Back in the day when I was covering religion fulltime, I always knew I could score a front page story if I prepared a large feature for Easter Sunday. That was always the day that my editors were looking for “something religious” to please the church-attending readers. Other reporters did this as well, as it was one of the few days in the year that our work could shine.
Lots has changed, obviously, judging from the front pages of some of the newspapers I perused this past Easter Sunday. My former employer, the Houston Chronicle, had nothing local. Ditto for the Los Angeles Times, Seattle Times, Oregonian and even the Salt Lake Tribune –- usually reliable to at least run something Latter-day Saint related — came up short.
A few outlets ran a pope-observes-Easter wire story from the Associated Press, but that was it. I looked at the Washington Post, which had a bit more, including a story about a local church opening up for the first time since COVID-19 started plus a piece on how pandemic-ravaged Italy is observing Easter.
The New York Times ran a mishmash of opinion pieces, including one from an English prof who wasn’t sure if Jesus had resurrected or not and one from a prof from Wheaton College urging readers to remember Easter is more than a spring celebration. There was a jewel of a piece on Jesus’ wounds and — in the Times wedding section — a beautifully photographed story about a Nigerian-American couple whose first kiss was on their wedding day. The story was snark free; a true Easter miracle.
I know it’s a challenge to come up with original Easter (and Passover) story ideas year after year, but it can be done and many of us did it.
Most of the religion content I saw yesterday was relegated to the opinion pages and kept away from news content, which is a troubling shift from religion-as-news to religion-in-the-realm-of-feelings. There’s plenty of the former available, but where’s the will to dig out those stories, especially the biggest one that happened Sunday that no one reported on?
That was the premiere of Season 2 of filmmaker Dallas Jenkins’ very successful “The Chosen” TV series. It’s the first multi-season TV series about the life of Christ, and 74,346 people raised $10 million for Season 1, which came out last year. That amount made “The Chosen” the largest crowdfunded media project –- ever.
I bought the DVD of Season 1 and watched all the episodes, which concoct narratives around the central Gospel story. The screenwriters take characters like Nicodemus, Mary Magdalene, Simon Peter and John the Baptist and fill in details that could be similar to what really happened. That’s how we meet Peter’s wife Eden (who finds Peter totally exasperating) and Nicodemus’ wife Zohara (a control freak), the sadistic Roman centurion Quintus and his reluctant subordinate Gaius and –- my favorite character -– the nerdy tax collector Matthew.
It’s become quite popular, but there was almost no coverage on it in Texas media, even though that’s the state in which the first eight episodes were filmed.
For Season 2, the producers needed a sophisticated Jerusalem set — like the one leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had already built for one of their own video shoots. This fascinating Deseret News piece (by Erica Evans) tells how LDS officials -– who had never before let any outsiders use the property -– agreed to allow the evangelicals in to film. A companion piece on the Goshen, Utah, location -– and all the COVID precautions that were taken — is here.
KSL-TV in Salt Lake City also mentioned the unusual LDS-evangelical working relationship.
But other than the Utah media, a Fox TV interview with lead actor (playing Jesus) Jonathan Roumie and veteran religion writer Steve Rabey’s piece here for the Colorado Springs Gazette, I saw no other mainstream news coverage.
We believe Jesus was the son of God, but in between the miracles, do you think he enjoyed blue collar work? We do.#TheChosen #TheChosenSeason2 https://t.co/JtdxQ55y86
— TheChosen (@thechosentv) April 5, 2021
So I watched the Season 2 premiere on Easter Sunday. It was on four platforms: the movie app, the Chosen YouTube channel, its Facebook page and the website.
Dallas Jenkins, who took up the first 18 minutes explaining the series and asking for more funding, reported after the show that total movie viewers that day was 230,000. Considering this was on a holiday and that word of this production was mostly by word-of-mouth with some advertising, that’s a lot.
Their YouTube channel has 817K subscriptions and quite a bit of money was raised on Sunday to fund Season 3. Jenkins told us that the movie trailer alone was trending among YouTube’s top 10.
Being that the first season was filmed in Texas — filming overseas is impossible at this point — shouldn’t at least the Texas media be onto this story? Here’s something that’s been translated into 19 languages and has a goal of raising more than $1 billion for all seven seasons this series will eventually air.
There are so many stories tied up with this series. While certain outlets have gone manic over purity culture stories and white evangelical angst in recent months, where have been the features about this media project? Where are the TV critics? Where are the pop culture reporters?
Even reporters who I know are linked into the evangelical culture have missed this story. Christianity Today ran this podcast in December, but the moment has come for more serious coverage. This thing has been watched by 50 million people in 180 countries, so it’s time to take a serious look. Are they cutting it in terms of acting; of being true to the Jewish traditions of the time? What sorts of experts are contributing to this effort?
Maybe, like Mel Gibson’s 2004 movie The Passion of the Christ, coverage will slowly build, but it’s time religion reporters gave this effort a serious look — as a news story.
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