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In recent years a big contrast between faith based movies and movies that contain highly sexual, profane or violent content has made itself manifest. If faith based movies are expected to survive in today’s cinematic world, viewers need to show Hollywood that they want these films.
Photo credit: Screenshot mpaa.org
This weekend we’ll see a current example of this. The Cokeville Miracle will be released on the same weekend as "Entourage", an HBO film that mentions sex multiple times in its trailer,and "Insidious 3", a horror film.
"The Cokeville Miracle" contains a faith-based and story that started nearly three decades ago when a madman walked into Cokeville Elementary with thirteen guns, a large bomb, and a rambling manifesto.
After two-and-a-half intense hours, the bomb was unintentionally detonated in a small classroom packed with 154 hostages. All the hostages, including 136 young children, inexplicably survived.
After the terror of the moment had subsided something else hard to explain happened: this incredible story of a massive explosion and miraculous deliverance largely disappeared.
Cokeville never became a name synonymous with school violence like Columbine or Sandy Hook, nor did it become a byword for the miraculous, like the ancient cities of Jericho or Bethesda. Outside of the small Wyoming town, the incident seemed to be forgotten, even among people from the area.
One Columbine survivor, Liz Carlston, wrote in the Huffington post that she had “driven past Cokeville, Wyoming, but never knew about the madman and his wife who held an elementary school hostage in 1986.”
Photo credit: Cokeville Miracle
There are many possible reasons why this story seems to have slipped from the nation’s consciousness. It could be because all of the hostages survived. Or maybe it’s because the small town is off the beaten path. But a big part of the silence might be because we, as a society, don’t know how to talk about faith and miracles in public.
Noted philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas observed that Western societies have a tendency to force individuals “to split their identity [into] public and private components as soon as they participate in public debates.”
To see how this plays out in daily life, consider a 2010 Miss Manners column where readers were told to avoid discussing religion in public. “In this society, most of the acrimony short of violence is over religion,” she warns. If someone starts talking about faith, she advises readers to simply pretend like they’re busy and not paying attention.
If talking about faith can be uncomfortable, reporting on it can be difficult. In a story about a miracle, answers to the core questions of journalism—who, what, where, when, why, and how—can be fuzzy.
“So how does one discern what is true and not true, what is objective and subjective? These are the concepts of good reporting we all learn in journalism school,” award-winning journalist Kim Sue Lia Perks wrote in advice to faith-beat reporters. “But I have found the best thing you can do in religion writing is throw them on the back burner.”
If hearing about another’s faith can be uncomfortable, and reporting on faith is difficult, it makes sense that stories of faith are often too quickly forgotten. We know how to treat a story about people dying by a killer’s hand, but are unsure how to publicly treat a story about people being saved by the hand of God.
That hesitancy to bring things we don’t understand into the public sphere is something Arthur Van Wagenen, director of Excel Entertainment, wants to change. He wants “to inspire conversations about faith, regardless of religion, and to share the important story with as many people as we can.”
Photo credit: Cokeville Miracle
Inspiring others was also a motive behind the 2006 book Witness to Miracles, which includes 187 accounts of miracles people experienced on the day of the Cokeville bombing. These miraculous experiences make a permanent mark on those who experience them firsthand.
“I grew up knowing with [a] sureness at a very young age that guardian angels were, and are, certainly real,” explained one resident of Cokeville. “Cokeville’s Miracle to me stands as a witness that God lives and is mindful of his children.”
It is for this reason that Van Wagenen decided to make a movie based on the hostage situation at Cokeville Elementary School in 1986. It is his hope that after watching the story on the big screen, people will walk away with a stronger belief in God.
Whether people are now ready for a conversation about guardian angels, faith, and miracles remains to be seen.
“One of my favorite quotes is ‘Tyranny prevails when good men fail to act,’” Damian Dayton, the film’s marketer, said. “In the movie business, I like to say that ‘Garbage prevails when good people stay home.’ ”
The choice of which movie you will see this weekend may seem insignificant but with a movie ticket you can send a message to Hollywood regarding the kind of entertainment you support.
"The Cokeville Miracle" opens in select theaters in Utah and across the nation on June 5.
