Financed by Walden Media's Philip Anschutz, an evangelical Christian billionaire who has funded organizations that oppose abortion and gay rights, Narnia is being sold to both a standard fantasy audience as well as a Passion-type fan base. For the Christian audience, Disney has hired Motive Entertainment, the marketing agency that Gibson's Icon Productions used to galvanize churches and religious leaders. One Christian group, BarnaFilms, whose aim is to be a "catalyst in moral and spiritual transformation in the United States," has sold an estimated 500,000 tickets for preview screenings the day before the film opens. [  ]

Within the Christian entertainment community, Narnia is not just another $150 million Disney family movie. With its Jesus-like "vision of Aslan getting shaved and killed," as Nicolosi notes, it's a victory that mirrors what the Christian right has accomplished on a larger scale, according to Didi Herman, co-author of Globalizing Family Values: The Christian Right in International Politics. "The Christian right has adopted an approach that involves attempting to reshape dominant culture from the inside," she says. "Often this is at the local level," for example, getting onto school boards to impact education policy. "In terms of cultural change the strategy is similar: Get conservative Christians into the media, into the film industry, and the values and politics of those institutions will change." [    ]

But there is no explicit mention of Christianity in Anschutz's speech or Walden's materials, reflecting another strategy among members of the Christian right that involves cloaking their goals in secular language. As Didi Herman explains, "The [Christian right's] more sophisticated elements quite consciously avoid religious rhetoric; they know it doesn't work. The language of sin, apocalypse, redemption results in them being 'loonified' by the media." For example, Mel Gibson, in discussing his latest project Apocalypto (also to be distributed by Disney), rejected rumors that his new film was an end-times narrative inspired by sacred Mayan texts, saying at a press conference that it is "not a big doomsday picture or anything like that." [   ]

Still, judging from the dozens of stories published in the mainstream press about the Narnia-Christian connection--The New York Times has run at least six since February--the "secular" establishment seems to be worried. As Nicolosi says, "The idea of religious people acquiring media and artistic expertise is chilling to the secular left. I suppose they imagine that we will be as unfair and propagandistic with cultural power as they have been. But I pray we won't be. We have to answer to God for how we treat people."

Bill Berkowitz has more information in his article, "The movie, the media, and the conservative politics of Philip Anschutz".

World Magazine, edited by Marvin Olasky, has a blog where there is a disturbingly homophobic review of the new movie, Brokeback Mountain. Some quotes:

For all of our modern cultural "enlightenment," and despite the pervasiveness of gay characters and stories all over American media, and regardless of the success of shows like "Will & Grace" and "Queer Eye," by and large Americans -- blue state, red state, Christian and non -- innately find homosexuality repulsive. [   ]

It's part of our makeup. It's biological, it's conscience-born, it's part of the imago dei. It's part of a "moral aesthetic" most everyone bears latent. To be blunt, we know anal sex is gross, and we especially know anal sex between men is repulsive. Even for most of those who have no basis for which to call it a sin find the act itself "gross." [    ]

Americans like to believe they are tolerant. Even the convervatives in our country play liberal (or at least libertarian) on this issue, so as long as homosexuals play nice, we are fine with them. And by "play nice," I mean "play funny." Like Homer Simpson, we like our homosexuals flaming. So they can joke about sex and they can swish their way from the silver screen to the TV screen, they can even pontificate about their rights and move us to tears with their experienced repression and persecution. We'll sympathize with them on "Oprah" and laugh at them on "Will & Grace" and appreciate their good fashion sense on "Queer Eye" and nod our heads with the "Seinfeld" gang that there's not anything wrong with that. But almost none of us want to see them doing the thing that really distinguishes them.