I started 2016 as chief film critic at Christianity Today and ended it on staff here at Vox. Religion and pop culture has been my beat for a long while. So it's not surprising I spot it around every corner.
But even by my heightened radar's standards, 2016 feels like a banner year for onscreen treatments of religion. I don't mean what we've come to consider “Christian movies,” though there were a few of those, most notably the moderately commercially successful God's Not Dead 2 and the crashing box office failure Ben-Hur (executive produced, by the way, by Mark Burnett of The Apprentice). “Christian films” are made for a sizable but still niche market and bent to the tastes of that segment: biblical or inspirational tales, or (in the case of the God's Not Dead franchise) legends of the culture wars. They're meant to preach to — or shore up — the choir.
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