Bible Belt, biopics, or depictions of biblical moments (such as Danny Carrales’ Pilgrim’s Progress in 2008), Godlywood films are diversifying and becoming less proselytizing in order to reach the widest possible audience. As Sister Nancy Usselman, film critic and Christian cinema influencer, puts it in a French documentary on Godlywood, “You don’t have to say it. You just show it.” Christians (2 billion people worldwide in 2025) represent a significant segment of the cinema audience, with the Christian cinema industry seeking to reach beyond the American evangelical community alone.
Long limited to sports movies set in the Bible Belt, biopics, or depictions of biblical moments, Godlywood films are diversifying and becoming less proselytizing in order to reach the widest possible audience.
Alongside the development of Godlywood, we are also witnessing a kind of renaissance of “Godsploitation.”
Alongside the development of Godlywood, we are also witnessing a kind of renaissance of “Godsploitation”—films and series about faith, religion, or iconic figures that even mainstream studios and broadcasters have been investing in since the box office success of The Passion of the Christ. Faith-based movies target both Christians and the general public with adventure or fantasy stories with subtle biblical subtexts. In the 2000s, Walden Media produced The Chronicles of Narnia franchise; more recently, Amazon MGM Studios coproduced the series House of David with the Wonder Project (the company of Jon Erwin, one of the Erwin brothers), which launched in early 2025 on Prime Video, where it quickly rose to second place for most-watched content.
However, not all Godlywood and Godsploitation films are unanimously acclaimed by Christians, even evangelicals. Criticism of self-proclaimed “Christian cinema” is growing, and not only because of the poor quality of some productions. The falsification of historical facts, the caricatured portrayal of characters, the Manichean representation of relations between believers and nonbelievers, the simplification of social claims, and unbridled ultranationalism and patriotism, featuring the instrumentalization of Christian values in the service of a political agenda, often generate more criticism than they do support from Christian critics and some audiences, which do not all recognize themselves in this portrayal of Christianity and demand a different kind of cinema.
Franchises such as God’s Not Dead (five films produced by Pure Flix between 2014 and 2024), for example, are widely criticized within the Christian community itself, in specialized magazines and websites such as Christianity Today, the Gospel Coalition, Religion Unplugged, Decent Films, and Patheos. As Nathalie Dupont, a French Godlywood researcher and expert, notes, the explicitly propagandistic film The Trump Prophecy manages to divide America further, as some evangelical Christians have disagreed with the film’s stance.
Trump’s policy agenda risks stumbling over the proselytizing ambitions of the Christian film industry, whose hitherto nationalist and patriotic vision has hindered its evangelization ambitions at the heart of the evangelical project.
Since his second term, Trump has singled out Hollywood as an industry in need of reform: denouncing DEI policies (and launching an FCC investigation into Disney), announcing tariffs on films shot abroad, requests from the commerce secretary to studios, unions, and industry lobbies, appointing three special “ambassadors” (Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone, Jon Voight), and vowing to “restore” the Hollywood of yesteryear—white, heterosexual, Christian. These attacks foreshadow the Trump administration’s derision towards the Hollywood industry, which its supporters consider too “woke,” and show how open the path is for the development of a parallel, Godlywood industry. Trump’s policy agenda risks stumbling over the proselytizing ambitions of the Christian film industry, whose hitherto nationalist and patriotic vision has hindered its evangelization ambitions at the heart of the evangelical project.
Global Godlywood?
The current challenge for Godlywood, both in terms of proselytizing and economics, is to internationalize its distribution networks, drawing on the growing evangelical communities in several countries. In February 2025, Angel Studios partnered with other studios around the world, notably in France (Saje Productions), Germany (Kinostar), Australia and New Zealand (Rialto), the Philippines (Crystalsky), Singapore (Shaw), Sri Lanka (Slyline Entertainment), Africa (Filmone, Empire), and South America (Role, Santa Barbara Films, Paka Paka), notably in Brazil (Paris Films).
In Brazil, a historically Catholic country where one in three residents in 2025 identifies as evangelical, the Godlywood film The Forge: The Power of Transformation, produced by the Kendrick brothers, achieved impressive box office results in 2024. An autonomous Christian-evangelical film industry is taking shape there; as in the United States, it is driven mainly by pastor-producers such as Edir Macedo, who in 2018 financed the film Nada a perder (Nothing to Lose), about his own life, through his company Record. Countries such as South Korea and the United Kingdom, where evangelical communities exist and are growing, may also soon become big Christian cinema markets, too. The coming years, then, will determine the extent to which Godlywood can go global.
Chloé Delaporte is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry (France) and is part of the RIRRA21 team. A specialist in the French and North American film industries, she has worked in particular on generic categorization (Le Genre filmique, PSN, 2015), film festivals and awards (La Culture de la récompense, PUV, 2022), and the international circulation of films and series (Géopolitique du cinéma, Le Cavalier bleu, 2023 and 2025). Co-leader of the ANR FEMME (Female Filmmakers and Feminism in the Media) project, she is currently focusing on feminist struggles in the film industry and the visibility of content made by women.
Image made using “Clapperboard, O2 film, September 2008,” by Mattbr licensed under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic.
