(CNN) — The Blind Side” was a heartwarming movie about a real-life Christian family who adopted a troubled teen with a knack for football, helped him get into college, and eventually all the way to the NFL. It was nominated for a best picture Oscar, won Sandra Bullock the best actress Oscar, and it won over Christian audiences who for decades have said they were slighted and misrepresented by Hollywood. But all that was not enough to keep the movie on the shelves one of the country’s largest Christian bookstores.
LifeWay Christian Resources, a division of the Southern Baptist Convention, had been selling the DVD at its 165 stores for two years with a sticker warning its patrons of strong language. There were rumblings about a resolution last month at the denomination’s annual conference, and complaints from about a dozen people prompted LifeWay to remove the film from its shelves and online store.
At issue was the film’s use of profanity, a racial slur and taking the Lord’s name in vain.
That decision sparked outrage among some prominent evangelicals Christians who said pulling the movie over foul language was “legalistic” and “Pharisaical.”
“What we have here is a clear case of straining out a gnat to swallow a camel. The blind leading the blind,” best-selling author Eric Metaxas said to CNN using language Jesus charged against religious hypocrites in the Bible. Metaxas has been leading the charge against the film’s removal.
“We agree the movie as a whole promotes Christian values and a redemptive message; however, it does contain instances of street language and racial slurs against African-Americans,” Marty King, LifeWay’s communications director, said in a statement to CNN.
“LifeWay decided last month to stop carrying it because of the likelihood it would be the focus of debate and division at our annual denominational meeting. We were electing the Southern Baptist Convention’s first African-American president, and did not want to distract from that historic moment.”
In June, the SBC, which had at one time advocated for slavery, elected Rev. Fred Luter, pastor of Franklin Street Baptist Church in New Orleans.
In the lead up to the convention, Florida pastor Rodney Baker submitted a resolution titled “Maintaining Appropriate Content in Products Distributed by LifeWay Christian Bookstores” for consideration expressing that the convention “expresses dissatisfaction with ‘The Blind Side’ and any product that contains explicit profanity, God’s name in vain, and racial slur.”
“I love the movie, the theme of the movie as far as adoption and deliverance of a young man,” Baker told CNN. “In terms of the theme, I’m with it 100%. What happened was Hollywood got a hold of it.”
Baker, who pastors the 2,000-plus member Hopeful Baptist Church in Lake City, Florida, and who has nine children, bought the film at another Christian bookstore in 2010. “When I started watching it and heard the Lord’s name in vain, it I thought, ‘I hope LifeWay isn’t selling this.’ “
Baker said he first submitted the resolution to his state Baptist conference in 2010. He never asked for the film to be removed and doesn’t think it should be removed from other stores. His concern, he said, was an SBC-affiliated bookstore carrying a film with language that the convention teaches is inappropriate.
“These people are not idiots, and they’re not making bad points,” Metaxas said. “The idea that cursing in a movie is unnecessary or bad is a sensible sentiment 99.9 percent of the time.”
“When Hollywood does that incredible rare thing and portrays people of faith in a positive light, it’s such a rare thing, we have to be grateful,” he said and not push to have the film removed from stores.
John Stonestreet, a Christian speaker writing for Breakpoint.com, said the controversy highlighted a popular point about Christian art in some evangelical circles. “We’ve created for ourselves a kind of ‘artistic ghetto,’ and are willing to preserve it even at the cost of quality.”
“There’s this kind of complex dance that we do as people of faith in this world and sometimes it means accepting something that’s not perfect,” Metaxas said, “I think the reason this rankles, not just for me but for so many people, it reminds them of Pharisaical thinking, it’s legalistic. I would say it’s misunderstanding the holiness of God.”
Baker said he was caught off guard by the push back against his resolution by other Christians.
“We have Christians who are upset with other Christians who are upholding a standard, that by the way doesn’t change,” Baker said.
“I am a small-town pastor who was lead by God to write this resolution,” he said.
Baker said the heart of the resolution is not a point on which he is willing to compromise.
“It’s not compromising. It’s called strategy and wisdom,” Metaxas said.
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