Judging from this New York Times article, decision-makers in Hollywood are still quite reluctant to make religious movies, even after the success of the Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ.

Does that please me? No. I'm a pluralist. It would be perfectly fine with me if the movie business gave Christians (and Christian conservatives) some God at the cineplex. In fact, I'd be happy -- I wish years ago the big studios had looked at, say, the huge sales of the Left Behind books and greenlighted some old-fashioned big-budget, straightforward biblical epics. It might have shut up people like Mel Gibson (and Michael Medved and others) for whom Hollywood's secular product mix is a welcome excuse to play the victim card.

The TV networks gave us Touched by an Angel and Joan of Arcadia, and none of us pinko atheist liberals ever had to watch them (though I actually did watch Touched by an Angel a couple of times; it had a bit more social gospel in it than you'd expect, not to mention the fact that Roma Downey was against the Iraq war). Didn't it seem as if we heard a lot less whining from Michael Medved after Touched by an Angel became a hit?

I don't believe the big movie studios have kept it secular just because movie people themselves are secular -- big studios always want to make movies that will make money overseas, and biblical epics would be a tough sell in Hong Kong and Beirut. But I hope the studios come around on this -- I'd sure as hell rather have, say, Peter Jackson's The Greatest Story Ever Told than Mel's.