‘Bred Crumbs

When the first commercials for End of the Spear aired, with their odd closing voiceover noting "group sales" available, I should have realized what was afoot, but I didn’t see it. Naive me. It meant that another "faith-based" — code for evangelical Christian — movie has descended on us, marketed through churches, hoping to duplicate The Passion of the Christ’s alarming success, or at least lap up a few of the Christian crumbs left over after Narnia.

There’s an interesting twist to this one, though. Smack in the middle of End of the Spear is a gay actor, Chad Allen, former colleague of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Which wouldn’t be so surprising if this movie were an adult flick. (And with that title, it will be an adult flick.) But what’s a proud out actor doing abetting the enemy camp?

Hey, did I just take a side in the tiresome "culture" wars? You betcha. I’m wary of doing so in a nation already overcooking in an oven of extremities. (Stop me before I analogize again.) And, as I grow middle-ageder, I increasingly believe in the wisdom of the middle ground. But it can be tough to nudge my black-and-white mind to that happy land. Along those lines, the whole Christian stormtrooper thing is especially difficult to grasp, except as something vile that must be stopped, something I don’t understand why more people aren’t lining up against.

Also notably absent is gay outrage about Allen’s presence in such a seemingly churchthink film. Not so on the other side, where plenty of Xians, no doubt distraught because they can’t complain about people saying "Happy Holidays" for another ten months, are up in outstretched arms that a Ho-Mo-Sexual has sullied their nice little missionary-glorifying movie.

Maybe we should take heart in that discrepancy. Maybe it’s best for us to take the high road, keep our mouths shut this time, temper and examine our own prejudices while the screeching fundamentalists lay bare the hatred and stupidity at the core of their supposed spirituality.

Chad Allen, who plays a missionary who helps tame a violent Ecuadorean tribe that killed his father, seems OK with it. Allen, who also recently has played a gay detective on the more obscure of the two gay TV networks, grabbed the Spear once he found out that the producers had picked him for the role not in spite of his outspokenness on being who he is, but because of it — because Allen was proud not just of being gay, but of being spiritual. "From that point forward," Allen says, "it was about watching our bigoted notions melt away."

After all, shouldn’t it be OK that super-religious people get movies they want to see, just as I should get to see all the gay-themed movies I want? (Which, given the quality of most gay-themed movies, isn’t that many.) I hardly go to the theater anyway; let the megachristians have it. They can take out the reclining seats and put in pews. They can line the walls with crucifixes, just as they intend to with all our government buildings. They can replace the cheesy Coke trivia slides with cards flashing those few Bible verses that say things they agree with.

Oops. See? Middle ground. Tricky. But I’ll give it a shot if they will. Maybe that’s what the Christian movie with the gay star — a Reese’s cup of love – is really all about. (It’s your fault. You didn’t stop me.)