# Posted 3:00 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

JESUS SAVES! (MOSES INVESTS.) Last night I was Saved! It is a remarkable film, destined for a place in the great canon of teen angst and rebellion. Yet it stands out from other classics of the genre because, instead of Generic American High, its setting is the American Eagle Christian High School.

Saved! is a film that recognizes the profound difference between growing up in secular, public school America and growing up in a faith-based educational community. It is a difference that I identify with very strongly, because I attended an Orthodox Jewish school in New York City from kindergarten through twelfth grade.

I grew up in a world apart. All of us were aware of mainstream American culture, but it was not ours. Ours was a religious tradition that influenced everything from how we dressed to how we prayed to what we ate.

In its opening minutes, Saved! hints at the profound ethical transformation that a religious upbringing can have on a child. Instead of a sadistic bitch a la Heathers, the prettiest and most popular girl in school take cares of her wheelchair-bound brother and tries to save the school's token, chain-smoking Jew from the peril of her ways.

Of course, there is a hint of condescension and intolerance in this attempted conversion. But we also understand that it is fundamentally an act of kindness. Sadly, as the film develops, all such hints of kindness fall away. Each and every one of the Christian characters reveals his or herself as hypocritical, arrogant, or even cruel.

In contrast, the pregnant heroine, the wheelchair-bound apostate, the demonized homosexual and the chain-smoking Jew become the school's saviors. They are the only characters capable of true compassion and love. And once again, I identify with them. I hated my high school. I hated its hypocrisy, its ignorance and its racism. I hated how it was brainwashing a generation of bright and well-intentioned children, transforming them into a ghettoized and incurious suburban middle-class.

That, of course, is an exaggeration. But it is what I felt at the time. Yet it seems that the adults responsible for Saved! have not learned to leaven their criticism with any sort of nuanced perspective. In the climactic scene, the pregnant and almost-birthing heroine lectures the school's principal on how imposing one's beliefs on others is cruel and unjust because the world isn't a black-and-white place. Sadly, there is not a single hint in the entire scene that the film's creators recognize how their politically correct polemic has fallen prey to exactly the same hypocrisies that it preaches against.

Nonetheless, the film is a teenage classic. The acting is first-rate. The clothes and music and language ("Let's kick it Jesus-style!") perfectly capture the existence of an alternative Christian universe. And above all, the humor is devilishily irreverent. Upon seeing the nobody-yet-knows-she's-pregnant heroine emerge from a Planned Parenthood clinic, the Jew tells the apostate that there is only one reason a good Christian girl would be walking out of the clinic in dark glasses. He responds: "To plant a pipe bomb?"

In the last week, I have also seen another film, Priest, that attacks Christian intolerance with much greater sophistication as well as much greater honesty and kindness. Its protagonist is Father Greg, a British Catholic struggling both with his own homosexuality as well as the social degeneration of his working-class parish.

Not once in the course of his suffering -- often imposed by the intolerance of his community and his church -- does Greg abandon his faith in Christ. He rages against the Lord, insults him and even lusts after his muscular, taut and crucified body. Rather than a one-sided lecture, the film culminates in an inconclusive scriptural shouting match between Father Greg, his supporter Father Matthew, and an aging parishioner.

With the fire and brimstone of the Old Testament, the parishioner condemns Father Greg's perversion. With the tolerance and compassion of the New, Fathers Greg and Matthew preach forgiveness. Unabashed about its politics, the film lets its audience know what it believes: that if Christ is love, then the love of one man for another should be a source of inspiration, not a source of shame.

It is a controversial message but an honest one. Those who disagree are portrayed as neither ignorant nor hypocritical. The only villian in the film is the vicious father who commits incest with his daughter, one of Father Greg's students. His is not a sin of love. It is a barbaric sin that its perpetrator must hide from both his wife and his community because there is no defense for its cruelty.

At their heart, both Saved! and Priest are about the clash between absolute love and absolute faith. In my own days of adolescent rebellion, I saw love and faith as irreconciliable antagonists. I captured that message in my high school yearbook by placing below my portrait a poem by Langston Hughes known as 'Luck'. It reads:

Sometimes a crumb falls
From the tables of joy,
Sometimes a bone
Is flung.


To some people
Love is given,
To others
Only Heaven.

I'm not sure it means exactly what I thought it did, but I will always remember it.

UPDATE: Amazingly, the NY Times fails to note any sort of hypocrisy in its review of Saved! Instead, A.O. Scott writes that

The film, directed by Brian Dannelly, also wants to be a peace offering [Like the Germans' at Munich? --ed.] in the culture wars, suggesting that the polarization of our society is a smoke screen for our own internal confusion about values, morals and desire...

Some Christians may object that "Saved!," in the end, promotes liberal humanist piety at the expense of religious belief, and there is some truth to this complaint. At the same time, satire can never be evenhanded, and it's possible that this movie would have been better if it had indulged in a little more cruelty.

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