The rise of Christian cinema

Author Matthew Vaughan spent much of his life in the church – and even preached the gospel in Pakistan – but never considered himself a fan of Christian media. ‘To be honest, most of the films I saw were pretty corny,’ he tells me over the phone from his home in Birmingham.

For Vaughan, that changed when he came across an American box-set drama about Jesus called The Chosen. ‘It kept getting recommended to me by American missionaries,’ he says. ‘They said it was like a Jesus movie for the Netflix generation – well written, well acted and with a good budget behind it.’

Vaughan is far from alone. Since 2019, more than 100 million people have watched The Chosen. Many have gone further, and donated to fundraising campaigns to have the show dubbed into new languages and pushed on social media. The reliably secular New York Times calls it a ‘crowdfunded miracle’.

The man behind much of that success shares its assessment. ‘We would be remiss if we didn’t say there was at least some revelatory help with the whole crowdfunding idea,’ says Neal Harmon, the co-founder of Angel Studios, appearing over Zoom (in piercing HD quality) from his studio in the Mormon heartland of Utah.

Harmon, a devout believer and serial entrepreneur of varying degrees of success, first stumbled across the crowdfunding idea behind The Chosen after the dramatic collapse of his previous venture VidAngel – a special ‘filter’ service that would remove unsuitable scenes from shows and films on Netflix and Amazon.

VidAngel might have been just the ticket for God-fearing families across middle America. But unsurprisingly, the Hollywood studios weren’t so keen. After a long-running court battle pitting copyright law against free speech, Disney finally sued VidAngel for $62.4