On maintaining boundaries:

I advocate cultural engagement, but I'm not advocating cultural accommodation. I'm advocating going in with a Christian perspective and looking and thinking about things along those lines. The kind of evaluation I might talk about in popular art is not simply its confessional appearance, or does it have religious imagery or ministers, or are people praying in it. But what is the underlying vision, the cultural landscape that informs this work of art, and how might Christians think about that? I see it more as entering into a cultural dialogue, where people talk about different visions of life that are manifested in television programs, films, etc.

On media hostility:

I think the mainstream media is most interested in profit making, and if they think they can make money off religious groups, then I think they will make money off religious groups. Are they particularly hostile? Sometimes they are. Sometimes I think people in mainstream media don't understand Christian values and how people in religious communities think. And because of that, they just don't know how to deal with them. A lot of times they don't think of religion as significant in life, and so they don't cover it as well. It's more complicated than that. But there are different perspectives at work. ...

On THE PURPOSE-DRIVEN LIFE:

That book probably got at a key question for evangelicals, and that is if you believe that Christ is the Lord of all of life, then how am I to be faithful as a Christian in all of life? How can I be faithful in terms of business, in how I think about education, politics, popular arts? How do I apply faith to everything I do?

On movies:

Writers talk about Hollywood being the place where Satan has his throne, and movies were part of the worldly amusements that many Christians just simply boycotted. Church denominations did not allow their members to go to those. So evangelicals got into filmmaking later. But the same sort of tensions exist. ... How do you reach the broad market with a very particular religious message, especially one meant to be forthright and explicit? That's difficult to do, and I think that shows a weakness in the evangelical model for popular art. Popular artworks tend to affirm what people already believe rather than get them to think about new ideas; not that it can't do that, but most people go to a motion picture and leave wanting to be affirmed in their view of life. When popular artworks got outside of that evangelical subculture, they had a hard time finding an audience in mainstream culture. That remains the case with films today. Some films like LEFT BEHIND and THE OMEGA CODE have been successful in the evangelical market but have not done well in the general theatrical release. A lot of evangelical filmmakers struggle with that tension, how to reach a broad audience. But at the same time, some way or another, their work has to have some explicit religious content in order to be Christian. That's a tension they are working to overcome.

On THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST:

Here's a film by a major filmmaker dealing with Christ's Passion, an explicit religious film that would have great appeal among evangelical Christians. The Gibson film might identify that religious market, but the question is, for what? For more specific religious films. So we are going to get THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD again and again and again. And if history is any marker on this, we will have a couple films that might do incredibly well, but most of them will not be very successful. It's like riding a wave. I'm more interested in developing a kind of tradition seeing Christians as an interpretive community that looks at popular artworks from a matter of a faith perspective, and looks at them along those lines having some respect for other faith perspectives. If you want to do films and music that's evangelistic for other people, you should be open to them doing evangelism with you. ... I'm arguing more about cultural dialogue, where people can examine an artwork for what it says about life, about human beings and their relationship to God and the world and particular issues, and how might we think about those issues from a Christian perspective.

On evangelicals in mainstream culture:

They exist in a hostile world and are defending their faith, particularly in personal kinds of ways, but at the same time they want control of that culture. They want their values to be the supreme ones. Largely, evangelicals' popular art is not having a major impact on mainstream culture. ... In their model of using popular art to express very specific religious convictions, I don't think you see that taking root in the mainstream popular culture. In fact, I think you see the opposite happening. When evangelical artists get into that mainstream culture, they have to figure out ways to tell stories that are not explicitly religious. How do you do that? I'm suggesting rather than being sermonic about it, that you weave that vision into storytelling, into characterizations, into lyrics, and into musical style. Evangelicals need a better concept of art. For evangelicals, when it comes to popular art, faith is the issue; it's all about expressing faith. I would suggest they use faith more as the context for doing popular art. You use views of human beings, for example, that are more ambiguous: that people are both good and evil and how you work through that, or trying to understand how we see God at work in our lives -- telling stories that would explore those kind of things, as opposed to personifying God or making God into what one writer called some kind of magical outside assistance that gives self-reliant people a little boost along the way. I would suggest trying to really think about how we would work a Christian faith vision into a kind of cultural landscape that would inform storytelling, that would produce a whole different kind of Christian popular art that I think would be more interesting, more dramatic, and also would find a market in the mainstream culture.