S1-202 Bible and Popular Culture
12/01/2020
1:00 PM to 3:00 PM
The Myth of "Persecution” and the Portrayal of “Totalitarian Rome” in Popular Christian Media, Laura Robinson, Duke University
This paper explores what Candida Moss calls “the myth of persecution” in 20th and 21rst c. Christian popular media. As Moss describes in her 2013 book The Myth of Persecution, Christians have traditionally exaggerated the experience of pre-Constantinian persecution in the first three centuries. While persecution in this era was actually quite localized, Christians have found an exaggerated picture of Christianity as an embattled minority fighting a totalitarian state more apologetically and rhetorically useful.
My goal in this paper is to explore how totalitarian imagery and ideology has contributed to the myth of Christian persecution by looking at pieces of modern Christian popular media -- the 1995 Zondervan children’s television series The Story Keepers, the 2012 romance novel A Voice in the Wind by Francine Rivers, and the 2018 movie by Affirm Films, Paul: Apostle of Christ. My goal is to show that all these moves frame Rome not only as single-mindedly focused on eradicating Christianity, but as a state with a police force and surveillance system that is far more modern and developed than such systems would have been in the first century.
The modernity of the fictionalized “totalitarian Rome” serves not just as a fantasy of history, but as a fantasy of future America. By combining the myth of persecution with the dystopian capabilities of a modern fascist state, Christian popular media encourages its consumers to project what is “ostensibly” the past onto the present, or, more frequently, the not-too-distant future. Such media encourages Christians to think of themselves as persecuted along with the Christian characters in the story and to imagine that a similar state of affairs could occur now if the viewer is not properly vigilant.
https://www.sbl-site.org/meetings/abstr ... x?id=54544
This paper explores what Candida Moss calls “the myth of persecution” in 20th and 21rst c. Christian popular media. As Moss describes in her 2013 book The Myth of Persecution, Christians have traditionally exaggerated the experience of pre-Constantinian persecution in the first three centuries. While persecution in this era was actually quite localized, Christians have found an exaggerated picture of Christianity as an embattled minority fighting a totalitarian state more apologetically and rhetorically useful.
My goal in this paper is to explore how totalitarian imagery and ideology has contributed to the myth of Christian persecution by looking at pieces of modern Christian popular media -- the 1995 Zondervan children’s television series The Story Keepers, the 2012 romance novel A Voice in the Wind by Francine Rivers, and the 2018 movie by Affirm Films, Paul: Apostle of Christ. My goal is to show that all these moves frame Rome not only as single-mindedly focused on eradicating Christianity, but as a state with a police force and surveillance system that is far more modern and developed than such systems would have been in the first century.
The modernity of the fictionalized “totalitarian Rome” serves not just as a fantasy of history, but as a fantasy of future America. By combining the myth of persecution with the dystopian capabilities of a modern fascist state, Christian popular media encourages its consumers to project what is “ostensibly” the past onto the present, or, more frequently, the not-too-distant future. Such media encourages Christians to think of themselves as persecuted along with the Christian characters in the story and to imagine that a similar state of affairs could occur now if the viewer is not properly vigilant.
https://www.sbl-site.org/meetings/abstr ... x?id=54544
